Blue Mash GC, Laytonsville MD 160809
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- čas přidán 18. 08. 2016
- Grade: C+
Holes: 18 Par: 71 Length: 6858 yards Slope: 133 Rating: 73.3
In the armpit of northern MC east of the Shady Grove metro & MC Airpark.
I've played this course twice and I still have to give this course a C at best.
It's a nice golf course...decent half-links/half-woods layout with no real verticality but in good condition, they've fixed the 9th green, & the rough is real rough here with modest waste & some water...decent holes, really, with good elevated horseback greens that are tricky to putt.
But there are too many distractions here, it just leaves me with a bad feeling when I play it. The front side is nice...only a few distractions on it, some planes, choppers, truck-noise, compressor-noise at the pumping station, but things just get out of hand on the backside especially since they are "renovating" the backside, a lot of the bunkers are under repair & even then the greenskeepers are just crazy with their mowing & blowing.
It is just too noisy even if the greenskeepers aren't as overwhelmingly obnoxious as they were when I last played it...even if there aren't any greenskeepers. There are too many other sources of noise & distractions than the greenskeepers....especially since there aren't any houses on the course.
And $52 with a 25% hotdeal on golfnow to play this course?
Oh I'm sure that it's a LOT better on the weekend...not
There has to be an airport nearby because not only do they have small planes flying over the course but they also have choppers and twin-engine jets. Then the truck-noise and construction-noise on 108, that's another thing but really only on the west side of the course. But the greenskeepers here are just insane. They are all over the backside & have near-zero consideration for players on the course. By far the most widespread, blatant inconsiderate greenskeeper-fouling that I have seen on a golf-course. I thought that Friday at Bethpage Black was bad. This was just ridiculous.
It is like they are trying to fix-up the whole backside for people who pay the full rate while keeping the course open for paying customers who get a discount in exchange for the inconvenience, which is the basic philosophy behind greenskeeper-fouling everywhere, but here they've just gone buck-wild with the concept. Not the first place that I've seen things get this bad, not at all, but it never is good and this was really bad. Just plain greed & rudeness taken to its logical extreme. But even then, seriously, jets flying low over the course? Choppers? It's like playing next to an airport. Truck and construction-noise? It's like playing next to a construction-zone on a highway that runs by a regional airport.
Oh, wait! There is an airport at the intersection of Rte 650 & Rte 108, 5 miles up the road from Blue Mash. "Welcome to Davis Airport! Set in a [formerly] quiet corner of Montgomery County, Davis Airport provides pilots with the charm of an old fashioned country airstrip on the doorstep of Washington, DC"
Don't feel bad, there are two other courses on Rte 108 between Blue Mash & Davis airport.
It's a good course but can you really put up with this crap for most of 18 holes while playing a fairly-tough course & come away feeling like you had a good round of golf? I did not. It just did not leave me with a good feeling. I was low-grade angry for hours after this round.
It wasn't enough that they were rude to me directly on the 18th green, I also saw a greenskeeper be rude to seniors on the 10th tee. It was like watching the caretakers at a senior' citizens home abuse senior-citizens. People are paying over $50 to play & having to deal with this crap!
It would be a better course simply if it were not run by such greedy management. But it is. Sorry I'm not giving this course anything better than a C. There are too many good courses nearby that simply do not have these problems & charge similar rates. I have no intention of supporting a course-manager with his head up his butt. That is why I gave Lees' Hill such a bad grade in 2015 & why I walked-off Patuxent Greens in 2014.
In any case you should understand that some course-managers will use GolfNow hot-deals to try to take the edge off of having greenskeepers on the course while you're trying to play. Realize of course that it's not advertised as "greenskeeper golf, 25% off". It's advertised normally, no warning whatsoever.
They might not actually complain if they had been told before they paid for the round through GolfNow! It's like they are literally using discounts to screw some of their customers who pay to play a noisy course in bad condition with greenskeepers all over it, in order to pay the greenskeepers to fix the course to make regular customers happy & then gouging them to play & there's no guarantee that there won't be greenskeepers on the course even then.
And there will still be road & plane noise.
Courses like this are the 9th outer ring of Hell.
ps that price was $52 on a Friday morning with a 25% off hot deal
3 years ago.
That's what Herndon Centennial charged me this year to play in March, in winter rates, for 18 holes with a cart, on a course with nary a greenskeeper in sight. At 4 pm on a weekday. My guess is that Blue Mash would charge me somewhat more now, 3 years later.
let's take a look on golfnow and see what's going on with their rates...
for Monday May 27, on GN
HC is $67 for 18 with a cart until 12:48
BM is sold out until 11:50 when they have an $85 ticket, a $79 ticket at 12:40, and then at 1:20 they are $69 until 3 when they are $59 until 4:20 they drop to $44
HC is under $60 after noon and their prices vary between $50 and $33 the rest of the day, going up and down, until 6pm. But they won't take singles through GN. So not only are BM charging at least as much usually more than Hc, they are also charging $85 to play the course at noon tomorrow.
.
Who is the idiot who is going to pay $85 to play BM at noon on Memorial Day?
