Hey everyone, welcome to this episode of the Disc Golf Answer Man. I'm Bobby Cool Daddy Slick breeze. This is special The game episode where I have an interview with Scott Stokely. I've had Scott Stokely on two other times, back in the early days of Disc Golf Answer Man and back when I was doing my own thing of Cool Daddy Disc Golf Podcast. Always a great conversation with Scott. So this one is also another great conversation.
He we go back to his early days of when he started playing disc golf at Oak Grove, playing with some of the legends, some of the influences they've had on his life. And then talks about some of the struggles he's had, very transparent about some of the challenges he had with people he hung out with and substance abuse. And then of course, him help reaching out for help and how he overcame some of those challenges. So a really great conversation with Scott Stokely.
Let's take a listen. All right. Cool. So where where are you at right now? Oh God, the mobile you're. Yeah, so I, I have no idea. So I've done more podcasts from the vehicle. It's just because I'm on the road every day, so there's no way around it. I am in. We're leaving Minneapolis, I'm heading to. I'm running this seminar in with Madison, WI on Wednesday. A seminar? What kind of seminars are you doing? So I do this, I've been doing this for a few years now.
I do full day, like they're called Stokely Method seminars. Full day Stokely Method seminars. I capped them at, well, it was 6 people. I'm actually going to cut it back to five people, but it's five people. It's all day. It's an intensive training session, backhand, sidearm putting, mental game, utility shots, just every single part of the game. And it's just where I I take my lifetime of teaching disc golf and I make people throw better. I. Like it? I like it. Yeah, well, I'm sure.
I'm sure. Oh, go ahead. I was gonna say I have my schedule posted for the rest of the year. I have a few more in Wisconsin, but then before the end of the year I have a seminar scheduled in Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, California, maybe a couple other places, but it's Scott Stokely. Scott stokely.net is where you find the information. They all still up so if someone's interested they should sign up because they all stay every time they sell out
basically. Well, just in case, and I'm sure I'll most of my listeners, if not all of them have heard of Scott Stokely, but just in case, let's kind of go back to the beginning and hopefully I got my facts straight straight. Let's see if I got my facts right. But it was back in Oak Grove when you were seven years old, while most kids were trying to learn how to ride bikes and play
little leagues. You were out throwing with some of the disc golf legends that maybe people have heard of, Dan Roddick and the Liesman Brothers. So, looking back, what do you remember most about those early days at Oak Grove and how it shaped who you are in the sport now? Yeah. So when I first played my first round of disc golf, it was on the world's first permanent Frisbee golf, at the time, world's first permanent Frisbee golf course, when it was the
only course in the entire world. So I actually started at basically Ground Zero for the game, at least as far as the course permanent courses go. My dad had just passed away and not long after my mom of course would take me in all the local things in the area. And every park had something
about that park. You know, the biggest merry go round, the tallest swing, you know, something that made the park the thing you go to. And this one park called Oak Grove had a Frisbee golf course at the time. It was just one of the park activities. I mean, there were no other Frisbee golf courses, right? So it was just a thing that that park had to do. So when you went to Oak Grove, you brought her Frisbee? And I would play, but I wasn't playing regularly.
Then when I was 11, my mom's business started doing well. So she moved from a kind of a working class neighborhood to this kind of rich neighborhood locking out of Flint Ridge. The park bordered La Canada. It wasn't in the rich part of town, but it was close. And I didn't fit in to the rich kid neighborhood, especially back then. It was like a John Hughes movie. Everybody had brand new bikes, you know, fancy designer clothing at 11 years old. And I didn't have any of those things.
But when I went down to the Frisbee golf course, it was blue collar, it was hippies. It was kind of the people that I grew up with, and I also didn't have a dad. And what I've realized since then is that I gravitated towards basically all the grown men in, in the Oak Grove Gophers Club as father figures as well as my. They were my friends. I didn't have a whole lot of friends at school. I had the Oak Grove Gophers.
They were my people. So everything, yeah, everything in my early years, I, I got from them. The way I've described it is, you know, it was a very imperfect group of people, especially back then. If you played Frisbee golf, most of the, not all, but most of the people were kind of on the fringes a little bit. It was not mainstream by any stretch, but they were the best man I've known my entire life. And I learned different things, valuable things from all of them.
