Blog 88 – Wagga City

Nomadic_golfer : November 2020

Par 72, 6129m, slope 119, green fee $30

4 par 3s from 141-172m, 10 par 4s from 289-397m, 4 par 5s from 450-543m

Back in Coolac on Melbourne Cup day, for a 3 month stint at the magnificent Coolac Cabins & Camping, home to the Galway Farm Golf Club. I’d played everything within an hour’s drive on our previous stay here, so my first trip was 75 minutes to Wagga to play Wagga City.

What a start, the first is 543m – Is that the longest first hole in the country? I’d call this a country parklands course with the firm, red dirt in the rough, wide fairways and small-mid size gums that are generally quite spaced out so you normally get some sort of recovery shot. There are not many bunkers but the ones they do have are very big, more like a waste area and not much shape to them. Kikuyu fairways so tee shots just missing the fairway run much further than those that hit. The fairways were quite patchy, not the real spongy kikuyu, but the surrounds were. The largish bent greens (a number that were very long, but thin) were quite crusty, a very light green colour, a little slow, just ok. May have been sanded 3 or 4 weeks prior.

The course is quite long at 6130m and they do leave the blues out for visitors. The roos are the biggest I’ve seen on a course and there are lots; I actually changed two of my recovery shots for fear of killing roos 20m in front of me that wouldn’t move. Lots of straight or nearly straight holes, until you get to 15,16,17 which are 3 left to righters around a couple of dams; I liked the feel of this stretch of two par 4’s and a 5. What I do like is that this course is the Riverina/ South-Central NSW, they haven’t tried to be something else; the wide open feeling, the reddish dirt. It’s natural, it fits and it works.

Best holes were: 7 (a cool short par 4 at 289m with a dam on either side of the fairway from about 180m on a hole that turns sharply left at about 220m and has a number of small trees on that inside corner); 9 (172m par 3 with a green that is narrow at the front and wide at the back, has a bunker right and a bush filled water hazard for anything that misses left. This holes looks totally different to the rest of the course and is the toughest challenge to make par on the course); and 15 (378m sweeping left to right with a dam and larger sparse gums on the inside and probably the thickest collection of gums on the course, on the outside corner. The dam on the right goes all the way up to the green and there is OB left and long of the green. A lot going on here!

Overall, its pretty straight-forward, would be a great track to learn golf as there aren’t many tricks and what you see is what you get. It tests the long game and there are a few little nuances (9th & 15-17 ) that provide some variety. Enjoyable but middle of the road; probably the easiest course of that length I‘ve played. It’s a good application for Bryson theory – bomb it as far down as possible and if you miss the fairway it’ll run more anyway.