LAKE PRESIDENTIAL

LAKE PRESIDENTIAL'S PAR THREE NINTH

This Tuesday I ventured out to Lake Presidential, a new daily-fee course forty minutes from DC in PG county. There I met up with Troy Miller, assistant director of golf design at Landmark Land Company, which designed and now manages the course. Troy and I went to graduate school together at UGA and it was great to catch up with him while playing a solid, new course. Landmark’s design team is populated with former Pete Dye associates and that relationship is evident in the final product at Lake Presidential. The use of angles, the flat bottomed bunkers, and the size and shape of the greens is very reminiscent of a lot of Dye courses. I was pleasantly surprised though, to find a good number of allusions to classic architects like Donald Ross and Seth Raynor.

NUMBER TWELVE AT LAKE PRESIDENTIAL

The grass faces of the bunker bulged and moved like the best examples of those architects work. There were a few bunkers dropped in unexpected places that greatly added to the strategic interest of the course. The course, especially the back nine, lays on the ground, carved out of the forest.

The course was challenging, yet not overwhelming. There is decent width on most holes and a few forced carries. My main criticism of the course deals with some of the contouring around the greens. Too often the fronts of greens fell off into an overly steep run up making the aerial game the only one possible. On occasion, the transitions from some of the greenside bunkers into  the greens themselves,  were a little severe making recovery shots almost impossible to these smaller than average greens. There is lots of short grass around the greens and I will be anxious to go back in peak season to see if they can get these playing firm and fast (with an abundance of catch basins, this might be difficult). If they can, there will be a lot of fun shots from these chipping areas.

Lake Presidential is a good addition to the DC golfing scene. Priced at slightly less than the other daily-fee courses in the area, it provides decent value. While hamstrung with a routing completed by Greg Norman in 1995, the crew at Landmark did a very nice job creating a course that has both brains and brawn.  The surrounding real estate development impacts the course negatively on the front nine, but the back nine is mostly isolated from this blight. With the current state of the economy, I don’t think we need to worry about that changing anytime soon.

THE APPROACH TO THE TENTH

I would be remiss in not mentioning that this course is basically unwalkable. There are some long transitions from green to tee as well as some severe hills and gullys to navigate.