I probably learned a few destructive things from a few of them. Who I, you know, I, I still love these people, but I, I basically just all, all the good stuff in the world I found in somebody there and I learned those things from them. So yeah, it it didn't just help for me, it completely farmed me. Nice. And, and I know you've written a book. I have to, I apologize. I haven't read the whole book,
but I know you haven't. And I've seen a lot of people talk about it. And in the book, I, I, I've heard that you really don't sugarcoat stuff. You don't sugarcoat your past. You talk about it and before you became a champion, you're living kind of, as you kind of mentioned, maybe a wildlife battling certain things.
And you've been honest about those two years and what And that honesty I think resonates for a lot of people and you and I've had several conversations and I love your honesty and I love your approach to to disc golf and just talking with people and helping people. Is there a turning point of something that happened that made you go from these wild days to now? I want to, I want to reach out and I just want to help people and give back.
Yeah, So it's funny because when I saw the autobiography is called Grown Up Disc Golf, you can get it at Amazon or Audible. It's been doing really well for the past five years. I so much of these things I, I really loved about myself when I wrote the book because I had to then revisit these things and write about and actually ask, well, why did I do this or why was I thinking that? For better or for worse. And when I wrote the book, I made a very early decision.
I was either going to be honest in the book or I wasn't going to write the book. But it's not going to be some list of like, all these are these cool things I did and look how smart I was this week and look how great I was that week. Like, that's a shit book. I don't know if I can swear, but that is a definite autobiography. Well, it's definitely not a good story. I showed, I showed up and I played well in one. Yeah. I wasn't going to do that. I got it. You know, as a teenager, I got
into trouble. I partied a lot. I was, I had legal trouble, you know, I, you know, yeah. This is all like a lot of this all, all of it's in the book. You know, the first time I ever got arrested, I was 15 years old and I was, I have, I had a motorcycle. I wasn't old enough to drive. And I I've tried running from the cops and got pulled over. And to me, that was just like a wolf. It kind of still is like a rite of passage, you know, getting arrested for harmless teenager
angst. But I also started doing drugs and and, you know, when they became harder drugs, it started going, you know, yeah, they tends to go back pretty quickly. But that was what I was doing. I was, you know, I did selling drugs. And, you know, that was my world. But the, the, the turning point more than anything else was that it was the Oak Grove Gophers, but not, not not all of them. It was I started not just Oak Grove Gophers. I want to expand.
That was, it was the whole Southern California disc golf community that I started realizing that all the things I kind of got a pass for as a teenager. When I started getting older, there were people who were always kind and always friendly, but I also noticed they kind of didn't want me around. I just wasn't like as welcome with them. And those were the people whose respect I actually wanted. And I, I, I was like, well, I want to kind of be part of their group.
And I was fitting in with my, my people just fine. And when you sell drugs, you tend to fit in with the people using the drugs you sell, right? That's, it's a pretty tight community, but that's not who I wanted to be respected by.
You mentioned Dan Roddick and then, you know, TD Ugaldi, but it was, you know, Mark and Susie Horne and it was Beth Farish and it was Cliff Town and it was Dan Mangoni and it was Snapper Pearson and it was even some people in, in the early days, people from End of a Champion like Dave Dunnit Pace and Tim Solinsky, Harold Duvall were all friends of mine back then. I wanted their respect and I certainly didn't have it. They were not part of that my crowd.
And so I and by the way, I was also unhappy and I also thought, wow, these people seem pretty damn happy. They go out and play disc golf and like if they have a bad round, doesn't seem to screw their life up. They're they're they seem to have their together. And so I kind of just gravitated towards wanting to impress them. I mean it really was an important part, but I've never forgotten all the goodness and the people.
They were part of these other groups because they were not bad people, they were just had the same flaws I did. So I didn't abandoned those, those people by any stretch. I just was trying to impress the other ones. I feel like with some of the stuff you've done and I pretty Scott, I totally appreciate your honesty and your transparency and that's something I've always really admired about you. So I appreciate that talking about that stuff.
