COMMUNITY

Excellent!!! Have you done the "drive by" of your house to see when they came by with the camera truck?

I do that as well. Also look on YouTube for Stracka's course videos. Before I played my home course of South Suburban for the first time I saw the video and got a look of the hole and 200, 150, and 100 yardage marks with those videos.

GREAT READ! I will check out,thank you.

Yep! Even looked at places I've lived before. Very interesting ... and nostalgic.

I do that as well ... but Google Earth gives a much better view I believe.

I do this on every new course. For example, I played Shingle Creek twice last week, one in a best ball tournament and then on my own. The first thing I do is go to the course website and see if they have a holeby hole description. This course did. It showed a picture and a description of the hazards and where they were. I printed out each hole and created my own course book also. It doesn't have yardages on it but the carts have gps so you don't need them. If a course doesn't have hole by hole descriptions, then I'll go to Google Earth and do what you described. I had to do this formyown home course until this year when they came out with their own yardage book.

It's a great idea and helps make the course more familiar when you go out to play it.

AZBlue,
Just wanted to correct/help you on two things you said. You said Google Maps doesn't give you elevation changes. Actually it does. Just look at the bottom center of the sattelite view and as you move the cursor around you'll see the elevation change (as well as lat. and long. position). If you know your comfortable approach distances, measure them back from the center of the green and figure out the distance in elevation change as I mentioned above. It'll help you to select the best club for for the change in elevation. You'd be surprised how far off you are when you just guess the elevation. Try it with a course your familiar with and see how close you come. There's a long par 3 which looks to be about 20-30 ft below the tee at my home course, but it's actually only about 4 ft below the tee. That would explain why I was always on the back or long on that hole.

One other thing, the pictures you were looking at might have been from 2009, but you need to be aware that not all images were done in '09. For example, my home course hasn't had new imagery since 2004. Layouts do change over the years as well as hazard, tee and green placement. For those that are curious, the imagery date is in the bottom left corner of the sattelite image you are viewing.

Thanks for the info ... I didn't know that about the elevation. And it is always wise to check the imagery date for sure.

Mongo,

I checked several courses that I am familiar with here in Tucson and the elevation is NOT correctly reflected on many holes. One hole at The Pines is a par 3 which is way below the tee elevation by about 100 feet or so ... Google Earth did not reflect much change at all. So it is not reliable in the area of elevation.