I’ve performed this course numerous instances — and it retains getting higher

At GOLF.com, journey — and enjoying golf — is part of the gig. Right here, as we depend down the ultimate days of 2024, is a have a look at a number of the favourite programs our staffers performed over the previous 12 months.

***

I don’t keep in mind the primary time I performed the Rawls Course at Texas Tech, however I do keep in mind it wasn’t fairly a completed product. Properly, the golf course was completed, however the services weren’t.

The professional store was housed in a short lived trailer in the midst of a subject, and the locker rooms didn’t exist. You would pay on your spherical and slug a fast beer in there afterwards, however not a lot else. Regardless of, as a center faculty child, I didn’t want fancy services to be awed. The course took care of that.

The course was constructed within the early 2000s on what was an empty cotton subject. Wanting on the property now, you’d don’t know it was a boring open subject. When Tom Doak and his workforce had been constructing the Rawls, they moved 1.3 million yards of topsoil to form the course. What they created is without doubt one of the greatest public programs in the complete Lone Star state.

As a child in Lubbock, Texas simply stepping into the sport, having the chance to discover ways to play on the Rawls was invaluable expertise. Not solely is the course a brute from the again tees, but it surely additionally requires you to discover ways to turn out to be a shot-maker. With a west Texas breeze blowing most days, hitting a inventory shot is a rarity on the Rawls.

On daily basis of highschool, as soon as the afternoon bell rang, me and my teammates would head out to the Rawls to apply. And whereas we did loads of goofing off on the market, we additionally performed some fiercely aggressive matches. To at the present time, there isn’t a course that I do know higher than the Rawls.

Within the time since I’ve moved away from Lubbock, loads has modified round city — and the Rawls Course isn’t any exception. Lengthy gone is the non permanent trailer professional store, changed by an enormous clubhouse as an alternative. The Texas Tech golf groups have constructed a facility proper subsequent to it and their non-public apply areas lie past that. However new constructions aren’t the one enhancements which were made. The course has obtained loads of upgrades as effectively.

The situations on the Rawls haven’t all the time been nice. There have been years when the greens had been misplaced and others when the right take care of the course simply wasn’t there. That’s not the case anymore. With superintendent Jared Hotchkiss on the helm, the situations are higher than ever.

Nevertheless it’s not simply the conditioning that caught my eye after I visited the Rawls on my latest journey house. It was the tweaks they’ve made to the course. A number of the bunkers have been softened and others have been eliminated to make sure holes extra playable for the higher-handicap participant. To not point out, the slower inexperienced speeds they’ve been retaining has offered extra pin places on the greens and permits the course to play far more like a Scottish hyperlinks because it was first imagined.

I’m positive my mother and father received’t stay in west Texas endlessly, however even after they transfer away, I’ll should make it some extent to get again to Lubbock simply to play the Rawls Course. With the enhancements they hold making on the market, are you able to blame me?