But it seems like some of the things that you're involved in teaching, doing seminars, even some of the players that you sponsor it, it feels like like you've, I don't want to know, Maybe you don't have narrow it down to learned lessons, but like you're wanting to now put positive out in the world rather than the stuff you were doing in the past.
Well, OK, so here's the thing. I, when I was doing the things with the drugs and everything, I wasn't out there like, like I was a punk kid with an attitude, but I, I was never like, like, like trying to harm people or anything like that. I mean, there's people, there's plenty of people that do drugs that are good people that are struggling with something. There's plenty of people who do drugs who are terrible people. You know, regardless of if they were sober, they'd be terrible
people, right? So that they can be an independent, you know, description of a person. So I, I certainly, I never had like bad intentions in my heart, but I just was making bad decisions. So when I, I'm going to Fast forward them really quickly. So then I, I stopped using drugs. Then I went to college and then I went on tour and we spent the 90s on tour and my daughter was born in 2000 and then I was, I kind of stopped playing sound want to be home to raise her.
So now we Fast forward it up to like 2013 and I, I wasn't a partier at all all this whole time. And but in around 2012, 2013, I started using using drugs again and very quickly escalated rapidly into foreclosure, divorce, the unable to sustain myself financially, which is a
very fringe way of living. I mean, when someone's like says they're living on the street, it doesn't necessarily mean they're on sidewalks, but it could mean that they're scraping together money for a hotel room with a couple people they don't know very well a given night. And then you're shaking up with this person that you probably wouldn't be shaking up with for, to get have a roof like it. It's a very ugly existence right on the fringe. And I, I was at that point,
that's what I was doing. And it's probably going to on my tombstone. This is probably going to be my favorite story in all of disc golf was I reached out to Dave McCormick at Gateway Discs. Dave had been a friend of mine back in the 90s. And well, first I reached out to disc craft and asked him for help. And Jim Kenner and Mike actually did some things to kind of help me out here, but I was still using the drug. So I wasn't able to succeed with the help they offered and kind
of burned ridges. They've been mended since. But I, I screwed that up. But I reached out to Dave McCormick and Dave's like, well, I can help you out. I need to get in my discs into stores. I'll send you a bunch of discs and you can get them into stores and keep the difference to March and, you know, be a sales Rep. He didn't know I was doing the drugs. He had no idea that that was probably a bad move, not in
hindsight, but at the moment. So I, I, I walk into fly grain disc golf store in Denver, Co and the, the way to, to paint the picture of or paint the scene is that I'm on the doorstep of fly Green and I for all intents and purposes, and the biggest loser on earth. I hated myself. I hated my life. I felt like the biggest loser. I didn't feel like anybody would, would love me. All the cliche stuff. It's pretty, you know, it's cliche because it's accurate. And that's where I was when I
was walking into the store. And I'm gonna have to now I'm gonna have to tell these people, remind them, oh, I used to be really good at disc golf back 20 years ago. So therefore, you know, you should trust me and carry these discs and blah, blah, blah. So I walk in the door and I look up on the wall and there's the freaking poster of me autographed poster be up on the wall of the store. And the guy behind the counter just looks up.
He goes, Scott Stokely's here and he runs to the back and I hear him in the back yelling, you guys, Scott Stokely's out front. No, I'm not joking. He's he's in the store right now and there were two customers in the store. It's a true story that recognized me. And and one of them was like they said something like, Oh my God, I'm your biggest fan. And I'm like, what the hell is going? Don't you? I'm you guys, don't you realize what a loser I am? What are you?
What are you doing praising me? This is insane. Wow. And the guys come out from the back and they say, I know I'm signing autographs and I'm telling stories. This one guy in the stores telling stories about me. Oh, yeah. Whole 3 grateful disc championships. There's this building over here. And Mike Randolph had him by a stroke. And I'm like, I'm like, this is like Twilight Zone. Like I didn't think anybody would Remember Me, let alone I'm being praised.
