Meadowbrook Golf Course

The course was beautiful and well maintained for a public course. This was my friend’s first time golfing, so we decided that playing a scramble would be best for us. Steve the starter made it unnecessarily stressful. From the beginning, he started criticizing us. After asking if we’ve played here before, he rudely inform us all of these rules that weren’t clearly posted anywhere or told to us. After the first encounter, we didn’t see him again until around hole 11. He came up to us while we were in the tee box and told us we were going too slow and backing everyone up. He claimed that there were 3 groups piled up on hole 10 behind us and that there isn’t anyone ahead of us for the next 4 holes. We were worried that he was going to kick us out if we continued our current pace, so for the next couple holes I played faster than I comfortably wanted to do and my friend just sat in the cart and watched. We eventually caught up with the people ahead of us and were Steve-free for the rest of our time. I have been to other golf courses and have never had such a rude starter. We were completely willing to let groups play though us, just no one actually ever caught up to us. From our experience, Steve has very little customer service skill. I think that it would be in the course’s best interest to get a more polite starter.

There are plenty of great golf courses to choose from that don’t have Tom the starter running things. If you’re going to pair up golfers who don’t know each other, there should be a way to match by skill or experience level. We were paired with a 20-year-old who acted like he was a pro but played so slowly that Tom eventually had to come out and tell us to speed things up, making it look like we were the problem. To get away from him, we ended up skipping two holes—which was disappointing, especially since it was my birthday and we had paid full price but couldn’t even finish the full nine. We won't be back.

The normal starter is a bit abrasive and some of the fairways pool an unbelievable amount of water (lost two balls to shin high pools middle fairway), but an otherwise good public course that has a mix of nice, chill holes and some long, challenging par 4's and 5's. I would recommend putting on the putting green beforehand as the green speeds are not very consistent, in my experience, so having an idea of what they feel like will save some strokes.