After a disappointing finish last weekend to what was supposed to be a nice little trip I was anxious to try for 36 holes on a 60* sunny day yesterday. In an effort to play as many new courses as possible I decided to book a morning time at The Greens at Tanyard Golf Club in nearby Louisa. There are a handful of courses to the northeast near I-95 that I am interested in playing and I figured that Tanyard would work well for a location on the way to play a nice afternoon course. I had a little trouble finding the course and actually drove around in the community by mistake before finding the course entrance. The entrance is a single lane road in between two shopping centers and looks like an alley where the city would pick up the trash. I got there a little late but it did not matter because there was about an hour frost delay and I ended up going off about 9am.
The course is in a sleepy little housing community but the homes are well back from the course and only visible on maybe half of the holes. I found this course by searching for “golf courses” on the map so I didn’t really know what to expect. In short, the conditions were terrible. The fairways were like rough at most other courses that I have played with some shots nestling down in the long grass and other shots falling into bare spots in between the patchy grass. I hit quite a few fairways and had to dig down into the turf to cleanly contact the ball on all of the approaches. The conditions around the greens were just as bad with the ball collecting against a patch of grass which required a lower lofted club to try to bounce a shot towards to the hole. The greens were slow and rolled okay compared to the rest of the course, but that is not saying a too much though. Overall I would say the conditions cost me at least 5 strokes on my round and what is too bad is that I played very well from tee to green. I guess that I have become a bit of a “course snob” over the last few years but I still have played some gems for less than the $34 that I paid to play here. I feel a little bad expressing my opinion of the conditions, but it was a poor value.
All that said, I still enjoyed the morning. It was a cloudless morning, the temperature warmed up quickly, and the birds were chirping. The course was charming as some of the opening holes circled a small lake before becoming lined with pine trees. The course was open off the tee for the beginning holes before becoming a bit tighter, but the trouble off the tee was not alarming. The 8th hole, a 203 yard par 3, was my favorite hole on the front as it allowed for some recovery while still being a test. The 253 yard par 4 18th played up a small hill and was my favorite hole on the back because it could allow a good score to finish out the round. The course is shorter (71.1/127/6500) even from the Gold Tees, but I like that every now and then especially with smaller greens like the course had. Something unusual is that the the course is a par 72 with only three par 3s and three par 5s. Without some research I could not say the last time that I played this setup. However, because of some short par 4s I did not miss the extra par 5 as a scoring hole. I liked the course itself, it is just too bad that the maintenance budget is not larger.
#1 green:
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A lie that I got in a fairway:
