Highlands debuts lighted driving range

Drive by The Highlands Golf Course anytime during the day and you’ll almost always see somebody working on their game on the expansive range. Starting tonight, the same might be said even after the sun goes down.

The Highlands in Post Falls has added four light stands on the driving range that make their debut tonight. The lighted tee box dovetails with the course’s new Teaching and Learning Center as well as other planned course improvements.

The lights will stay on until 10 nightly and should illuminate the flight of shots for roughly 150 yards. Their greatest impact, obviously, will come in spring and fall, giving 9-to-5ers a chance to practice after work.

“It just makes it more user friendly and it means more extended hours for people who want to hit balls, especially when it starts getting dark earlier,” said Dan Unrue, hired in March as The Highlands’ director of instruction after more than 20 years as head pro at Village Country Club in Lompoc, Calif. “With this great facility, we have an opportunity to enhance our teaching program and reach out to all levels of golfers – from beginners all the way up to advanced players.”

The Highlands range has long been popular because it features grass tees as opposed to mats. With three tiers of tee boxes and a rotation system that allows two rows to recover while the other is in use, visitors hit balls off grass to a large landing area. The range has been the site of hole-in-one challenges and long-drive competitions.

“The range is a focus, just like the greens on the course,” said course superintendent Jack Oselinsky, seated at a new outdoor patio area that overlooks the range. “It’s a phenomenal range, I mean look at the thing. The view is gorgeous. People just love to come up and relax here and a lot of them just use the range and not the golf course.”

The Highlands plans to light the putting and chipping areas as well. Unrue envisions golf schools, short-game schools, night lessons and night putting/chipping tournaments. One of the advantages of golf schools is the ability to zero in on a segment of the game or the swing.

“When you can hammer on someone’s swing for two, three days in a row and isolate on that – and you’re physically capable of hitting a lot of balls – we can make some tremendous changes in people’s golf swings in a school atmosphere,” Unrue said.

The Highlands diagnosed several trouble spots on its course and addressed them a year ago. Downhill greens on No. 10 and No. 18 were reconfigured to become flatter and more receptive to approaches and chips.

Among other changes upcoming: The par-3 sixth, where tee boxes will be lengthened to stretch the hole’s yardage from 90 to 140 and the front portion of the green will be raised so putts from the upper half won’t routinely run off the green. The tees on the par-4 fifth will be moved back to share the boxes on No. 15 and prevent long-knockers from driving the green.

“You might hit the maintenance building,” Oselinsky said, “but not the green.”

There is discussion of turning Nos. 1 and 11, two short par 5s, into long par 4s played from the current white tees and making the course par-70 from the blues. The white tees would be moved to the current blues and those two holes would remain par 5s for a par 72.

“It’s a shot-maker’s course,” Unrue said. “This is a good course for course management and I’m a firm believer in that. You don’t have to be a low handicapper to think like a low handicapper.”