That's in the bottom third (the most expensive) of courses within 100 miles of Frederick between noon and 2pm on Memorial day. Yeah, I know: you can't drive to a cheaper, better course and pay less money for a better round in better conditions,
Come on, people. This is Blue Mash we're talking about here, not Whiskey Creek or even Little Bennett. Definitely not PB Dye or Musket Ridge or even Black Rock. It's not even Northwest!
This is a course with maybe 5 good holes on it. Maybe #1, #8, #13, and what else?
If you count #s 2,3,4,6 and 18 then why not count 20 other courses as equally as good and you know they're better? IMHO the best thing about this course is that there are no houses on it and the greens are usually in good condition. In exchange you get a course that's right next to a busy local road and a county airport with a price that's close to the price of the best courses in the Frederick area. It's certainly not the most expensive course around but it certainly is not a good value either, and there are many much-better much QUIETER courses with better layouts at a comparable price within an hours' drive of BM not to mention within 2 hours' drive.
Not to mention the many courses that are both cheaper and better. Not to mention quieter.
But golfers are nothing if not stubbornly stupid in the face of common-sense.
You get a course in your head, you have break your head against it before you quit playing it.
There are 50 guys coming here every weekend saying "I'll quit playing here once I break XX on it". Just can't break free of the siren call of the long rough and fast greens on the front side, and the shots over water on #9 and #17.
Free your minds, people.
It is not healthy to be enslaved to any one golf-course
czcams.com/video/mVvC_-aZqYs/video.html
a side note, I thought the greens here were above-average, but in general I hate aeration, especially getting charged full-price to play on aerated greens, and so today I had to look at these two videos.
tell me which you prefer
czcams.com/video/JDnrZTXyHV8/video.html
czcams.com/video/z0R6yz4u0x8/video.html
alas they still want to topdress and roll
"They both seem to be trying to do it in a way that doesn't disrupt the
course as much as possible but obviously the one in Victoria is more
desirable as a player."
...well, yeah. Until they decided to throw sand and fertilizer down on the greens anyway.
But did you notice how Mr. Scientific Greenskeeper still got the concept of a good green confused with a Stimpmeter reading? It's not just about how far the ball rolls with a given height and slope. It's also about the breaks. Every time the ball hits something on the green that affects the ball path, there's an additional uncertainty added to the break, plus that missing 1/4-ft of roll is often the difference between making the putt and missing it, or having the ball roll off the green or stay on.
I just don't understand why they can't understand that they need to aerate the greens hole by hole, week by week instead of all at once and then still charge people to play the course. I guess that enough people play golf who don't really care about that.
...seriously, you were charged $40 to walk Redgate before noon on a Monday? Wow...
Maybe next time you should check to see if there is a GolfNow deal on before you buy a tee-time...
"The day was fun...the course was in pretty terrible condition. the greens were incredibly slow...like unbelievably slow...the fringes were not in good shape at all with huge spots of dead grass. "
Was grass growing out of the traps?
Was 95% of the fairway divoted-up within 100 yards of the green, with the remainder heavily grown-over with crabgrass?
Were there...large spots of dead grass and dirt and even bare roots in both the rough and fairways, and black patches and crabgrass on the greens?
I mean, come on...you said that it was in terrible shape...
Maybe you should try Virginia Oaks, Cannon Ridge and Eisenhower for comparison.
All $50/round with a cart too.
on the other hand, this sounds pretty normal for a Blue Mash GN hot-deal LOL
I think that what you've just experienced is a course that is just coming on line for the year, I have to wonder how many courses in the area are in great shape in the last week of April. But seriously I've seen a lot worse than this in mid-summer, because the ownership won't even bother to water the course & won't even do basic course-maintenance on all the holes often enough to keep the grass from growing over.
And then you have courses like Bull Run, where the course is in near-perfect condition all the time, all year long, whenever they are open.
And then you have courses that are just ok. Better or worse but still quite playable.
I just think that it's all in the desire that the ownership has to present a decent course, along with sure the timing of play and the timing of course-maintenance, the weather and the players...because I rarely see a course hacked-up like I see when I play a "top-shelf" course. Rich people are just brutal to a golf course. They never rake the bunkers or fix their divots and they drop trash on the course like it's a 7-11 parking-lot at 5am. Then they drag their bags on the greens if they're walking, or drive right up to the greens if they're in a cart. And they never, ever drive 90deg on the fairway. It's just funny how course-maintenance will happily cover the greens with sand but not cover the divots properly. But all in all I'm both sorry and glad that you got a chance to experience what i experienced the last time that I played BM: an overpriced round given the level of greenskeeper-fouling. Now you know exactly what I was talking about. But hopefully they will have the course in decent condition for your next attempt to play #16 decently :)
That's ok, the best that I've ever done on it was a double-bogey. It is, without a doubt, a very-challenging hole. You suddenly realize just how much space you're used to having when you think about hitting 225 into a green, and just how short the irons are that you can reliably get up into the air. For me that hole is all about trying not to overpower the drive and just bitng the bullet and swinging a 5-iron for my second shot and trying not to overpower it and taking the lie that I get and chipping up to the green, not leaving the ball short. I get over the fringe and then it's just a matter of getting back to the hole and in. All that I ask for is to not lose my ball on that hole. Now tell me if there's anything like that level of challenge at Blue Mash, or even #14.