[LErmer]

The sand trap on OB's 8th hole is a poor excuse for a trap.

[Bogie Shooter]

May heavy rain be the culprit?

[golfing eagles]

Originally Posted by LErmer

The sand trap on OB's 8th hole is a poor excuse for a trap.

As are many others in TV. Front left bunker on Calusa #6 is chronically like that

[UpNorth]

Sand traps are more than just a hole filled with sand and they are expensive to fix. My home course up here in the Northeast is undergoing complete refurbishment, including all 43 sand traps. The cost per trap is reportedly $20,000 each. Layers of rock, gravel and sand. You may not appreciate being in a sand trap, but you can appreciate what goes into making one properly.

[Dr Winston O Boogie jr]

Originally Posted by UpNorth

Sand traps are more than just a hole filled with sand and they are expensive to fix. My home course up here in the Northeast is undergoing complete refurbishment, including all 43 sand traps. The cost per trap is reportedly $20,000 each. Layers of rock, gravel and sand. You may not appreciate being in a sand trap, but you can appreciate what goes into making one properly.

You are absolutely correct my friend. In fact most people don't realize that 80%-90% of a properly constructed golf course is under ground.

It seems to me that in general The Villages' golf courses are poorly constructed and poorly maintained. Many are also poorly designed.


I love The Villages. I love living here. They seem to do so many things so well. The pools are great the rec centers are beautiful and the landscaping is stunning. All are well maintained. But the one thing that The Villages spends most of its advertising on is golf. Yet, they do a terrible job on their golf courses. The executive courses are in mediocre to terrible condition and the so called "championship" courses are at best inconsistent. I haven't played a course that I would consider to be in excellent condition. The best I've seen is mediocre to good. But many that I felt were good were not so good on other occasions.

As I said, I like seeing all fo the beautiful landscaping but I see workers tearing up beautiful flowers only to replace them with more of the same flowers. I'd like to see less of that done and more money put into the golf courses.

AndI don't want to hear how so many rounds of the winter make it impossible to maintain courses. I've worked at and played several courses in Florida and they all have a lot of play in the winter. I've never seen what are supposedly "country club courses" with this kind of inconsistent condition. It leads me to believe that they were not designed and/or constructed properly and not enough money is being put into their maintenance budgets.

One example of poor design is the size of the tees on many executive courses. Most players are hitting irons off of most of these tees. Par three tees take a much worse beating than par four and five tees. They need to be made much larger so that the wear can be spread out. I've also played some executives where the tee markers haven't been moved in two days. Those markers need to be moved every day. Of course, as I've said many of them are not big enough to spread the wear out.

Bunkers on executive courses are rarely raked by the crews. Everyone complains about players not raking bunkers but I've been the first one off on many mornings and the bunkers are not raked.

It's a shame that The Villages, that does everything else so well, doesn't take care fo their biggest selling point.

[Mrmean58]

Originally Posted by LErmer

The sand trap on OB's 8th hole is a poor excuse for a trap.

Your thread title calls out sand traps yet you only call out a single sand trap from the entire course. With the thousands of bunkers on the Villages courses and variable weather this time of year, you should expect an occasional bunker that needs maintenance. Not reasonable to have every bunker perfect before sunset daily.

[kkingston57]

Originally Posted by Bogie Shooter

May heavy rain be the culprit?

Great rhetorical ?

[Speedie]

Hard packed sand in traps can sometimes allow a ball to escape. My golf needs all the luck I can get

[JMintzer]

I played Truman this morning. The two traps I somehow ended up in were well raked (by the grounds crew) and the sand was almost too fluffy and soft...

[Rwirish]

Most of the sand traps are simply in poor condition.

[Papa_lecki]

The state of the art bunker system these days is called “Billy Bunker”.
Golf Construction | Better Billy Bunker Inc | United States

It costs about $2-3 a square foot for labor to install plus materials.
A typical bunker is around 1000 sq ft. Sand has been getting VERY expensive.

You would rebuild ALL the bunkers on a course, so 27 a hole championship course would have around 120 bunkers?