Revamped Oscar Blom prepares for unveiling

Oscar Blom Golf Course, the nine-hole, par-3 course that shares a pro shop with the larger Bill & Payne Stewart Golf Course at Glenstone Avenue and Interstate 44, is getting a facelift, complete with new greens and extra tee boxes.

Jeremy Weiss, assistant course pro at the Stewart course, said the work is necessary.

“It’s going to be like night and day,” he said. “This course is going to be so much better than before. You can play from the junior tees or the back tees and have a chance to improve your game. Before, you’d basically have the same shot on every hole, and now you’ll have to use all of your irons.”

New features on the course include new hole layout, three sets of tees for each hole, larger greens, Zoysia grass fairways, a new lighting system, new practice green and practice bunker, and a new security fence around the course.

Construction at Oscar Blom began in November, and the plan is to open the course in late July or early August, depending on how fast the newly planted grass takes root and grows to playable levels.

Mid-America Golf and Landscape Inc. redesigned the course, while AC Electrical Systems Inc. and Harry Cooper Supply Co. were responsible for the course’s new lighting system.

The money for the renovation – approximately $650,000 – was raised by the Heart of the Ozarks Junior Golf Foundation, which looks to provide facilities and equipment for junior golfers and golfers with disabilities in the Ozarks. Foundation Executive Director Rick Grayson said the timing was right to make over the course.

“We’ve seen the play at Oscar Blom dwindle in recent years, even though there seems to be a growing interest in golf, and we feel like that’s because the conditions of the golf course were not up to par,” Grayson said. “We had several conversations with golfers, and the decision was made to redesign the course so that a good golfer would want to play it and so it would be comparable to any other course in town in terms of difficulty of the par 3 holes.”

But, Grayson added, the group did not forget the younger golfers when the changes were made.

“We wanted kids and kids with disabilities to be able to go play golf and not be so worn out from the physical part of it,” he said. “It’s a twofold situation where we made it better for the beginning golfer and the more advanced golfer as well.”

The unique design of the course helps it fit in well with the other courses in the Springfield-Greene County Park system, according to parks department Assistant Director Jodie Adams.

“It offers night play, which is unique for the parks system, but the second thing is it offers an intermediate level course of play,” she said. “For someone that’s beginning the game and is trying to progress to the intermediate level, that’s the place to play and practice.”

That intermediate difficulty level could come in handy for a city golf program that has one of the highest participation levels of any city program; more than 120,000 rounds of golf are played on city courses annually.