Orchard Valley, Aurora Illinois

[David Hillman]

There's a course right by house that I have never played because until recently, I thought it was really expensive. Turns out it isn't. I planned to play there this afternoon, but they had a flood-rescheduled outing and were booked.

So at the last minute, I looked around for a plan B. Orchard Valley is about 20 miles from my place, and on many people's "Top X Public Courses in Illinois" list. Their site claims they are "One of Chicagoland's Top Five Courses" ( Orchard Valley Golf Course ).

I got a nice twilight deal, $48 to ride, and teed off at 3:10. Unfortunately, I was really not impressed with the experience. It's a nice course, especially for one owned by a park district, but Top 5? I don't think so. I can't think of anything special about it, to be honest.

The design is quite nice, but just a standard suburbia course were you are often playing in peoples' backyards, and alongside nearby roads ( a pet peeve of mine... plant some damn trees! On one tee, we had to shout at each other because of the traffic noise 30 yards away. The "signature hole", #12, has a street running alongside it. ) The greens were in poor shape, heavily marked up. For unknown reasons, someone had spray-painted a dashed line around each putting surface at the cut of the first fringe.

If you play here, bring your rangefinder, or GPS. The carts don't have GPS, but instead some sort of 1970's technology called a "Y-box" ( http://www.y-box.biz/ ). I'd never seen one these before, it's a cigarette pack-sized box velcroed to the cart's dashboard. It has a 3 digit readout that is allegedly the distance to the center of the green. Mine blinked on and off, got stuck on 172 for three holes, and was just generally about useless.

I'm not a real big fan of GPS in the first place, though, I'd rather have yardage markers. This course hasn't got those either. No stakes at all. In the middle of each fairway is a cube, about the size of a Rubik's cube. That's the 150 marker, and it's either red, blue, or white, depending on flag position. Nice idea, but you can only see the damn things about half the time, on the other holes, you just have to guess your distance. The scorecard is useless, too.

Luckily, I was paired up with a nice retired gentleman who works at the course. He basically caddied for me all afternoon, telling me where to try and hit the ball. I did, and despite water on 12 holes, I didn't lose a single B330 ( trying them for the first time ). Shot 84, but scrambled for it. 5 or 6 greens.

Tips are 6750/72.8/134. We played the blues, at 6400 yards and 70.9/130. From there, the par 3s are very reasonable; 168, 143, 154, 185. None of the par 5s are long, only one over 500 yards.

There are some obvious risk/reward holes, usually involving driving over water to an angled fairway ( 4, 16, 18 ). This would work better with some kind of yardage indicators, though. As it is, it's more like guess/reward. The most interesting hole is 15. A short par 4 with a real choice off the tee. The hole is 343 from the back tees ( 325 from the blues ) and the fairway extends straight to about 360. In other words, you can be in the fairway and past the pin, because the green is off the right, separated from the tee and main fairway by a lake. A ~260y carry will get you to the 'other' fairway, directly in front of the green, or you can play almost any club into the main fairway, and hit a second shot over the lake and bunkers on the left side. It'll be an easier hole next time around, when I'm not convinced that it is much longer than it really is ( I hit 3 wood, 7 iron over the back to a difficult spot ). Visually, it looks like 430 not 330.

Two of the par 3s are all-carry over water, but not particularly tough holes. I parred them both.

I didn't take any pictures, as there wasn't really anything special to take pictures of. Like I said, just a standard suburban course. I'm not sure where their ranking comes from; the clubhouse is gorgeous and the pro shop is bigger than my house, maybe that's it. Definitely not for the bridges... all of which appear ready to fall into their respective bodies of water at any minute, and can only be crossed at 1 mph or your clubs may jump right out of your bag.

Not a bad deal, but nothing to write home about.