I’ve performed this course numerous occasions — 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 take a look at a few of the favourite programs our staffers performed over the previous 12 months.

***

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

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

The course was constructed within the early 2000s on what was once an empty cotton area. Trying on the property now, you’d don’t know it was once a boring open area. When Tom Doak and his staff had been constructing the Rawls, they moved 1.3 million yards of topsoil to form the course. What they created is among the greatest public programs in all the Lone Star state.

As a child in Lubbock, Texas simply entering 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, nevertheless it additionally requires you to discover ways to develop into a shot-maker. With a west Texas breeze blowing most days, hitting a inventory shot is a rarity on the Rawls.

Each day 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 today, there isn’t a course that I do know higher than the Rawls.

Within the time since I’ve moved away from Lubbock, a lot has modified round city — and the Rawls Course is not any exception. Lengthy gone is the momentary trailer professional store, changed by a large clubhouse as a replacement. The Texas Tech golf groups have constructed a facility proper subsequent to it and their personal apply areas lie past that. However new constructions aren’t the one enhancements which have been made. The course has acquired loads of upgrades as nicely.

The circumstances on the Rawls haven’t at all times been nice. There have been years when the greens had been misplaced and others when the correct look after the course simply wasn’t there. That’s not the case anymore. With superintendent Jared Hotchkiss on the helm, the circumstances are higher than ever.

However it’s not simply the conditioning that caught my eye once I visited the Rawls on my current 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 preserving has supplied 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 gained’t reside in west Texas without end, 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?