vpveschi

This course's strength is its greens. Speeds are fast enough for a putt to get away from you if you're lazy, without being terrifying. The green sizes vary from hole to hole in an interesting way, breaks vary from subtle to obvious and will keep you on your toes all round. Most importantly, the roll was true. In some spots there are visible patches in the greens, but the ball rolled nearly as true through those as on the grass; I stopped worrying about them being in my line pretty quickly. I don't think I saw a ball "wobbled" off its line all round; putts were missed because they were mis-read or mis-hit, never because of a bobble on the way to the cup. Overall, they may be the best public greens I've seen all year.

Visually, the course is beautifully set in nature, and every hole feels secluded.

I wish the fairways were as nice as the greens, but they were unfortunately spotty in terms of grass coverage. Lots of bare spots where your ball lies on dirt. This might just be due to being late in the season with a lot of play, but my advice is to play preferred lies here, and not make yourself miserable playing from junky lies in the fairway all day long.

As the title suggests, the course's setup has a lot of hard doglegs, nearly all of which turn right. Lots of people enjoy this type of layout, but it's just not my cup of tea. I found myself savoring every hole that wasn't a dogleg. And what a shame, because many of those holes were fantastic! They just get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of traditional, trees-on-both-sides doglegs.

One nitpick, the scorecard is pretty good at giving the layout of every hole except 17. On 5, there's a lake that you can see visually throughout the hole, but it really shouldn't come into play for anything less than a really bad shot, and they put the picture of the entire lake on the scorecard. On 17, there is water that's very much in play just to the right of the green that you can't see from the fairway, and there is nothing on the scorecard to show it! Just a warning for the first-timer, and hopefully something that makes the next scorecard re-print if someone at Great Ohio Lodges is watching.

Overall, this course is very much worth a try, even a long drive, for the greens, the value, and the setting, and may be worth a return for the golfer who savors dogleg-right hole designs.