And I absolutely at that moment didn't feel like a loser. I felt like, I felt like Scott Stokely, right? I'm now I'm like, Oh my God, I'm like this, you know, at least in our little world, I'm just important person, you know, again, I, I remember thinking I got to get off the draw. I'm going to get off the drugs and quit the drugs and I'm going to make my, I'm going to change my life and get back into disc golf and, you know, keep this feeling going.
And then I walked out the door and like 5 minutes later I'm like, I really need to get high. And I went and bought drugs with the money from the disc I sold because you know, it's not a movie doesn't, doesn't work like that. But I had that thing in my head of like, oh, I know how this feels, how I want to feel. And I didn't realize I could feel it without the drugs again. And then I was like, well, my solution here is I need to, I need to get back into disc golf.
I hadn't really played for 13 years. I'm like, I got to get back into this community where there's things that make me feel about myself that I wasn't feeling. It's, you know, kind of, it's a long story. You know, everyone's got their own version of their, their, their path. But basically I got off the drugs and then I was like, oh, all I want to do is get high, but I'm not using drugs. Fly Green gave me a job. I'm working at Fly Green. I'm actually, I got an
apartment. I'm, I'm now I'm paying my bills and I'm miserable because you know, the reason I did, whatever reason I was doing the drugs doesn't just go away. So I was doing better, but I was like, every day I'm like, I'm going to get high tomorrow. Like I know I'm, I know I'm going to, because I, I know it's not a really, you know, I'm minimum wage. I'm living in someone's basement. It's an apartment, but it's not a life I wanted. And I was like, what am I going
to do? I'm like, I got to go out on tour. This is it. I got to go out on tour. So, but I didn't have a driver's license at this point. You tend to lose those when you do drugs. I didn't have a driver's license. I didn't have a vehicle and I had no money. So I call it Barry Schultz in North Carolina. I hadn't talked to him in like 15 years. I'm like, hey, Barry, Scott Stokely, It's like, well, what's going on?
And I just sat on the phone and I told him everything I'd been doing, all the stuff that had been going bad, just completely honest with him. And I said, I need to go out on tour. I go, I need your help. And he says, oh, I live on a disc golf course and I got a spare room. Just get here. And I was like, I'm like, well, First off, he has his roommate, Brian Mccree. I didn't even ask him about coming out. I said I just, I don't know what to do. Barry.
I've been away from the sport. I don't know how it works anymore. And Barry, I hear him like turn away from the phone. He goes, hey, Brian. He goes, Stokely's coming to live with us. I never asked him. He didn't ask me. He just told Stokely's coming to live with us. And Brian's like, oh, sweet. Scott Stoker, That's awesome. And so he gets back. He goes, yeah, I just get North Carolina, got a place. And I said, Barry, I go, I don't, I don't have any money. He goes, I didn't ask you for
money. Just get here and I said how long can I stay? I said how long can I stay and his exact words were as long as you need to and that's how it started of that. I hope this isn't too long of a story. So the story was so now I'm out all right now I'm going to go out on tour again and it's like I would go to a tournament and I would get praise. Wow, you throw really far. Oh, I knew you back in the day. I heard blah, blah, blah, beer sidearms really good.
That felt good, but it was still incomplete like I still like it was kind of not superficial, but I'm like you're praising me for throwing frisbee as well. That feels good, but that's not the same. That isn't the feeling I actually needed. And I ended up dating a woman to son had autism and I started running events for kids and adults with special needs. Went to 270 cities and taught a free disc golf class for kids with special needs while I was touring around playing these events.
And that was it. That was what did it. Where I went, people were like, they weren't saying, oh, I love how good you are at Frisbee. They're like, I love what a good man you are. I love what a good person you are. I hire you. And, and oh man, that was, that was, that was the drug that I was looking for. So the last years, whether I'm sponsoring special needs players or I'm, I'm donating.
I mean, the last four years I've donated all my prize money at tournaments to special needs or developing organizations or developing kind of like everything I do now is I'm just seeking a different drug, which is I want to like help the world and I want to make people better. And like I'm happy now. I want to share how to become happy. And I'm financially successful now and I'm doing really well and I so now I want to share with other people how to be financially successful.
