Pros:
+ The course appears well-maintained. The fairways are easy to tell from the rough. I saw only one or two scraps of paper or discarded plastic bottles on the ground in the whole course.
+ Hackett Park has a large sprawling course. A player will get a good hike from playing here.
+ Some nice gradual elevation challenges. There are none that are particularly daunting.
+ A pretty good balance of wooded and open holes.
+ The tee pads are made of sturdy concrete tiles.
Cons:
- All of the existing tee signs need desperately to be replaced. They are misnumbered, show wildly incorrect distances and do not even contain a diagram of the hole ahead to give the player a clear idea of where to throw. A few were missing altogether.
- Sometimes, a player can see multiple pins from one tee. Hole four jumps to mind as the biggest offender because there are three targets visible from the fairway. Because most of the tee signs have no map, I was throwing towards pin five without knowing it!
- There are also very bad 'next tee' signs at this course. Some have none at all. Others have easily missed dull orange diamonds with an arrow on them. This disrupts the flow of the course.
- There was no information board/course diagram or lost disc box anywhere that I could see.
Other Thoughts:
My favorite hole of this course was definitely 11. The hole itself was a standard wooded tunnel shot. The pin is so high off the ground that a wooden ladder has been provided to retrieve discs, which I thought was a nice touch. Plus, the player passes by a curious crumbling structure along the way. I couldn't resist peeking inside and wondering what it was used for at some time in the distant past. Moments like those make me glad that I play disc golf.
My least favorite hole here is easily 10. The trees seemed too close together to throw a decent line, the rocks underfoot felt like a nuisance to avoid, and it took me at least fifteen minutes to find the bleeping tee pad, which brings me to the meat and potatoes of this review...
Signage is important to the disc golfer. It's one thing if someone is a regular to Hackett Park and is already familiar with it from start to finish. However, for a player like me who had never been here before, signage is vital to the enjoyment of a course because it keeps the action flowing.
On three separate occasions I got lost. The first time between 3 and 4, it felt more natural for me to walk around the bush and down the path. Little did I know that I had to walk towards the baseball field for tee 4. The third time was between 14 and 15 because a footpath between the two was nearly hidden by overgrowth.
The second time was between 9 and 10, and this is why signage is so important. After hole 9 finished, there was no indication of where to go next. I almost tricked myself into believing that this was just a 9-hole course! I wandered around in irritation for fifteen minutes as I found the pins for 18, 14, 13 and even 10 before I finally found 10's tee pad.
It turned out that after 9 I had to walk up towards the road, keeping the baseball stadium over my left shoulder and up the slope into a narrow path with a dull brown sign? Signage. Fix it.
Beyond that, I have to say that the actual disc golf part of the course is fun. There are some nice wide open fields to let loose at full power. Hackett also features some nice constricted tunnels to be precise and disciplined. Whatever kind of a disc golfer you are, this course it bound to scratch your itch. Add to that some enjoyable uphill and downhill throws, both open and wooded, and you've got the potential for a very good disc golf course here.