May 2024 - Parks & Recreation - 49

Eco-Friendly, ADA-Compliant Mini Golf
Course Delivers Fun for All
By Phil Callighan
A
miniature golf course championed for many years by the mayor
of the City of Leesville, Louisiana, was installed in 2023.
The city is home to Fort Johnson (formerly Fort Polk), and
although the military base has several recreational attractions,
the mayor believed adding a miniature golf course to city property would
provide more convenient access to family fun for all ages without having to
pass through military checkpoints.
The site for the 16,000-square-foot
miniature golf course was an old
city pool that had been taken out of
service prior to 2015 and filled in.
During the intervening years, fundraising
for the mini golf course began.
ADA Compliance
Once the budget was established,
the city set out to create an 18-hole
miniature golf course that was fully
ADA compliant and eco-friendly
with Adventure Golf and Sports.
ADA compliance requires wheelchair
accessibility. While such a
course does not prohibit elevations
of the playing surface, the design
requires a great deal of calculation
to determine elevation degrees and
the lengths of pathways/playing
surfaces needed to manually power
a wheelchair through the elevations.
Low-impact obstacles also are required
to ensure ADA compliance,
so higher pile turf and shallow faux
bunkers were incorporated into the
design to slow ball speed and add
difficulty to the course.
Construction
To construct the course, highdensity
polyethylene modular interlocking
panels were used. The
panels are 100 percent permeable,
have various degrees of flexibility
and are made from recycled materials.
This panel method creates
the look and feel of a permanent
concrete course without the added
cost of pouring concrete while providing
the flexibility to move the
course in the future, if necessary.
The panels also avoid typical
concrete disadvantages, such as the
inability to make alterations to the
course inexpensively once a hole
has been poured; drainage problems,
such as water pooling on a
nonporous playing surface; or surface
cracking from freeze/thaw/
shrinkage common with concrete
courses in northern regions.
Once the city had completed a
rough grade of the site for the mini
golf
course,
the
project
required
dumping locally sourced gravel and
then some fine minus rock into the
general mini golf hole shapes, and
those shapes were compacted so that
all was water permeable. Modular
panels cut to match the shapes were
applied over the top with 100 percent
permeable turf over the panels. Then
all the turf was infilled with sand.
The 18-hole mini golf course was
built on the site of an old swimming
pool adjacent to the nine-hole City of
Leesville (Louisiana) Municipal Golf
Course.
Ceramic ballast infill holds the turf
down and makes it putt like a true
professional putting surface.
With permeable panels and turf,
water runs right through, creating
an eco-friendly course that enables
preservation of natural landscaping
and allows play to resume
quickly after rain. Depending on
the level of flora and fauna, routine
maintenance is as easy as using a
leaf blower to remove leaves and
light debris and hosing off bird/
plant droppings as necessary.
The mini golf course is already a
hit, and the city is hopeful it can add
more visual interest to the course by
incorporating some local-themed
elements down the road.
Phil Callighan, on behalf of Adventure Golf & Sports, is
Senior Account Executive at Knorr Marketing (philc@
knorrmarketing.com).
PARK S ANDRECRE AT ION . OR G | MAY 2 0 2 4 | Parks & Recreation
49
PHOTO COURTESY OF CITY OF LEESVILLE, LOUISIANA
May 2024 - Parks & Recreation

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of May 2024 - Parks & Recreation
