Briarwood Golf Club in York, PA

I recently played Briarwood Golf Club in York, PA. My dad and I played as a twosome; we played the West course. When driving past the East course, the first few holes looked very flat with lots of young trees, but as you can see by the picture the East Course is far from flat and undeveloped (from Briarwood's website). The opening holes of the West course look totally different from the East and has a very nice layout through the rolling hills of South-Central Pennsylvania.

The beginning of the West course has much bigger and older trees so the course looks much older. My dad and I are slightly better than bogey-golfers, and when looking at the yardages on the scorecard, we decided to play the back (blue) tees since those were only around 6400 yards. The course was in good shape with well defined fairways and very consistent greens. The course was a bit wet from the early summer rains so we were forced to stay on the cart path for a few holes. I felt the course design is pretty fair to the average to above-average golfer. However, there were a few long drives that I was glad to have the ball slowed by the wet fairways, since I would have rolled into a creek cutting through the middle of the fairway. The course is very pretty with plenty of water holes and many well-placed sand traps. Our time on the course was pretty quiet as the hills acted as a good sound barrier.

The improvements I would like to see on this course would be the addition of a par 5 on the front nine and another one on the back nine. There were a few long par 4's where it would have been easy to add an extra tee in the way back and move all of the tee off areas back one level to make it a par 5. Also, their riding carts were acceptable, but a nice addition would be newer electric models as they are using gas currently. Though I didn't shoot the best round of my life, and it wasn't a PGA tour quality course, I still had a great time. I would enjoy playing this course again and would recommend it to anyone in the Pennsylvania and Maryland area. It was only about an 70 minute drive from the Baltimore metro area. Don't let the recession keep you away either as my Dad and I played on a weekday morning with a cart and paid only $29.00 for me and $25.00 for him (senior citizen discount). A very good deal for some good quality golf!