None of these are paid gigs. This is I'm just seeking that drug of I want people to look at me in a way where I feel good about myself because that's my, that's my drug. If that makes sense. If that makes sense. No, yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. That's a really great. Thing to. That's 100,000 page books summed up in like 8 minutes, so I hope. Definitely tell people to go go get the book so they could actually get it, you know, take a deeper 5 and learn more about
it 'cause I think. Book ends in 2000. The book ends when I quit this Oh, my daughter was born, but the book ended with my daughter being born and I'm like, what the hell am I gonna do now? I play frisbee golf for a living. Oh, you need. Sounds like we need a second book the the next chapter or the saga. No, I'm writing three books and and. OK, Yeah. So My Empire Strikes Back is in the works. Nice. I love.
I love that analogy. That's Oh, no. Well, you'll appreciate the analogy because. This is the heavy dark, Moody one. This is this is that. Oh, OK. And then after that, the the third book is all going to be about I've now I've gone to 40 countries in the last three years. I've I'm going to.
My. 41st country next week. So so last book's going to be all fun and rosy with the Ewoks. I love it and I love the way your brain thinks of you're, you're thinking 2345 steps ahead, which is which is a fantastic way to look at it. So, so let's talk a little bit about kind of the journey. You know, disc golf has grown up, you've grown up with disc golf. You've been through a lot of lot of different challenges and overcome those challenges.
So tell me a little bit about you know, you're coming back, but now you're you're playing disc golf now and then you played back when you were. You played the Open at 50 years old and not, not a lot of players can say that they've spanned large generations of disc golf, right? What's the biggest change you've seen in disc golf? And is there anything that you miss about the quote UN quote old days of disc golf? Yeah, that's a fantastic
question. So the biggest change has just been the cultural acceptance, like the fact that the whole world's upside down now as far as disc golf goes. Like we're like this real sport. I mean, we might not be the biggest sport, but we're not this fringe thing. You know, there's respectable ball golfers who think disc golf's a cool alternative to ball golf. You know, there's parents aren't ashamed of their kids when they
want to play. They actually try to figure out how to help their kids go on tour. Cities are cities approach companies and say we want a disc golf course in our park. Can you send someone and you know, where do we buy the baskets they used to show up with with torches and pitchforks if you tried to put a course in back in the 80s? Nobody today has any understanding of how much work the early pioneers of our sport did to get the disc in the ground.
I mean, they literally fought City Hall nearly every time they put a course in. It could be a five year, it could be five years of working with the neighborhood just to get them to approve a tentative plant. Yeah, So that's the biggest difference now. And now we're just this real sport. If you start today, you, you just think of disc golf as just one of those alternative sports that, you know, 8 million people play. It wasn't like that.
As far as what I miss about the old days, I I'm not ever going to be the grumpy old man who says back in my day things were better. If I was to list 20 different things about disc golf, 19 of them are better now than they've ever been. You know what, from the cultural acceptance to the explosion of the women's field to how many juniors play and you know, the pro tour and technology and the Cal cool the courses are. And you know, 19 of the 20 are
better than they've ever been. The one thing that can't be the same just because we're bigger is that the the the family aspect of the sport, it just can't ever replicate the way it used to be just because we're right now Now, OK, disc golf is like a family. Yes, you can go to any course in the world, post to Facebook. Hey, I'm in town. I need a place to crash. Some disc golfer will be like, I
got a couch. You know, like there's still this thing that we have that's incredibly unique and special, but it's not the same as when there were, you know, nine of us. Right. Right, so the way the way I described it, it was because we were it was such a group made-up of like outcasts and misfits. You know, most players, you know, I'm there's there was we had a doctor here, you know, scientist over there, but we know mostly we were misfits and there was this it was this US
against them mentality. I mean like nobody, I mean, and I mean nobody understood what we did except for us. I mean, you had. You had guys who would. And this was not. This is a common story. In the old days, they couldn't tell their boss that they were going to a disc golf tournament to get time off. They had to lie because their boss would have no under score. But first they have to explain what disc golf is. And then it would sound stupid to them.
