Pros:
The little 9 hole recreational course at Valley View Middle School is easy find but more difficult to navigate. As you drive into the school, drive just past the lovely, turfed track/football field to the smaller grass field. The course starts and finishes at opposite ends of this small field. There are small fiberglass tee signs with only the hole number on them. The baskets are basic no name models. There are no tee pads.
# 1 is just a short, 140' hole to a basket set right in front of the discus cage. It's set so close that a bounce off the fence ACE shot might be possible. After thus hole is where the fun really starts. Holes 2-8 are all set up in a very nasty, nettle and blackberry filled section of the woods here. Most play down the small walking path with basically a 4 foot wide fairway. Leaving your shot wide to either side means you're disc is probably buried in the 2-3 foot high nettles. If you're lucky, it's just buried in the blackberry bushes.
There were a couple of small sticks with the hole distance written on them. The baskets are sometimes not visible from the non-tee pads. After fighting the stinging nettles (mine are still itching a full two days later), you finish with # 9 throwing back towards the school with the basket just behind the softball backstop. Which by the way is about 140' to reach the left field fence. Most of the 6th grade girls here probably go yard here!
Cons:
First and most obvious are the plethora of stinging nettles that are thick throughout the majority of the course. Next comes the blackberry bushes.
I found the tee signs to be a problem. They don't face the basket but are set facing what would be the side of the tee pad, if there were any tee pads. So when you do find a tee sign in this jungle, you still have to determine whether the basket if left or right from said tee sign, or north or south, or east or west? Confused? Yeah, me too and I'm the one who just wrote this. But I'm happy to confirm that I'm not the culprit who put these confusing signs in.
Other Thoughts:
Nettles are easy to knock down with any stick you have available. I must have toppled a 1000 of them. Unfortunately, that only leaves about a million more. If this course was to receive any play at all, they would all get trampled down with use. But that's not going to happen here. I fear this course is just going to slowly get taken over by this jungle of very nasty, very stinging and itchy nettles.
But unlike General McArthur, I won't be returning!