At GOLF.com, travel — and playing golf — is a part of the gig. Here, as we count down the final days of 2024, is a look at some of the favorite courses our staffers played over the past 12 months.

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I don’t remember the first time I played the Rawls Course at Texas Tech, but I do remember it wasn’t quite a finished product. Well, the golf course was finished, but the facilities were not.

The pro shop was housed in a temporary trailer in the middle of a field, and the locker rooms didn’t exist. You could pay for your round and slug a quick beer in there afterwards, but not much else. No matter, as a middle school kid, I didn’t need fancy facilities to be awed. The course took care of that.

The course was built in the early 2000s on what used to be an empty cotton field. Looking at the property now, you’d have no idea it used to be a boring open field. When Tom Doak and his team were building the Rawls, they moved 1.3 million yards of topsoil to shape the course. What they created is one of the best public courses in the entire Lone Star state.

As a kid in Lubbock, Texas just getting into the game, having the opportunity to learn how to play at the Rawls was invaluable experience. Not only is the course a brute from the back tees, but it also requires you to learn how to become a shot-maker. With a west Texas breeze blowing most days, hitting a stock shot is a rarity at the Rawls.

Every day of high school, once the afternoon bell rang, me and my teammates would head out to the Rawls to practice. And while we did plenty of goofing off out there, we also played some fiercely competitive matches. To this day, there isn’t a course that I know better than the Rawls.

In the time since I’ve moved away from Lubbock, plenty has changed around town — and the Rawls Course is no exception. Long gone is the temporary trailer pro shop, replaced by a massive clubhouse in its place. The Texas Tech golf teams have built a facility right next to it and their private practice areas lie beyond that. But new structures aren’t the only improvements that have been made. The course has received plenty of upgrades as well.

The conditions at the Rawls haven’t always been great. There have been years when the greens were lost and others when the proper care for the course just wasn’t there. That’s not the case anymore. With superintendent Jared Hotchkiss at the helm, the conditions are better than ever.

But it’s not just the conditioning that caught my eye when I visited the Rawls on my recent trip home. It was the tweaks they’ve made to the course. Some of the bunkers have been softened and others have been removed to make certain holes more playable for the higher-handicap player. Not to mention, the slower green speeds they’ve been keeping has provided more pin locations on the greens and allows the course to play much more like a Scottish links as it was first imagined.

I’m sure my parents won’t live in west Texas forever, but even after they move away, I’ll have to make it a point to get back to Lubbock just to play the Rawls Course. With the improvements they keep making out there, can you blame me?