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.
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| 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 18th 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 18th green.
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| 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
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| 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.
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| View of the 2nd hole |
The 400+ yard par-4 5th 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.
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| 10th Hole Tee Box |
The back-9 of the golf course gets your attention quickly. The 10th 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 11th 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
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.
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| 1st Hole example of overcut greens |
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
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| 16th Hole |
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
