Quote:
Originally Posted by Rich Iwaszko
What is a state of the art practice facility?????????
|
One aspect of the bunker practice available at the Sarasota practice facility that I *love* is that your shots are directed against a rather steep hill with a wooden "wall" built into it. In my experience, a mighty tiny percentage of golfers ever spend any significant time in a practice bunker - and for plenty of good reasons. One of the biggest reasons, I believe, is that many of the "misses" - including both sh**ks and skulls - have a way of flying much more rapidly and sometimes lower and more loudly than intended, drawing the type of attention that many of us, I'm guessing, might rather avoid. Not only does this unique arrangement of bunker, hill, and wooden wall save the otherwise long walk of shame to retrieve said misses, it seems to greatly reduce the risk of inadvertent decapitation - also residing on the embarrassing side.
The two bunkers *are* rather deep and much of the forward portions are overly steep but the consistency of the sand seems to be in the ballpark of what I've tended to find on many of the executive courses. They can get a little "thin" down in the flat areas at the bottoms, but some judicious raking can pretty well get you the "depth" situation that you might prefer.
An "acceptable" downside to this arrangement is that you get no real feel for what kind of "roll out" there might have been as the landing area is also quite sloped, as well as not being mown to typical putting green height. This *does*, however, offer the opportunity for practicing pitches off a downhill lie for returning the balls to the bunker for further practice - *if* you have had the patience to manage to actually have some balls escape the sand - another of those "plenty of good reasons" for spending little time there. :-)
Even with this exceptional arrangement, I've rarely had to "wait" for an opportunity to practice sand shots there. It looks like there *used* to be a practice bunker at Evans Prairie and there's one at Palmer Legends (or was that Glenview?) down in the "bottom", but that one may be mostly reserved for lessons. Don't get up north much. . .