Course Design

[CEValkyrie]

Pretty good article talking about design of holes.
http://www.pdga.com/course-design-validation

[CEValkyrie]

Summary

If the course design validation step has not been completed, is the course design really done? If the designer didn't establish design goals with the course owner before starting, what benchmarks can the designer use to guide their design process or the course owner use to determine whether the job was done well? There are hundreds of popular courses that could be just as popular if they were also designed more consistently for specific skill levels. Popularity and designing appropriately for skill levels are not in opposition as design goals. But even a good scoring spread on a hole doesn't guarantee it's produced by skill versus flukey factors.

As you can see, doing scoring spread analysis to help validate your courses is a little extra work. But it's a necessary final step to say a course design has been completed in a professional manner. The unfortunate thing is many players may never notice the subtleties behind any changes you make to improve the course based on this information. Players react positively more to the course aesthetics than anything else. If the scoring spread indicates changes might improve a hole, try to make them in a way that doesn't diminish the aesthetics, if any, for the hole. Fortunately, simply changing the lengths to improve spreads rarely messes with the overall look of the hole and sometimes improves it. Time to get out your calculator.

[pickax]

I've been tempted to become a member of the DGCD Guild for the analysis tools. I just haven't gotten around to doing it. Brett- Since you have are constantly designing alternate holes, have you every taken the time to do something like this?

[CEValkyrie]

For CAC I went thru and calculated scoring averages by division on all the temps holes. There were 2 very bad holes by scoring and I pretty much knew how poor they were going into it.  (6A & 9B).