2010 Am Worlds

[Bruce Brakel]

2010 Am Worlds will be in central Ohio, north of Columbus.  I'm posting this so I can remember this stuff.

According to my source, they will be using are Tiffen, Upper Sandusky, Marion and Delaware.  They will also be using a temp course to be located later.  I will go visit the course directory and post links to the course dirtectory.

Delaware:  http://www.pdga.com/course-details?id=2566
Marion: http://www.pdga.com/course-details?id=2365
Upper Sandusky: http://www.pdga.com/course-details?id=2365
Tiffin: http://www.pdga.com/course-details?id=2062

All four of these towns are along the same highway.  Here's a map:

http://www.mapquest.com/maps?1c=Tiffin&1s=OH&2c=Delaware&2s=OH

[Bruce Brakel]

US 23 through there is interstate quality, mostly, with one or two traffic lights and a couple of uncontrolled surface crossings.  Ohio 53 is a narrow two-lane paved country highway.  So they don't feel like the same strip of pavement.

This is my nutshell summary of the 2010 Worlds courses:  if you want to win an amateur world championship, come to 2010 worlds.  If you want to play world class courses, go somewhere else. 

The Delaware course is very good.  It has elevation changes, holes in the woods, holes in the park -- it really is as good as most of the merely good courses you'd play at a Worlds  It is a little short on flush toilets.  I don't think it had any true par 4 holes, but maybe all the long tees are not in yet. 

The other three course are not even as good as [sorry, Brett] Fairfield.  If you were to plant eight more trees on the open part of Fairfield and then were to iron out all the elevation changes in the Fairfield woods so that those holes were flat and monotonously similar, and then were to drain the swamp, you'd start to have something like these other three courses.  Quite frankly, we were flabbergasted at how hideously lame these Am Worlds courses are.  I played eight new-to-me courses this week for 2009 USWDGC and 2010 Am Worlds.  Three of them I'd never recommend you stop at on your cross-country trip to whereever:  Tiffen, Upper Sandusky and Marion. 

They are installing long tees which will do nothing to make the courses better.  It will only make the courses easier for the cannon arms and harder for the average player.  I throw longer than most over 50 amateurs, so, fine, whatever.  If you are a cannon arm, and they put your division on long tees, you should think about playing this Worlds.  Otherwise, save your coin for Rochester, NY, in 2011. 

This selection of courses really demonstrates that Worlds is a fundraiser for some pro tournament to be named later.  The PDGA does not give a rat's-ass about the ams except as a way to fund the pros.  Otherwise, there is no way they could award am worlds to these awesomely bad courses.  These are not Worlds-class.  They are city-class.  If it was the only course in your city, you'd play it if you didn't have time to drive down to Delaware.  Like Brett, and Fairfield.  I have never played a course at Worlds as lame as any of these three, but I didn't play Waterworks in DesMoines. 

Edit:  Diana says she agrees with all of this except that she would also mention the ridiculous lack of parking at Upper Sandusky, the generous use of poison ivy as the ground cover of choice on all the wooded holes, the literal half mile walk from 18 to 1 at Tiffen ["Where's the car?"  "It's got to be up there somewhere, past the pool and baseball diamonds."] and the apparent lack of flush toilets at the parks.