The only ill-will I begrudge the owners and management is that the course still charges $50+ for a weekend morning round, pretending that there’s nothing wrong. 68 Golf Corridor in Jessamine County…allegedly).įor those of us that remember playing Old Silo in its prime, today was like visiting the golf course of a ghost town. I get it: times continue to be tough for golf courses in Central Kentucky, as courses were so obviously overbuilt in the past two decades (never mind what’s going on, there’s a new Jack Nicklaus Signature course coming to the U.S. Even several of the tee boxes are falling victim to these most insidious of lawn weeds, indicating to me that if there remains a chemical budget at Old Silo, it has been slashed to next to nothing. Where once lush, full, green rough resided has been taken over by an unyielding invasion of dandelions. Sure, the contours and multiple tiers are still there, injecting at least some modicum of strategy into one’s golf game, but I’m not completely sure that management hasn’t applied some sort of growth retardant to slow or halt the grass on the greens from growing.ĭespite being crispy to the touch and an awkward shade of beige not commonly found during springtime in Kentucky, the greens rolled extremely slow so slow that balls stopped on down slopes with inexplicable regularity. No longer are the greens some of the best in the state. Sure, fast and firm is fashionable and desirable in golf today, but the once brilliant sheen of bent grass has given way a mix of native grasses that aren’t so thirsty during our hot, humid summers.ĭespite being the height of grass-growing season, the grass isn’t growing at Old Silo…except where it shouldn’t be. This year I was too disgusted to even bother asking. Last season, I asked the golf pro what was going on with the bunkers, and was told there was a plan to remove some and renovate others. However, the course is a shell of its former self, which makes it all the more sad for those of us that would prefer to remember it as it once was. The course is routed through an incredibly diverse and interesting piece of property, with its ravines, creeks, massive elevation changes, and impressive rock wall outcroppings, none of which has changed. Any magazine or blog list that didn’t rank Old Silo among its top five public courses could be disregarded as not credible. And it’s really sad.ĭuring the past 15 years, Old Silo was regularly regarded as the standard of excellence for daily fee golf courses in Kentucky. No, this is a conscious and complete abdication of any pretense that Old Silo remains a well cared for golf course. The bunkers aren’t the only casualties of Old Silo’s austere times: the chemical budget has been slashed as well, as dandelions dominated the course’s landscape. It’s not that the bunkers hadn’t been raked or that there was more soil than sand left in the traps that’s par for the course for most municipal and some daily fee courses in Central Kentucky. The once beautiful, high-walled bunkers filled with white sand that so defined Graham Marsh’s first foray into golf course design in the U.S. The barren, sand-less, weed-filled bunkers had been completely and utterly neglected.

I’m not one for kicking someone while they’re down, but the magnitude of the fall of Old Silo’s conditioning deserves to be known by you, Dear Readers, lest you have unrealistic expectations of what you’ll find at Old Silo based on historical reputation and my own prior glowing review. No, while I arrived at Old Silo in Mount Sterling, Kentucky hopeful that the course was in much improved condition over what I had visited almost one year ago, I was immediately heartbroken as I peered out of the pro shop windows down toward the 9th and 18th green complexes. Those obstacles have little to do with my dour mood. Or that I didn’t make nearly as many putts as I should with my new Anser 2 putter. Never mind that my struggles getting off the tee reared their ugly heads again, making it pointless to even try to keep score. Today was an exceedingly disappointing and depressing day on the golf course at Old Silo Golf Club. 2016 will mark the 3rd consecutive season that the bunkers at Old Silo have been completely neglected.Įditor’s note: Old Silo Golf Club closed permanently in 2017.

Old silo ky