Pros:
- Delightfully challenging course with great variety of fairway shapes and shots required to score well.
- Elevation change along fairways is frequently intense, and many greens are precarious.
- Multi-use park seems to be well maintained, and disc golf portion is separate and mostly secluded.
- Course equipment, including two sets of tees on about half the holes, is in good repair and does its job well.
Cons:
- Significant elevation change makes for good golf, but can be fatiguing to navigate, surely even more difficult in wet conditions.
- No relief from tight, wooded holes for duration of round.
- Navigation can be difficult in a few places during your first round.
Other Thoughts:
Megiddo Disc Golf Course at Westwood Park had been on my wish list for too many years. So when I learned I would be playing the course for this past years Ledgestone Insurance Open, I was exceptionally excited. I had heard great things about the course, and it definitely lived up to expectations. This is a fantastic, technical course that will provide a challenge for just about every level of disc golfer. The shorter, white tees were a great challenge for the intermediate level players during my rounds while still being a ton of fun, and I would imagine the longer, blue tees (present on 10/18 holes) would provide all the challenge desired for more advanced players.
This course does a fantastic job of presenting a constantly varying set of fairway shapes and distances, playing up, down, and across hills to greens of various levels of precariousness. The course is well balanced and well paced. The longer, more challenging par 3s and par 4s are broken up by shorter, more birdie-able holes. The first four holes give a great example of the variety present throughout the course. Hole 1 plays left-to-right with a dangerous downward slope on the right side, Hole 2 plays right-to-left with the creek bed meandering through the fairway all the way to just short of the basket, Hole 3 is a shorter, straight, downward shot again with drop-off just short of the basket, and Hole 4 is a massively up-hill par 4 that requires a well-placed right-to-left shot around the hill side to have a chance to make your way up the hill to the basket for a birdie 3. I used just about every shot in my arsenal throughout my rounds here, with Hole 11's big, downhill, right-hand-backhand flex shot being one of my favorites.
There is an almost constant threat of a roll-away or drop-off in at least one direction while putting on this course, making up-shot placement a not at all trivial endeavor. This is non-stop woods golf, and while well balanced, there isn't really an opportunity to just air out a big drive, this can start to feel a little oppressive if you aren't having a good round/hitting your lines. I would not bring a newer golfer to this course. Most of the fairways are quite fair, if at times rather tight. The only exception to this, in my opinion, is Hole 17. It doesn't seem to have a well defined route to the basket, which is a shame because the basket is elevated on top of a fallen tree and could easily be one of the better holes on the course if the fairway was cleaned out a bit.
I have mixed feelings about the DGA Mach V baskets, it feels like I get more spit-throughs and bounce outs with putts to the center portion of the chains than most other baskets, but these are in good repair and do their job well most of the time. The concrete tee pads were very nice, and there are benches present on several holes. The original tee-signs are rudimentary but adequate. I had the good fortune of having the excellent temporary tee-signs for the Ledgestone tournament up during my rounds, hopefully they are able to remain in place for a while. There aren't any extra frills here, but the course doesn't really need them, the quality of the golf speaks for itself.
There were some difficult spots of navigation during my first play through. If you aren't paying attention as you walk up to Hole 1, it is very easy to not notice Hole 3's tee pad across the path from it, and wonder in the wrong direction after Hole 2. It is also very easy to head up the wrong path from Hole 11's basket and end up at Hole 16, which then requires a lot of back-tracking to get back to Hole 12. I would suggest checking the map beforehand for at least these two spots on your first trip. The elevation present here makes for some great and dramatic golf, but you do have to walk up and down all those hills as well. Stairs are present in the steepest locations, but there are some others that were still hard to navigate, even in dry weather. I would imagine this course could be quite difficult to play after a significant rain, doubly so if the creek level is up.
Megiddo is an excellent course with a ton of fun and challenging shots. If you like woods golf and elevation, I can't imagine anything too much better than this.