Pros:
- Volunteer Park sports a skate park, soccer fields, and a disc golf course. The DGC is nestled around the fenced-in skate park, and plays alarmingly close to the fence in a couple places. Most holes have at least one obstacle, often in the form of a single sapling. Other holes have small berms of grassy earth with which to contend.
- Beginner friendly to the max, very few holes stretch past 200', if that. Several are laughably short, and are basically long putts from the "tee pad." No need for the drivers at this course. Ace runs galore for more experienced players, and really just about anybody who can kinda throw straight.
- Nice signage clearly details each hole. On each of the holes with a solitary sapling as the only hazard, the maps seem to specify these trees as mandos, with the fairway going to one side. This is necessary because of the close proximity of adjacent fairways.
Cons:
- #1 plays ridiculously close to the skate park fence. I can imagine this routinely results in dangerous situations. Adding to the absurdity, several fairways basically overlap each other. Baskets are awkwardly close to each other, and other tees. Considering this is a beginners' course, safety should be pretty high on the list of necessities, but it's sorely lacking in this layout.
- The lack of distance, significant elevation, and mature trees make this course one dimensional to say the least.
- Natural grass for pads. Lumpy grass might not provide very good footing in adverse conditions.
Other Thoughts:
- Beginner courses like Volunteer Park fill a valuable niche in the disc golf world; however, Volunteer Park does a particularly bad job of executing a safe course design. It was fun enough as a quick ace-race distraction during empty course conditions, but nothing I'd ever want to play again.
- Unless you're super desperate for some discin', hit up some of the nearby courses instead.