Kilmarlic Golf Club

$61 (cart included), played on Friday, October 2013 at 10am

Awesome layout!

$76 (cart included), played on Wednesday, June 2011 at 6am

Played Kilmarlic Golf Club 6-22-11, with the second starting time of the day. Very impressive operation, including practice area, clubhouse and highly welcoming and professional staff. Conditions today were excellent throughout.

Course winds through a mid-upscale housing development, but one never gets the feeling that the golf was secondary to the housing, as is sometimes the case. No two holes look very much alike, and for the most part, no other holes are visible from the one being played...and that is a good thing in my book.

Terrain is essentially flat, so the challenges come through water, sand (lots of bunkers, some big enough for your RV!), moguls, fairway sculpting, and several sizable marshy areas. Terrific design, very striking visually, and many of the vistas from the tees are postcard-worthy. Greens are very large, and several are tiered, making placement a critical thing.

Handouts included a yardage/layout placard (pretty, but not too helpful figuring yardage for shots across corners of doglegs), and a laminated card showing pin locations relative to green center (e.g., +7 or -11, etc.), in lieu of red/white/blue flags. I found this to not be of much value: I'd prefer the colored flags. More serious, in my view, was the paucity of distance markings on the course. Sprinkler heads are marked, but are very hard to find, and the 200/150/100 markers are flat stones embedded in the fairway, and are hard to see from very far away. However, these are pretty minor things compared to the total, and I really liked this course.

The course is not walkable, since distances from green to tee are very significant, with much meandering through the neighborhood. It is, however, a fitting companion to two nearby quality layouts, The Pointe and The Carolina, and very much worth a visit. I highly recommend!