Pros:
Lion's Club DGC is a great road trip course. It's a serious layout for serious players and makes a great stop for the road warriors. It has a very challenging setup and punishing rough that requires you to manage the course and use a variety of shots to shoot well. It has some short technical holes and long bomb holes, so there should be at least one shot for everybody. The course has good signs and directional signs so finding your way shouldn't be an issue. The tees are concrete and very long; they are great to get a good run-up from. Each hole has two pin placements and some of them like #8 change the hole considerably. There isn't much in the way of water, but a creek does come into play on #16 and #18 and it can come into play on #14 if you go very, very long. The baskets are Gateway Titans and catch very well. There is a practice basket with marked off putting distances near the parking lot, and the area the course is in is mostly disc golf only (#15 & #17 overlap a bit with a dog walking area.) The local fire department training are is right next to #15, so you get a cool show when they are doing training exercises. Overall, the course makes for a good round of tough golf. Players who enjoy a challenge will really like this course.
Cons:
Rolla is set in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains and has a nice rolling topography. Despite that, the disc golf course manages to use possibly the flattest piece of land in town for all but 3-4 holes. The lack of elevation in the wooded portion of the course really limits the course.
The course seems to have a lot of short, <250' technical holes (#1a, #2b, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #11, #12, #16a) and long, >400' bomb holes (#8, #10, #13, #14a, #17, #18.) The pins can be set up so that only #9 and #15 are between 250'-400'. That a lot of dink-dink-bomb-bomb. There could have been a lot more variety in the distances besides "pitch 'n putt short" and "over 400 foot."
The course loops over itself, so hole #3, #4, #5, #6, #11, #12 & #13 are all next to each other. Unfortunately, by doing this they made #11 essentially a repeat of #3 and #12 a repeat of #4. Neither of those shots is so cool that I'm dying to play them again. Given the design there isn't much you can do for the #3/#11 situation, but there is a long walk from #11 to #12 that could have been used to change up hole #12.
Some of the shots are long for the sake of being long. Hole #18 tees off in the woods and you have to keep it in the tunnel for about 100' before the hole opens up. The pins are 589' and 686', so after you clear the cool part of the hole you have five or six hundred feet of wide open to go to finish to an open basket. That hole could be ½ as long with the pin up closer to the creek and be more fun to play. You could say similar things about #10, #13 and #17.
Be careful when checking the tee signs. For some reason, the A placement is not always the short placement. Hole #2, #3, #4, #12, and #14 all list the A placement as the long placement, so if you glance at the sign on blind holes like #2 you will throw to the wrong place.
I generally overlook things like bugs unless it is very severe. Having said that, there are A LOT of ticks on this course during the warm months. You really need to take precautions and check for ticks after a round.
NOTE: Sometime over the summer of 2020 someone installed gigantic goofy/tacky number squares on top of the baskets. I guess arguably they make it easier to see the baskets, but since you can only see six or seven baskets from the tee anyway it seems like the answer to a question no one was asking. These gigantic number squares have no edging and gouge putters like no ones business; no kidding huge slices into the wings of putters like you swatted them with a Ginsu knife. I'm marking this course down 1/2 a disc until this issue is address because I've got torn-up putters and I'm pissed about it.
Other Thoughts:
I'm pretty sure I have reverse homeboy bias on this course. A lot of the things that bother me about the design I probably wouldn't notice if I played it a few times a year. If there was more of a balance between short/tweener/long shots instead of just short/long I'd grumble a lot less about the design. If some of the short shots were stretched out into the 300'-375' range I think the course would have better variety and would be more in keeping with the challenge of the design. As it is, the course is still very solid and definitely worth the trip.