And they'd be like, yeah, you're not taking time off for this, this thing. It's like people hid it from their wives. And so, you know, our, our, you know, we were the outcast group. And because the outcast group, we bonded over this in a way that just can never be the same. We call it the Frisbee family. We still call it that today. Like there's just nothing like it. We just, I went to the Virginia State championships. So I think the 48th Daniel, I was and it's mostly old school
players. The majority of people that tournament have been playing longer than me. And I hugged 100 people and so did everybody else. It was, it was absolutely a family. We're never going to get that back, you know, for better or worse. That's that's the thing that's different. And me personally, I would give up the other 19 things I'd do for that. But yeah, I love where the sport is. I think it's great. It's growing.
I love the pro tour. I'll say something that that people don't or they ask me all the time and and they don't understand how. I don't think they understand how strange this is, but on the pro Tour, basically nearly every single person on the pro tour are like really good people. And they actually genuinely really like one of them. Like they're competing. They're competing.
You know, where if I beat you, I'm taking food off your plate and the money is at a level where if I beat you, you might not come out next season. Like there's there's a line where people aren't able to afford to keep doing it. There's every reason in the world for it, for people to butt heads and have animosity, and there's almost none of it. Like, no, they're competing. I mean, there's not a single player on tour that takes it easy on the person.
No, you're trying to, you're trying to smash the person on the course. There's no lack of competitiveness, but there's also love at the same time, where it's like when you beat somebody, you're happy you won and you feel what they're going through at the same time. I don't think that exists. I don't think anybody in the NBA has ever been like the Chicago Bulls were ever like, oh, I feel so sad for those Detroit Pistons. Oh man, I bet they're really, I bet they're they're I bet
they're sad right now. There's there's an empathy. So it's a wild, it's wild, man. It's it shouldn't be like this. So that's the carryover of the Frisbee family that we still got. I don't think there's a sport in the world that has the quality of people playing it that we do, yeah. Yeah, I love that. I've been watching, you know, since coming back to Dynamic disc, watching a lot of YouTube disc golf videos or guys are just out there practicing and then showing, you know, what
they do off the course. And I that's something I notice is that these kids are having a great time together, laughing, being goofy, and they're all from different manufacturers because they don't care. They just, they're friends. They're they're out there having a good time, doing the same thing, have the same goals, cheering each other on and just having a great time. So yeah, I think that. It is, yeah. I couldn't speak any higher.
I'm so proud of them. I mean, they're, they, what they're doing is they're carrying on the Frisbee tradition, the Frisbee legacy and, and I'm proud of all of them. I think they're and they're my friend. I love all of them. Yeah. Yeah, let's change the directions a little bit. You held both the backhand and sidearm world distance record. So you've had some big accomplishments when it comes to the the two distance.
And I know on the disc golf answer, man, that's one of the biggest questions we used to always get it was how do I throw farther? So in your eyes, what do most people get wrong when it comes to throwing far? So throwing far is just. It's technique and it's practice with with an overtone of like, you know, your physical, you know, abilities, you know, taller physics is on your side.
I suppose that there's this fast twitch versus slow twitch muscle thing that probably, you know, it probably is friend, if that's valid. I, I've never looked into it enough to know if that's just a trendy, you know, observation of athletes. But if it's true, there's probably so there's some, there's some genetics involved, but but that's the overarching like kind of ceiling. It's technique and it's, it's mechanics. If you don't throw with proper mechanics, you don't throw far.
So here's how I'll describe it. It, it's real simple. A 7 year old cowgirl can, can break the speed of sound with a piece of leather. If she has the proper technique, she can crack a bullwhip. A 25 year old male bodybuilder can't break the speed of sound if he doesn't crack the whip properly. Now it there's obviously way more to it than that, but that's just it's a pretty accurate
analogy. Proper technique, physics becomes on your side, but the whip in the right position, move the whip the right direction, physics takes over the whip, accelerates, snap, there you go. You just broke the speed of sound. Improper technique. You just have a piece of leather flying through the air, not doing that. And as far as like when people say, well, what is the one thing, I'm not dismissing the answer. It's not one thing.
There are a number of things and everyone of them, if you don't do those, will remove a measurable amount of your distance. So no, it's not an exact formula. But let's say that you, let's say they be based on your height and your physical attributes and your age and how long you've been playing. Let's say that had you been throwing perfectly the whole time, you're, you potentially had a, you could have been a 500 foot thrower had everything done been perfect.
