Sevillano Links Review

Course Review and Comments

I had both a good and bad experience at Sevillano.

First thing is the practice area. I would consider it first rate. Driving range, practice green and putting green were all in excellent shape. The cart was very nice with GPS (with a very small, hard to read, screen) to help you. You might want to buy the yardage book (but the book does not give any hints on how to play the hole, just disances only).

The course overall is excellent. The tee boxes were in great shape as well as the fairways. There was a lot of mushy areas from overwatering. The greens look almost like carpet. The sand bunkers were poor at best. Very wet and hard with not much sand. I usually play sand well but all my sand shots took off as my SW bounced off the hard sand instead of going through it.

The course looks just like the links style courses from the British Open. No trees, no shade, just lots of scrub brush surrounding the fairways. Overall not the prettiest golf course I have been to.

I played the Tournament tees and found them to be the correct length for me (eventhough the starter tried in vain to convince us to play the shorter Challenge tees). My only grumbling I had about the tee length is that on the back 9, all of the par 3's were virtually the same length (168, 172, 172). I would have liked to see some more variety.

There are a lot of huge doglegs and blind shots. So watch out on a busy day, I can forsee it being a little dangerous as golfers try to cut those corners and might be be shooting right into you.

My biggest complaint about this course was the lack of care and consideration by the staff. I teed off at 6:50 am (prime time). Starting at the 2nd green, a maintenance worker was mowing the outside strip of the green. Even as we were putting, he kept the mower running on the side of the green. As we left the green to go to the next, we saw this same worker do the same thing at the 3rd green. He would start mowing the outside strip for the greens everytime we approached. This happened on the 4th, 5th, 6th greens. I finally called the proshop on the 7th green to ask them to stop the mowing. A little peace and quiet is what I expect at a golf course, not the constant sound of lawn mowers right next to the green. When I went to the proshop to tell them of my experience with the lawn mowers and noise, they apologized but did not seem too concerned. In fact, one employee asked me "Well, when should we mow the grass anyways?". That discussion left a very bad taste in my mouth.

Sevillano is overall a great course. I probably will never return since it takes 2 hours to get there from Sacramento and it is staffed by employees who really are not concerned about their customer's enjoyment or experience.