Madison Green Golf Club

Madison Green is a relatively new course, built in 2001 in Royal Palm Beach, FL that has already earned respect in golfing publications as both a challenging and entertaining golf course.

The Highlights

The Details

Facilities

 The facilities at Madison Green are nice, but not quite up to the high end private course level. The driving range is unique as we will explain later, but none of the facilities are overly exceptional.

Practice Putting Green

The pro shop at Madison Green is small, but check-in was quick and easy. The clubhouse is also in the same building as the pro shop and it offered a few lockers, showers and a steam room. Everything in the club house is new and clean, but overall the club house is simple and small. Madison Green also has a ballroom that overlooks the 18^th green for meetings, weddings, tournaments, etc.  It isn’t the largest ballroom in South Florida, but it is nice and has a nice view of the 18^th green.

View of Driving Range

As for the golf practice facilities, Madison Green offers all the necessary practice facilities even though none are exceptional. There is a putting green, which was having some work done during our visit. It resembled the speeds and roll on the golf course and provided enough room for pre-round practice. There is a pitching green as well next to the driving range. The driving range at Madison Green is rather interesting and worth seeing even though its practicality is debatable. There are targets for 100 yards, 150 yards, etc in the lake and golfers hit directly into the lake. For us, it goes against our natural tendency to avoid water and it doesn’t offer a very realistic golf-like practice, but it is unique and kind of fun. 

Difficulty

Example of multiple tee boxes on par-3 4th hole

The main selling point for Madison Green is the difficulty of the course and more specifically the broad range of difficulty from the shorter tee boxes to the tips. The course offers a good experience for golfers of any skill level. At many golf courses, the white, blue and black tees are merely spaced out 15 yards within the same tee box and there really is not much change in difficulty. Madison green offers a unique golfing experience from every tee box. The black tees are exceptionally tough and add about 1,000 yards and significantly more complexity in terms of landing areas over the white tees. On the flip side, the red and yellow tees are relatively short at 4,801 yards and 5,338 yards respectively and would not discourage the inexperienced and shorter hitting golfers.

Madison Green is commonly described as a Florida links-style golf course. Although true links-style courses with their characteristic tree-less and windswept tracts dotted with deep bunkers are not necessarily found in Florida, we do notice that Madison Green attempts to incorporate some of the elements of traditional links-style courses into the design.  Madison Green was designed with a significant amount of rolling hills and some greens lack front side hazards to allow for running the ball like traditional links courses. However, the course is not hard enough to necessarily incorporate normal links type strategies and there is more water and trees. That being said, the designers did a nice job merging the links-style rolling hill element with the Florida terrain to create a unique and challenging round of golf.

We chose the following holes as the more notable and challenging holes at Madison Green.

View of the 2nd hole

On the front-9, the #4 handicap 2^nd hole is a challenging hole. It is a par-5 dogleg left with water down much of the left side of the fairway. The drive is to the dogleg so if you hit it long and right, the golf ball runs off OB, while short and left puts you in a hazard. The second shot is a tight shot with the water on the left and little room to the right.

The 400+ yard par-4 5^th hole is also a difficult golfing hole because there is little room for error on the drive. There is a line of waste bunker down the right side of the fairway and for some reason the line of sight on the tee almost tricks the golfer into aiming right because the closer you are to the right side of the fairway the better the approach shot is into the green. There are significant hills on this hole and a hazard in the front right side of the green that must also be respected.

10th Hole Tee Box

The back-9 of the golf course gets your attention quickly. The 10^th hole is a tight dogleg right and is the hardest handicap on the course. The drive is tricky because there just isn’t much room to land the ball. Hit left or overshoot the fairway and the approach shot is very likely to be longer and obstructed with a bad angle to the green, while missing right puts you in the hazard. From the white tees it is about 200 yards to the landing area and about 250 yards from the black tees so a driver is not the play for many golfers. The second shot really depends on the quality of the first. As stated above, missing the drive long makes for a more difficult and potentially obstructed shot into an oddly shaped green and is much more difficult than being a little shorter and more right.

There isn’t much relief on the par-5 11^th hole. The drive again is difficult with water on the left and bunkers on the right. The second shot is also very tight, especially if your drive is short or in the bunker. The water cuts in on the left side of the fairway around the landing area of the second shot, which is exasperated by the fairway also sloping towards the water.   

In general, the longer golf holes at Madison Green provide the most difficulty and the par-3’s tend to be the easiest holes on the course. We feel that the most challenging aspect of the golf course is the tee shots while the putting and greensides prove to be the lesser challenge. There are neither abundant nor overly difficult greenside bunkers on many of the holes and the greens hold approach shots pretty well. The putting surfaces are decently fast, but the ball rolls true and the greens are not too difficult to read.

Condition

We have some positive and some negative comments about the condition of Madison Green Golf Club. First we will discuss the positives. The golf course is not overplayed, which is not the case with many golf courses in South Florida that are open to the public. The tee boxes and fairways are in pretty good shape with few divots or signs of wear. The bunkers around the greens are well kept and the sand is soft.

The cart paths are made of compacted sand as opposed to concrete, which is actually a nice feature on the golf course. The cart paths are part of the waste bunkers that line each of the holes and work well because they blend into the course aesthetics nicely. The cart paths are well kept with no washouts or significant wear spots, which is the concern I would have with not having concrete cart paths.

1st Hole example of overcut greens

We have mixed feelings about the views on Madison Green Golf Course. If we focus solely on the course, it is a very pretty golf course to look at. The well defined waste bunkers and water set against the rolling hills make for some very nice views. However, the course was designed with Crestwood Blvd, a decently busy road, running through the middle of it and it is distracting for about six of the holes on the course.

The other detractor as it relates to the condition of Madison Green is the condition of many of the greens. The greens are not excessively ball marked or scuffed, but for some reason many greens have skinned areas, especially on ridges as though the grounds keepers either use substandard mowers or they are trying to cut the greens too close. This was disappointing because with the exception of cutting the greens too close, the greens were pretty nice.

 

One other less significant observation about the condition of Madison Green is that we would like to see a picture of the layout of the holes either on the score card, on GPS, or at the tee box. The Madison Green website mentions that they have GPS in their carts, but we did not receive a cart with GPS. There are a couple of holes with difficult landing areas on the course where it would have been nice to have had a picture of the entire hole to see how it set up before hitting a shot. 

Value

16th Hole

We feel Madison Green is a decent value, especially for Florida residents. The golf course is not cheap, but the experience is not a cheap experience. The in-season rates which span from November to April range from $79 for morning tee times to $69 from noon till 2pm and then $49 for twilight. Non-residents are about $10 to $20 more for each time. Like many Florida courses, low-season rates have shown to be lower and we will update our review with specifics of the low-season rates after April. Madison Green also lists select tee times on discount booking websites, which provide the opportunity to play at an even better rate if you are flexible on tee times.

In general, the rack rate pricing is above the average, but the experience is worth the price especially if you are able to take advantage of the occasional special discount deals from the discount booking websites.

Overall

Madison Green is a very nice course that offers a good experience and we would recommend playing the golf course. We like that Madison Green Golf Club offers a challenge for the more advanced golfers while not discouraging the inexperienced and leisure players. The golf course, for the most part, is visually pleasing and well kept. However, the pervasive overcutting of the greens combined with the lack of GPS, smaller facilities and proximity to Crestwood Drive, while not being the biggest detractors, left us feeling the experience was short of our highest overall rating.