By the way, I look at it as well, if you don't do this thing over here, if you don't plant your foot before you start pulling the disk, if you start pulling before you plant, you're losing, you know, that's 45 feet of distance you're losing over here. And then if you're keeping your head forward, which prevents you from rotating the sores and reaching back, that's another 52 feet over here. And now you're putting the nose up on the disk.
That's another 27 feet. And so next thing you know, you're, you're, you're now throwing 330 feet. Well, if you fix the nose up on the disc, well, that's going to get you back that 30 feet. Wonderful that you were losing, but you're still losing the distance from these other things. Every single piece of the puzzle adds or subtracts A measurable amount of distance. When you get everything perfectly, then you're kind of at your ceiling as far as what your physical body can do.
And that's where there are differences in bodies. This is what it really comes down to with with Dick on the Pro Tour. Like everybody on the pro tour rips the desk. I'm going to talk about the guys just because I'm more familiar with the guy Division. I mean, mechanics, there's, there's not a whole lot of flaws
on the pro tour mechanically. So when somebody throws 500 feet and someone else can throw 650, that's the last part where it's like, well, yeah, but they're 6 foot 2 and you're 5 foot 10. And and yeah, they happen to have those fast twitch muscles and you don't, but everybody is. The mechanics are so good. They're kind of throwing at their ceiling. Like nobody on the pro tour that can only throw 500 feet today will be throwing 650 in three years because their technique
improves. You're not on the pro tours. Your technique isn't really damn close to. I mean I think the word perfect, but perfect ish. Yeah, I got you. So what's what's what's, I guess one thing that for the listeners, if that's, that's something to want to aspire to is getting on the pro tour. It sounds like getting out there and just practicing and getting down the techniques and not realize it, like you said.
And something I know we've talked about before on the show is that it's not just one or two things. It's a it's a multitude of things working all together in a positive way to absolutely get that distance. But I guess to somewhat, what would you say to someone that thinks that they've reached their ceiling? Is it? Is that something that prevent them from being a pro if they can't quite get that big distance? So no. So it's not about having a big distance as a pro throwing
farther. So okay, there's a term that use called tour distance and tour distance means can you throw a 450 foot heiser, which is basically a controllable shot. Can I throw 450 feet and landed safe? If you have to throw an Anheuser flex shot to get 450 feet, you don't have the controlled play door because. When you lose accuracy, when you do a flight shot, when you do a Heiser or heiser flip, you're more accurate. You got to be able to get to that 450 range and every player
on on tour does. That's the the weakest players on the tour can still pop a 450 foot Heiser. Anything above that is bonus, but the the frequency by which these the situations where you will use that come up gets smaller and smaller the the farther you throw the opportunity to throw that that far. Like real, we'll use him as the obvious example throws a mile. But how often during a run out is that an advantage?
Like, well, every every time there's a basket shorter than than shorter than everybody can reach, then there's almost no advantage because they can all reach it when you have longer holes. But you have OB in play, which means, you know, AB is not throwing full power anyways. Like so that all that power is not really going to showcase itself. So how many holes does he
actually get to use that power? Well, there's a couple like wide open holes and there's maybe a couple shots turning around where he gets to throw the big heiser window, which is a bigger gap than the smaller window the weaker players have to throw. OK. So yeah, so he's his distance gives him a couple strokes around. But so does, you know, Andrew Marwee circle one putty, and so does Rs B's. You know, the circle two shots he throws in seems seemingly every couple, you know, couple
times around. So it's it's every part of the game gives you it's a skill set that that you know, gives you the edge over the other players so that you can use. But distance is just one of those skill sets. You still got to do all the other parts of the game. Gotcha. Yeah, you got to have a complete game for sure. Okay, so tell us. Okay, so as I did my research, obviously I found that you had your Stokely disks, so you're coming out with some disks. So tell us a little bit about that.
What's this new adventure all about? Yeah, so. So I manufactured my own disks. Now it's called disks. It's not the typical pro line because they're not third party manufacturer.
