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DAH Tips: Location, Location, Location
Don’t Limit the Potential of Your Design! Let’s Talk Places

For those of you who I’ve never met at a Golden Tee event, my name is Adam Kramer and I serve as the director of the Design-a-Hole Contest. Man, that would be the best business card EVER.

With the 2015 Design-a-Hole Contest open and ready for business, this time of year becomes awfully busy. New to the contest? Here's the deal: Design your dream par-3, par-4 or par-5, submit it to  design-a-hole@itsgames.com and you could see this go from concept to creation. (You could also win your very own Home Edition or a Big Bertha Driver.)

Full contest details can be found here.

While I don’t pick the winning design, leaving such challenging tasks up to the prestigious judges, I do sit in the meetings and absorb the enormous amount of feedback and conversations over submissions that take place.

In my time of working alongside this group, I’ve learned a lot about the judges want to see. And in an effort to offer up some guidance, I’ll be passing around various Design-a-Hole tips before the April 15 submission deadline arrives.

We started with Obstacle Management, and we're not moving too far for our next chapter.


Design-a-Hole Tip No. 2: Location Management


Last year, the Design-a-Hole team decided to do something different. We released two of the locations for the contest, providing some direction for those in need. It worked well… to an extent.

The problem, however, was that certain designs centered too closely on the geographical location and not the golf hole. To avoid that problem this year, we’ve decided not to reveal any of the locations in Golden Tee 2015 until later on.

“A good golf hole can fit on any course,” Design-a-Hole Judge and Golden Tee course designer Jim Zielinski said. “We want to see the creative golf ideas you can come up with, and the specific items found at specific regions of the world should be secondary.”

Think of it this way: If your hole is tied to a specific building, object or location, you might put yourself at a distinct disadvantage to make the finals if this area is not featured in Golden Tee 2015. If this design includes a very specific object—say a building to a city (and please don’t do that)—it will likely get tossed out quickly.

The winning design has to work in this update. That doesn’t mean it can’t have some unique traits or objects to distinguish it, but these objects should be within reason. More specifically, we should be able to take your design—make a few tweaks, perhaps characterize the trees and the background setting—and it should fit right in.

It sounds simple to say, “Design a good golf hole” but this is a different reality when you sit down and think. And while adding some character to your creation is an integral part to this exercise, try and think about how your design could fit on a non-specific course.

Could it fit? If so, you’re on the right track. And if you can encompass at least one quality shot—depending on if you’re designing a par-3, par-4 or par-5—you could be on your way to Golden Tee immortality.

Want more information? Read up on the Design-a-Hole Contest here. You have until April 15.

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