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A Week Dedicated to Golf Course Patents - Day 1

By David Dawsey PE Esq

Ever wonder if you can patent a golf course?s architecture? Well, this week I will provide you with some interesting golf course layout patents that you may find hard to believe. Additionally, if you are a golf course architecture aficionado then you should avoid these posts because they will bring tears to your eyes (or make you puke).

The first in the series of golf course patents is a patent titled ?Select Pace Golf Course,? which issued this week. The patent is USPN 7651404, which describes the invention as:

A full-sized outdoor golf course is described with any number of holes, usually 18 or 36 holes. Each hole is made up of a tee, a fairway, and a green. The holes are laid out in a pattern that makes it practical for each group of players on the golf course to play the holes in random order. This is accomplished by organizing the holes in a pattern that greatly increases the number of tees that are available to pick from after leaving any green on the course. All tees and greens, and only tees and greens, but no fairways, are located along special cart paths (44, 46, 48, 49, 50), that run roughly perpendicular to the normal cart paths that usually run along each fairway, so that when finishing play on any green, several tees are reachable by golf cart in a relatively short predetermined time, preferably 1-1/2 minutes or less, using the special cart paths (44, 46, 48, 49, 50).

Check out this practical course design!

The patent explains:

Conventional golf courses are laid out with the holes following one another in sequential manner to more or less fit well into the terrain of the land on which they are built. They are designed to be played in sequential manner from hole 1 through hole 18 (on an 18 hole course). When players finish playing one hole, there is normally only one nearby tee to go to next, which is the next sequential hole number.

It is commonly known that the main complaint of golfers is the pace of play, which is usually the pace of the slowest group on the golf course. The pace is often 5 hours or more.

This complaint stems from the fact that the holes on conventional courses are designed for and played in sequential order and cannot practically be played in random order. This is because most tee areas are an entire fairway away from other tees or would necessitate crossing over other fairways, which may be in use, in order to reach them. This makes it too time consuming, confusing, dangerous, frustrating, and disruptive to other players, to allow playing the holes in random order. In other words, it would be chaotic. Someone skilled in the art would know that random order of play would not be allowed on a standard golf course on which most holes are occupied by players. Just the occasional nearness of more than one tee area, that may or may not be open, would not be enough to make it practical. Players that are stuck behind a slow group might have to travel the length of many fairways in order to hopefully find an open tee and fairway. That would defeat the purpose of trying to play a faster round of golf.
Most golf courses attempt to alleviate the pace of play problem by having rangers or marshals drive around the course. The rangers try to encourage slower groups to play faster. This has very limited success. Despite their best efforts, the pace of play is often still over 5 hours because of the inability of some groups to play any faster.

I am all for speeding up the pace of play, but I would prefer to play a slower round on a nice unique design rather than a blazing fast round on an, umm, less unique design.

Dave Dawsey  - Monitoring Golf Course Intellectual Property

PS ? click HERE to check out interesting putter patents

Full post as published by Golf Patents on February 01, 2010 (boomark / email).