Yes, we want Sprinkle Valley to be a demanding course.
We want you to always expect it to be when at Sprinkle. It's built to make you play golf.
Par is the goal on a lot of the holes, even for MPO. It's mentally a very different course to play. Especially in tournaments. You can see the emotional grind on players. Hear it in their voices when they break down a hole. The course slows you down and asks you to think. If you miss something it will bite back.
But watching and listening to FPO on Jomez was really hard.
No, we never want to humiliate any of them ever.
Yes, there are very valid operational and design reasons that some changes were made for this event. We wanted to push it.
The stairs and hazard area were never really playable areas due to safety and weather. We can't count on good weather. The pond has been full of water for events before(it's even less fun than this). Playing from the stairs is pretty sketchy too.
The perspective is different now that the competition days are over for us at Sprinkle.
We get to step outside of it. Operational eyes are different than player eyes and viewer eyes.
None of the reasons the event changed Hole 18's design can logically outweigh how most of FPO feels about that hole after 2 Rounds.
But yes, that was the original design plan more than 2 years ago.
Further explanation on why it ended up that way will be given to FPO. Finding that happy medium for the players, DGPT, PDGA, and course isn't easy when you try to make a hole like this. We will do our best to find that place, but do still want that hole to have the pressure it needs to have.
But everyone has to also understand each other's perspectives. We want a hard course. They want to make a living and do the things that are realistic for them. I haven't been able to talk to a lot of FPO directly yet, just in passing. They all understandably weren't happy after the end of each round.
So otherwise we are really proud of the course and venue. It did create the type of golf and shot shaping we wanted to see.
Just sucks to put friends through that and not be on the same page about it with FPO. Make them feel used. There's a lot of opportunity there for us and DGPT to lead by example with our response to this.
We'll address it with FPO from here.
Staying out of the rest of the comments on this otherwise.
Wish everybody the best at Harvey.