Throw yourself into the world of Disc Golf

A. McCloskey

Enjoying the sport of Disc Golf, junior Adam Wenzel becomes a more experienced player with practice. Disc Golf is played throughout America, and the world, because of its eventful history.

Alex McCloskey, Section Editor

Disc Golf is a sport that is much less known than sports such as basketball, baseball, and football. However, the sport itself has a vibrant history of its own. Disc Golf was first played in Bladworth, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1926. The sport of Disc Golf was officially formalized in the 1970’s. It is played very similarly to ball golf where the objective is to get the disc into the basket in the fewest amount of strokes or throws. Ball golf can be traced back to as early as 1457 in Scotland, which means that Disc Golf is a modified version of it. Junior Jackson Langdon said, “Normal golf and Disc Golf are virtually the same, except that Disc Golf uses a frisbee, and in my opinion, it’s a lot more exciting.”

The largest known figures for being the creators of Disc Golf include “Steady Ed” Headrick and Dave Dunipace. Soon after inventing the basket and starting his company, Ed founded the Professional Disc Golf Association. He modeled his PDGA after the International Frisbee Association that he created at Wham-O a decade earlier.

While many professionals have used very expensive discs throughout time, there are a variety of different discs, each made with different plastics. Plastics such as DX, J-Pro, Pro-D, X-Line, and R-Pro from Innova Discs and Discraft are less durable plastics, but are great for beginners because of their low prices. The numbers on discs indicate flight ratings. Flight ratings in modern disc golf can be used to compare Innova golf discs to each other. There are four main categories that provide for flight ratings: speed, glide, turn, and fade.

Courses all throughout history have varied in difficulty and length. Depending on what course you decide to do, the difficulty can vary. For example, if you are in a city area park course, it will most likely have much shorter distanced holes with lower pars. Places that are more rural will usually offer longer distance courses. Though, the average length for any course is 3600-4300 feet, the average distance for each hole is around 200-240 feet. The maximum length for an 18 hole course is 4500 feet, while the maximum length for a 9 hole course is 2250 feet. If you are interested in starting Disc Golf yourself, there are several to courses in Raleigh. The closest to Millbrook is Cedar Hills Park. Some other courses include Kentwood Park, Centennial Campus, Bethesda Park, Middle Creek, and the UNC course.