Pros:
- Very pleasant park setting
- Great equipment: baskets, tee pads, signs, benches etc.
- Streams, ponds, and rolling hills make for great risk/reward play
- Decent hole length and shot variety
Cons:
- Long grass will eat your discs if not careful
- Mostly open shots, few tight fairways to force lines
- Lackluster finish
Other Thoughts:
Macatawa Greenspace is a delightful park that turned an old ball golf course into a very fun disc golf course. The rolling hills, sporadic trees, and prairie grasses provide enough shot shaping to make the round interesting, while still allowing you to play your game. The stars of the course though, are the ponds and creeks that run through the course providing a great level of risk/reward.
The water holes are designed such that you can choose exactly how much danger you are willing to put your disc into. All of the water carries have lines for you to bail out if you can't reach tho other shore, or just don't want to risk it, and you can always stay clear of the creeks.
The equipment is fantastic, with spacious tee pads, well catching baskets, nice benches, and informative tee signs. Some of the signs have started to fade already. Hopefully this is remedied because they are really quite nice.
The big con for this course is the long grass. It adds another risk/reward aspect to the course, but one most people find more irritating than adding of any real merit. It isn't overly hard to stay in the fairways most of the time, but if you mess up your shot, you could be looking for a long time. The rolling hills don't help this aspect since they can prevent you from seeing where your disc finishes. Mowing additional paths in the rough, widening the fairways, or just keeping it all mowed to a lower level, would really help keep frustration down.
The course ends with a handful of holes (15, 17, 18) that don't quite meet the same standard as the rest of the course, which is too bad. In general there is something interesting to think about for each hole.
This course makes for a very fun, pleasant, if not overly challenging round, and could be even better if the long grass is beaten down a bit more. Send spotters if you can, particularly if playing with less experience players to help avoid frustration.