Revival Club (Rookie Design Challenge)
Dec 26, 2020 7:15:51 GMT -5
jwfickett, mattf27, and 18 more like this
Post by mctrees02 on Dec 26, 2020 7:15:51 GMT -5
This course is (probably) what happens when you find yourself in the midst of a pandemic induced midlife crisis and then come to the sudden realization that you're a few (ok a lot) of millions short of winning the Wolf Point auction.
A few weeks after the auction ended, an old friend I hadn’t heard from since college called to talk about a 340 acre parcel of land immediately north of Wolf Point he had just acquired from a distant relative who happens to be a master distiller up in Kentucky…and he wanted me to come down to Port Lavaca to take a look at it. We arrived to find a somewhat sandy, washed out piece of land with a dried up creek bed weaving through the property in a few directions. He had no clue what to do with the land…but I immediately saw the opportunity. Instead of owning the biggest hidden gem in Texas, I would turn this mundane piece of property into a golf junkie’s paradise where 36 per day is just a warmup.
Welcome to Revival Club.
Here you will find a wide open course where you’ll likely hit every fairway in most of your rounds. You'll also find a very compact routing featuring 4 greens within 200 yards of each other (2-4-10-12) and another 6 greens within 300 yards of each other (7-11-14-15-16-17). The fun and challenge of this course comes in using the firm turf to reach the proper part of the 70-100yd wide fairways to have the best angle into the hole. Pars can be a plenty here but red numbers are well earned and those who enjoy playing the ball along the ground will be rewarded.
Revival’s winds should be blowing at least medium and the course is forgiving enough to handle playing in a very high breeze. The prevailing winds are from the South/Southwest and occasionally shift to the north/northwest in the winter. If you’re in Texas, always beware the east wind because bad weather is almost certainly on the horizon.
Revival features four sets of tees, each playing to a par of 71 at just over 6800 yards. Want to have a round with more short and long holes? Play the gold tees. Looking for a strong test of your ball striking? play the red tees on pin 4. Prefer a steadier stream of medium length 4’s and 5’s? Consider the blacks. If you can’t make your mind up on what you want to play, go play the green tees and get a little bit of everything.
In addition to Revival, I will be publishing the following courses from this same plot of land in the coming weeks and updating this post one they are released:
Paradiso de Vaca (aka Cow Club) published on 1/16 - The name is an ode to the nearby town of Port Lavaca, TX. Whenever you’re in search of a late afternoon E9 or whiskey loop, Revival Club morphs into the Cow Club, an 18 hole course on the same property featuring some of my crazier routing ideas that others thankfully talked me off the ledge on. There a few other greens hidden throughout the property (surfaces are set to fairway in Revival) that will be used at Cow Club. You may be able to pick out where some are located from the aerial map. Want to finish your day with a 700+ yd par 5 or a par 3 with tees spread out across a 270* range that is also sharing hole locations with an adjacent par 5? Then Cow Club is for you.
Jimmy’s Jamboree - With a nod to the former owner of the property, JJ’s is a course that’s equal parts short game improvement area and a gambling w/ friends fiesta. Here you’ll find 17 embedded hole signs ranging from 38-203 yards before venturing onto an 18th hole approaching 800 yards that finishes on the putting course. The 18th is for the golfer who needs to press his bets with a long drive competition after losing his wallet on the short holes.
Broken Spoke - Named after the legendary Austin dancehall, the Spoke is an 18 hole putting course that opens at 4pm and features a bar and snack shack in the middle. More importantly, all 18 holes will start next to the bar so you’re cup should never run dry.
Finally, I want to thank the many people that helped me out to get this project to the finish line.
mvpmanatee - We started talking early on in the contest and I’ve enjoyed having somebody else to talk with about our courses, our competition, and our pursuit of making it to the pros (congrats on the Kinetic promo).
15eicheltower9 - Kenyon reached out early on to compliment me on my (now failed) routing and that spawned an all too regular conversation as we both worked through our contest courses. It was both motivating and mildly depressing to see each other grinding away on our PS4’s at 4-5am most mornings for 3+ months working on our projects. Thank you for inspiring me to also finish Top 20 in the RDC.
tpetro - thank you for standing up to the evil overlord (b101 ) about the virtue of double greens. I may have taken one completely out and split another into a pair of adjacent greens, but it was encouraging finding another designer who likes quirk as much as me. You were also an excellent filter for some of my craziest ideas.
mattf27 - thank you for the joy of planting (and bunker building) streams. Enough said.
b101 - thank you for the candid beta review. You’ve been kind enough to review both of my published courses in beta and your tutorials and design streams have provided much needed clarity to this project more times than I can count. May we forever enjoy building courses that encourage the ground game. #MakeTheBallRollAgain
grovey31 - thank you for subtly nudging me to look at tee shot framing without ever saying “hey your tee shots are vast areas of green and look like crap...do A, B and C and they won’t suck so bad!”
jeffm - thanks to you and the other guis over at the Refuge for the early playtests. You all saw a better way to frame the bunkers and clubhouse view and I think the 18th hole is better for it.
mattyfromcanada - thanks for staying up for some late night fun and yuks on Twitch. Hole 12 is for you, I hope I did it justice.
VctryLnSprts - thank you for the final course pictures. You found some really cool angles that I had never seen my course from.
Rob Collins/Tad King - thank you for building Sweetens Cove, Landmand and Red Hen...and for sharing so many inflight magazine hole design sketches with the world. I'm in awe of your work and hopefully did a solid job plucking a few things from your IRL projects for this virtual endeavor.
TLDR - I hope you all enjoy playing this project as much I have enjoyed building it. This will almost certainly be my last 18 hole PS4 design project. When my new IRL job settles in and/or I find the right bourbon for gaming PC trade, then I’ll be back in the design game but until then it’s time to enjoy playing the game for a while and hopefully getting to help/judge/armchair quarterback for other designers for a bit. Cheers!