my disc golf philosophy 101

I want to first say there should only be 1 division in this sport that plays for money as there are hardly enough true pros anymore to support more than one pro division, yet alone 2 or 3 pro divisions. The pdga has tried to make a profession out of disc golf before it has been made professional.

About 1/2 the courses have issues and most do not even have scorecards, not too mention how poorly designed and unsafe some are.

On top of that my Ball Golfer friends impression of the game is “ disc golfers are so stoned they cant figure out what the pars are so they call everything par 3. or maybe they are too stoned to add or maybe just too stupid so they play everything par 3 to make it easier to add up their score” Catering to this ignorance has been one of the single biggest detriments to the game and sport of disc golf.

Taking amateur money and using it to try and make a profession out of a game has put us behind a bit in developing a good solid amateur foundation.

Today if you do well in adnvaced yo get ridiculed and called a sandbagger, even if you have a mortgage, full time job a wife and 3 kids. Whats wrong with a guy being one of the best Amatuers in the sport?

does a guy with a real life have to turn pro and play for money??

I’ll touch base on you comments and concerns about making courses too long. This is not the problem and most recreational golfers really just want to know what the par on the holes are and the par for the course, so they can play it like golf. After all it is GOLF!!!! The non conforming disc golfers who do not want disc golf to ne like ball gold should make up their own game and call it "frisbee toss in small park".

Ed Hedrick’s version of disc golf was a game mostly for recreation not sport and certainly not for a profession. If he didn’t want it to turn out like golf he should have called it Frisbee toss at target or something like that,,,,, not disc golf.

We had a disc golf course called Creve Coeur that was about 7000 feet about 388 foot average per hole and they were all par 3’s. Most pros would shoot 10-14 under there but ams couldn’t make any 2’s at all, it rarely got played by anyone before the redesign.

I stretched it into a 10,000 foot par 69 with all par 3’s under 330 most par 4’s between 525 and 650 and the par 5’s are over 750. Now the course gets about 200-300 players on a good day, most of them are new players, young kids that play other sports, you know,,,,, athletes!!

Now the top players in the area will go there and can easily shoot -10 to -14 but it’s a whole different mindset.

These distances are examples and a base line for all new courses I design. We have wooded holes of 365-450 that cannot be reached in 1, these holes are par 4’s.

If a hole can only be 3’ed less than 10% of the time it’s a par 4 and if I make a hole a par 4 ALL pins will be par 4 having a 300 foot placement and a 600 foot pin placement on the same hole just messes up the tee signs, scorecards and the course. This makes it hard to let people know what the par is and even harder form them to figure it out.

We still have some holes here that are both par 3 and 4 and while we cant change them all, we can make sure new courses are designed correctly and proper pars are established from the beginning.

New guys and gilrs could care less how long the hole is as long as they know it’s a par 4 or 5 they just play and keep score. Our courses have scorecards that tell what the par is and the players use them.We are going through over 2500 scorecards per course in less than a month at times.

Here are the pars at our 18 hole courses, Creve Coeur 69, Endicott 56, JB 57, Sioux passage 59- 65, Festus 70, Centralia 70-72, Ozark 72, Akita's run 54, Quail ridge 54, Collinsville 57, Hazelwood 54 ( probably more like 48). Moscow mills 54, Most everyone here gets PAR and no one has a problem with playing the course to the par.

I ask questions and take polls all the time from the players at the courses, believe it or not, I very RARELY hear the courses are too long. ( and believe me, to a guy who would call every hole a par 3 the holes are quite LONGGGGG). We make pars for our holes and our courses that make sense to regular people, the idea that all holes are par 3’s has confused a lot of normal people who know what golf is and how it is played. When a guys steps up to a 500 foot hole and some old school guy tells him its a par 3, this confuses and discourages them. Add another 400 feet and when a guy is told that a 900 foot hole is a par 3, they just think whoever made the course or invented the game is on drugs or at the very least, just plain STUPID.

What fucks up a disc golf course is a bunch of par 3-1/2’s that no one can get a 2 on and everyone gets a 3 and if you get a 4 its really like a bogey and a ½.

This hole is probably a par 4 for new players and should be called one, as long as 450 holes are made and called par 3 disc golf will have a harder time evolving into a pro sport!

This game is GOLF and while some cities put in par 3 style ball golf courses, no one I know who plays ball golf seriously will go there more than a few times a year.

I just taught a girl how to throw backhand, she had been playing disc golf for 3 years only throwing sidearm and while her sidearm was really good ( 325’) she can now throw backhand close to400. Yes she was a division one college athlete, but she represents who will be playing disc golf in the future, her and the thousands of new players here in ST Louis each year!~