Kensington Black Locust

[Bruce Brakel]

We played the redesigned Kensington course this weekend.  They did a great job with the redesign.  They eliminated all the holes on the tunnel course on the lake side of the road.  They created new holes on the quarry side, so now they have an 18 hole loop and a nine hole loop.  The nine hole loop is numbered 19-27, so it's convenient that you can come back to your car after 18 to grab a beverage. 

The course plays three or four new holes to get to the old holes, then it plays the old holes with a few pin relocations and a couple of new holes sprinkled in, and then the new nine hole loop is all new holes.  So it feels half familiar and half like undiscovered country.

From the long tees the course offers a good variety of holes from the 220 foot must-deuce category to 600 foot par four holes.  The average d is 360 from the longs.  Since we were paying $2 each to play and it was a busy day, we didn't see any point to playing short tees.  If you treat every hole as par 3, an 81 would be a really good score.  Really, why ever play short tees?  I took a few lefty drives, and on other holes I wished I had the lefty accuracy and power to take a lefty drive, so there must be some balance.  They also added some balance on some of the existing holes by moving the basket to the right. 

I have only two complaints with the redesign.  First, naming the course "Black Locust" was dumb in a clever way.  It would be like naming your course "Poison Ivy" or "Stinging Nettle" but more obscure until you realize what a black locust is.  The black locust is a tree that grows thorns.  Some people are very sensitive to the toxin in the thorns.  Sure, there's plenty of black locusts on the course. 

The other thing is, for some reason they decided to add a lot of mosquitos with the redesign.  Maybe that's just due to the rainy cool summer we're having.  There were at least five distinct species of mosquitos out there.