Playing golf: The Greenfield Estates way

When designing a golf course that is expected to attract a wide variety of players, every designer is faced with a dilemma – how do you make the course challenging enough for the best professionals or scratch-handicap players, without overpowering and frustrating the hackers and beginners among us? At Ayala Greenfield Estates, this was a particularly important to be an integrated amenity for all its residents, as accessible to anyone as the other amenities in the Ayala Land Inc. (ALI) and Greenfield Development Corp.'s (GDC) joint residential project in the South.

While most golf courses tend to offer little else other than distance in challenging its players, Robert Trent Jones Jr., and his team of talented designers fashioned the golf course at Ayala Greenfield Estates to demand strategic play more than brute strength to overcome the defenses laid out on each hole. Precise shot-making from both long and short range, careful club selection, choice of line and landing area from the tees and fairways, utilization of terrain to earn favorable positioning, as well as planning and precise execution in attacking the greens will be crucial in mastering the course.

The fairways are laid out to allow players a choice of position and landing area according to their ability. Hazards are deliberately placed to either tempt the player to make a bold shot to gain advantage or to intimidate him into resorting to a safe shot for a more conservative percentage play.

Although the course may sound intimidating to the average golfer, the designers have injected features that will make it more forgiving towards the occasional errant shot. Some fairways will have cross slopes along the edges that will tend to bring back the ball to the line of play offering the player a chance to make a recovery. Other holes will have large greens to serve as an easy target.