Greendale Course is Local Golfers’ Best Kept Secret

On any given day, Fairfax County’s eight professionally designed public golf courses provide seasonal sports entertainment at an affordable price and patrons can make use of them by clicking here for course hours, tee times, and fees.

Among the better kept secrets in that collection of courses is Greendale Golf Course, a regulation 18-hole course on 148 acres, at 6700 Telegraph Road. It is pristine. The course is always immaculately groomed, there are plenty of carts, and on any given day you will get ample time for that mulligan. In five visits to the course I have yet to see more than a dozen cars in the parking lot—curiously they are always BMWs, Mercedeses, and Jaguars.

You enter the grounds via a green and dark-veined canopy of trees in full bloom. The road from Telegraph to the club house is the long part of a T that splits off at the building allowing you to park on either side, facing the course. Practice greens are next to the building, to the right, and golf cart parking is to the left. You begin your round at the other side of the building.

Despite being between major thoroughfares once you enter the grounds you are enveloped by an all encompassing quiet—a quiet so deep you can just hear a water jet’s splash from a distance of over two hundred yards. No car or construction noises penetrate, you have entered an oasis. To accentuate that feeling, or just to see if you can prove me wrong, play the 17th hole and tell me what you see and sense as you get ready to tee off.

Among the offerings in the club house are a substantial grill featuring made to order hamburgers, hotdogs, deli sandwiches and more, a comfortable seating area, golf supplies on sale, and a handful of knowledgeable county employees ready to help. Among the nicest of touches are the scorecards.

The 6”X8” slick folded cards open up to provide a color depiction of each hole with suggested strokes, room for up to six player scores for 18 holes of play, yards per hole for men and women at blue, white, gold, or red levels (distance) of play, par and pace of play per hole, and men’s and ladies’ handicaps per hole. When closed, the card’s back has very legible course indications running from marker definitions, to local rules, to USGA Rule reminders. The front has the course’s name and information and your main contacts, Keith Tasaka (course superintendent) and Gary Temple (general manager).

If you’ve got the time and are in the mood for an exercising escape from it all, assuming you can keep the recommended 41.5 minute pace, you might just try Greendale for lunch.