Dealing with a "Temporary Oddball Tee Location"

[DaveLeeNC]

I ran into an interesting choice today. We were playing (casual round - no bets or competition among us) on a 'vaguely familiar course' and were on a par 3 that varied in yardage from 200 to about 125 yards, depending on the tees. Would have been (per the scorecard) 160 for us today.

 

All of the tees were moved up to this oddball location about 60 yards from the green (all of them in the same place). There were no obvious conditioning issues on any of the tees and no repair work going on there either. Then we see all along the left side of the fairway that they had been trimming the limbs that were overhanging the fairway (good for them). The treeline (and the 'limb litter') ended right where they put the tees. So this was clearly a safety issue for the guys doing the trimming. There was a 'cherry picker' nearby but no workers in sight. I believe the trimming was complete but clean up had not yet started.

 

So the question is 'where to play the hole'. We decided that we are not playing a short par 3 course, so we teed off from the tee box that matched the tees we were playing. The question of posting is clearly in play. Is it just another hole played or is it a hole 'not played by the RoG' (where you would post par plus strokes). In this case both scores were the same for me so I didn't have to worry about that. My playing partners do not keep indexes so they didn't care.

 

Just curious as to how others might handle this, both from a 'posting perspective' as well as a 'course etiquette perspective' (where the expectation of the course management was that folks would play from the tee markers). FWIW, this is closer to a 'muni' type of course than it is a higher end, private club kind of thing.

 

dave

[gretch]

If no workers were present, I would just tee off where we wanted, fill our divots, and politely apologize and move on if caught and told I wasn't supposed to.

 

We had a similar thing happen that really would have screwed up our round on a nice course the other day. They had one of the best par 4's on the course with construction going on in the lake by the green, so they put a temp green in the middle of the fairway and played the hole as a 160 yd par 3, tightly mowed fairway and one of those huge cups. We decided to ignore it. We hit our drives as usual, lasered the yardage to the center of the green we couldn't play to, and on the next suitable hole, we dropped another ball to the appropriate yardage and conditions away that we had hit out drives on the temp hole. In essence, we played the course in regulation that way.

[Augster]

I agree with the above.

 

In your group, you are the committee for your day’s play. Play whatever tee box the “committee” agrees to play.

 

But if the tees were marked GUR or something, then respect the course’s wishes. While they weren’t working, play what boxes you’d like.