An 18-hole Bunkers & Bumps-style course was recently designed and installed by Adventure Golf & Sports (AGS) on property owned by the NOLA Motorsports Park on the outskirts of New Orleans in Avondale, Louisiana. The park plans to brand the mini golf course along with oversized yard games, arcade games, a future craft pizza kitchen and sports bar + coffee bar along with existing Go-Karting as “Throttle & Swing” – and promote it as a new FEC adjacent to the automotive racetrack.
When David Pace, CEO of NOLA Motorsports, arrived in 2020, there was a Go Kart track on a piece of property that added some value to the racetrack and was doing well financially. “But it needed something else to add to it,” says Pace. “Driving 20 minutes to half an hour just to spend eight minutes on Go Karts and then you’re done and you’re like ‘what else is there to do?’ I had to figure out what was the best piece to add to it. After spending some time doing a lot of research, visiting a lot of places, going to IAAPA [Expo] and also spending some time with the locals doing surveys, ‘mini golf’ came up more than one time. So that’s what drove me down this route and I knew from my research, seeing what PopStroke has done with Tiger Woods, that that was the new fad.
“The newest, hottest site out there is a mini golf course that looks like a real course, not something with windmills and animation. So that’s kind of why we went this route. And after meeting with AGS at IAAPA and talking to a couple different places, I realized they had the ability and seemed like the best group for us to head down this path.”
According to AGS, the Bunkers & Bumps-style mini golf course they designed and installed over the top of a portion of a huge asphalt parking lot adjacent to the motorsports park is an eco-friendly, miniaturized professional-looking golf course using interlocking, patented, permeable panels. “We had to do some site work prior to them getting here,” says Pace. “We just had to create a drainage field underneath and cover it with a layer of sand. Then we turned it over to them.” AGS used various layers and permeable turf to cover the panels, creating slopes, rolling terrain and faux sand bunkers. Unlike traditional mini golf that often uses bricks, walls, obstacles and theme elements for boundaries, Bunkers & Bumps relies on various terrain designs and rough turf to shape holes.
AGS used 75,000 pounds of recycled rubber to create elevation changes on the course, with some of the hole elevations changing three to five feet. “It’s quite a challenging course,” says Dustin Tandy, the AGS crew supervisor of the installation. “Players really need skill to read the greens.”
“It’s an 18-hole miniature golf course offering families a fun experience,” says Pace. “It’s larger than most 18-hole miniature golf courses and it’s got two cups per hole and one of them is always plugged, so we’re able to make it so that the experience is never the same. We can rotate the holes that are plugged or unplugged anytime we want.
“[AGS] did a really good job. There was a lot of ad-lib where we had to move away from the actual drawing and use the landscaping as it falls and be creative. They did a good job with that. My sales contact and all the office staff were great to work with as well.”
