The Good -
Pretty, and moderately technical course. Interesting and difficult pin placements, and rolling terrain make the ten holes fun, and forces you to try all different kinds of shots from la ...
show more ›
The Good -
Pretty, and moderately technical course. Interesting and difficult pin placements, and rolling terrain make the ten holes fun, and forces you to try all different kinds of shots from lazer straight drives to rollers to get inside the circle of trees to putt in order to get up and down.
There are actually NO wide open pins, every single pin has at least a couple of trees around it. Your odds of hyzer-bombing an ace are probably a hundred-billion to one. You might bounce a skip into a basket, but almost all the baskets are covered. You can only SEE the pins from the tee box on maybe half the holes.
Hole number one tees up at the path SOUTH of the concession building, and goes NORTH along the trees and is hidden on the left just inside the trees, 90% of the way down the hill. Took me 3 times playing and Udisc maps to even FIND that hole lol.
The Bad -
It may be difficult to find your way around until you've played the course a couple of times, because pretty much all the tee maps are gone or destroyed, the hole numbers on the baskets are gone or broken, and most of the time you can't see the next basket.
I strongly recommend UDisc or a similar app. Sadly, destroyed or missing tee maps is fairly common for the Springfield area in general. The tee box maps at McBride, Watkins, Crusader and Oak Grove are all pretty much gone or destroyed. A little TLC would go a long way at McBride.
The basket is missing for hole 6 (and has been for months) and currently consists of a small branch that someone stuck in a piece of pipe...
The tee pads are hit and miss, as others have said, the path tees are the best, but I'm cool with teeing from grass anyhow, so not a huge deal for me... ymmv.
Hole number 5 and hole number 6 basically share a fairway and X across each other right at the path tee box for 5... so there's frequently a queue at 5 or 6 waiting for the people ahead or behind to play through out of the way. Hole 6 could simply be moved to the West or shortened just a bit and fix the problem,,,, Holes 8 and 9 also share a fairway and the same problems as 5/6, but simply making hole 8 mando to the right side of the trees could fix that spot.
Last but not least FWIW... THORNS, THORNS, some MORE THORNS in almost ALL of the trees, and COPIOUS outcrops of POISON IVY under all the trees and everywhere other than the fairways from hole 6 to hole 9. Poison ivy is all over the rough at all the courses in this area that's just natural, but there is a LOT of it here.
If you stick a disc in a tree higher or deeper than you can easily reach, you'd better go get a long stick, or a long sleeve shirt and gloves, and if you land on the ground anywhere other than the open, you should watch where you grab. One of my 8 year olds got a disc about 5 ft up and 3 ft deep in one of the fir/pine trees 2 weeks ago, and their big brother had to physically remove a half-dozen thorns from my arm before I could actually pull it out of the tree lol.
Overall, McBride is a pretty, challenging course that will test your shot repertoire, but needs quite a bit of TLC and a couple of logistical issues fixed. I do enjoy playing it, and get out there a couple of times a month.
Jeff Ragsdale
May 2016
Hans Gilgen
Aug 2013
Jeff Tanzi
Jun 2012
I liked the layout of the course, but the teepads were small and the course signs were wornout. Needs just a little work. Fun course that is actually ten holes, not nine.