Finding Joy in Disc Golf
Every time I meet a new disc golfer I like to ask them the same question; ‘How did you find the game?’ As you can imagine the answer ranges from the most common, ‘my friend introduced me’, or ‘I saw it on a tv show’ to the sometimes obscure, ‘i stumbled across a basket in a park I visited and it looked like fun’. The growth of disc golf has more or less been a 1:1 conversion, you love the game so you introduce a friend to it, they love the game too and they follow the same process. I always love hearing people's origin story as it is often a good reminder to me to keep going. However the real answer I am hoping to hear out of everyone is, how did you fall in love with the game?
I have long believed that disc golf suffers from a perception problem. People fail to recognize both the complexity of the game as well as the potential reward for success. They see someone throwing a frisbee and think, ‘yea I used to do that as a kid, it’s pretty easy’. What they don’t understand is that the discs we use are engineered to flip, fade, and hold a line for up to 200 meters. The rules of putting and game play are simple enough to grasp but hard enough that if you follow them to a tee, they force your brain into complex problem solving to be successful.
The concept of golf is fairly straight forward, complete a hole in the amount of allocated shots to receive par. Shoot less shots and get a negative score, shoot more and get positive. Traditional golf has some key numbers that act as their own reward system since most courses are near 72 strokes for par. Breaking 100, 90, 80,70, and even 60 all carry a certain amount of weight or prestige that the majority of golfers understand. Since disc golf courses vary wildly in their par allocations, shooting a 59 on a course doesn’t automatically garner the same amount of awe as doing that with a club and ball. However shooting under par on the vast majority of disc golf courses is still a very rewarding feat.
Somehow with disc golf it is not the overall score that drives the happiness factor. I have always believed that the key to finding joy in disc golf is learning how to throw and then watching the disc fly. The most prominent of these flight is something disc golfers call a ‘hyzer flip’. The easiest way to describe a hyzer is to picture a person throwing a disc with their throwing hand in front of them and their body lined up sideways to the target. This is a backhand throw and when the player releases it the disc has a tendency to go in the direction their shoulders are facing. Right handed players have their right hand in front of them and their shoulders facing left. The disc will, more often than not, fly directly to the left. This might sound complicated but the majority of people will pick up a disc, automatically stand in this formation and throw. A true source of joy in the game of disc golf is learning enough technique that a player can learn how the disc wants to fly but manipulates the spin and angles to throw a line the player envisions. There are dozens of particular shapes a player can learn and each successful line hit gives the brain a little dopamine hit. Many, many rounds I have experienced less than ideal scores but left the course satisfied because I was hitting the lines I wanted to. There is so much joy in seeing a disc fly in the direction you envisioned. Once you feel it for yourself it is a game changer. If I could get people to experience that just once then I would feel like I succeeded as a builder.
It is with this joy in mind that we are now trying to tweak our layouts. The Red course was designed to scale so that many of the holes require 3 good shots to get par even though they are not overly long in distance. After much consideration (and some strong suggestions) we have decided that more people will have more fun if we simply remove a handful more trees. Since that is the goal, that is what we will do.
Disc golf is beautiful and challenging, frustrating and rewarding. It contains all the best elements of sport. Our courses also contain all the things that make sustainable forestry and land stewardship so beautiful. All you have to do is come try it out for yourself and see why this can be another source of joy in your life.