Genesee Valley Golf Course Review

Genesee Valley Golf Course Review

Genesee Valley Golf Course
Schwartz Creek, Michigan
Grade: C
Teacher’s Comments: Some really neat holes, but overall felt a bit underwhelming.

Genesee Valley is a mostly ordinary, flat course with a back and forth routing. Seven of the holes are straight shots across an open field. Six others are back and forth routings in a parklands style. The remaining five take some interesting advantages of the west branch of Schwartz Creek, which runs through the property.

For what it’s worth, I’ve also seen the course called Genesee Valley Meadows.

From the tips, Genesee Valley stretches to 6, 866 yards where it plays to a 73.7/137. The next tees up are at 6, 487 and a 71.9/135. From the more forward tees, Genesee Valley measures 5, 585 and plays to a 67.9/124.

For my tastes, there’s too big a gap between the 6, 487 tees and the 5, 585 markers. The former is nearly 500 yards too long for a great many players, while the latter is too short. They need a set of tees at 6,000 yards or so.

There were a couple of really neat holes at Genesee Valley. The sixth is a nice short par four with a tricky elevated green well defended by bunkers. It is also an example of a hole that needs a bit of a haircut. Overhanging branches needed to be trimmed to allow players to work a ball right and left into the green.

The seventh is a interesting dogleg right around a pond with a trees at the vertex. There is also an interesting — and probably useless bunker to the right of the trees.

I say possibly useless because my playing partner hit a poor drive to the edge of the pond. He did, however, have a good line to the green from there. So he decided to go for it. As fate would have it, he chunked that shot and his ball ended up on the far side of the bunker. From there he hit another shot to the green, two putted and walked away with a bogey.

A final hole I’ll mention is the 576 yard par 5 eighteenth.

It’s a monster. The hole starts on an elevated tee, then dives down and left into the Schwartz Creek flood plain. The right side of the fairway is hard against a right to left slope.

Too far to the left, and you’ve got issues with the trees there. A little too far to the right and you have an awkward stance for a shot off the slope.

The second shot must clear Schwartz Creek and a patch of rough. It has to be long enough to avoid an uphill lie and being blocked by a large tree adjacent to the fairway.

From there, the hole turns to the right.

The approach must navigate to the left of the aforementioned tree, while avoiding huge bunkers to the left, and a smaller one to the right.

After all that, the green is thankfully a pussycat.

The issue for me with Genesee Valley, however, is that there aren’t enough of these interesting holes.

Conditions on the day I played were just so-so. There were significant dead spots in the fairways for as early in the season as I played (June 9). Trees on several holes needed trimming to maintain shot value. Much of the course felt shaggy, especially along the edges.

I’ll also note that this just might be the noisiest golf course I have ever played. It’s right up against I-69, where heavy trucks drone constantly on by. There’s something about the acoustics on the course where I felt as though I would never be free of the noise. Midway through my round, there was the sound of a huge explosion on the highway to the east. I never did find out what it was, but there were plenty of police in the vicinity of I-69 and I-75 on my return to GolfBlogger World Headquarters.

The Genesee Valley Golf Course review was first published on GolfBlogger.Com on September 10, 2020 from notes and photos taken on a round played on June 9, 2020. For all of GolfBlogger’s Michigan Golf Course Reviews, follow the link.