They're not just two or disc, you know, like they're actually like I manufacturer me and my partner, we like every single disc that every single Stokely disc you get is coming off of a machine that we owned, being from a mold that we own, that we created, shipped from a warehouse that we now I always want to be clear with people like we have some help within the industry in disk design and the manufacturing process. Like that is an art that takes years to get good at.
Like if you start manufacturing on your own machines yourself, you're going to go through a several year learning curve where you're going to burn through some bad. Yeah. Getting so we, we didn't do that. We jumped ahead and we got some experts to help with those areas. But we we own the company, we own the machines, it's our facility. I mean everything's on. We have 5 discount for Stokely discs. The most recent one is the Peregrine, which is the, it's my
first high speed driver. I'm super excited. If we were to comparables, call it Halo Destroyer because everything is comparable to something else, but it's an overstable high speed driver, doesn't share one bit how windy it is. It holds its lock. It's really good and you know. I've got, I believe three more molds coming out this year. We'll have 8 by the end of the year for Stokely discs. We also bought for the some of the people have been around a minute.
We bought Qing disc. Qing is a company that been around for years. They they shut down in 2014. And the important part of this story is they didn't shut down because they weren't doing well. I mean, if people didn't like the discs, we weren't going to buy the company loved the disc, but the person that owned the company had personal reasons for shutting it down. He shut down a successful
company. At the time, all 8 discs were being manufactured in China. And the very first thing we did when we bought the company is we bought, we brought the mulch back from China. So they're actually all in American they're being manufactured on car machines as well. So we juju which was the most possibilities out. I'll be just been for stores releasing the the the precision, but all eight of the Ching bolts
will also be released as well. But we're just pacing them, you know, probably 2A year to, you know, build hype around each model. So yeah, we're we're actually like this like we're like this real production facility. We're not just making one or two disks hoping to get it off the ground. We're actually full speed ahead to, to, to become a major manufacturer. And and we're, we're, we're going to be, it's exciting. Yeah, it's me. That's awesome, I love it.
So tell us if someone wanting to try out your disks, whether it's just Stokely disks or the Ching, what? Why? Why would you tell someone as far as what your mission is, what your values are? Why? Why do they want to try your discs? Okay, so there's that. That's a fantastic question. And that's the, you know, that's the key to any type of marketing like are are we, do we fly farther? Are we, do we feel better? Are we less expensive? You know, like whatever the
selling pitch is? There's a couple things. The first is, is the reason why I started this company because I, I make plenty of money teaching disc golf. I could have a hell of a life just traveling around the world the rest of my life teaching disc golf and I'd be quite comfortable and it would be really, really easy relative to like, you know, the grinding out the, you know, the 50 hour a
week job. I mean, I could go to, I could run one or two 7 hours a week the rest of my life and, and be comfortable. The reason why I started the company, my motivation was I have three things that I want to do desperately with my life. And these things cost a lot of money. I want to promote adaptive disc golf, special needs disc golf. I want to promote disc golf for people that the traditional game of disc golf doesn't fit for just because of physical or developmental disabilities.
I want to open up the game to that. I am very passionate about bringing disc golf or and participating, I should say, helping to bring disc golf to countries where they don't have disc golf. And this is primarily developing countries. We've been spending time in Indonesia, Cambodia. We just got back from Vietnam. We'll be going to going to South America this winter. I want to bring disc golf to people that the game doesn't reach now just for logistic
reasons and financial reasons. So basically the the theme here is that disc golf, disc golf in in the US and Europe and in the West is doing just fine without me. If if I disappeared tomorrow, disc golf, you know, I hopefully will mourn for about a minute and a half. And then if they're going to keep doing great, I can't make I can't affect change in in this the way I would like to where where I can affect change and grow disc golf or are these areas that disc golf isn't reaching well?
And that's developed countries. People adapted disc golf. So that's where my my heart is. And the third thing, and this is very important to me, is that there are more disc sports out there other than disc golf and ultimate. It's. It's so important. To me that these sports don't go away.
We're talking about guts and double discord and and freestyle and you know, I just everything that isn't disc golf and ultimate these sports are hanging on by a thread in some cases and it just needs an infusion of money. It needs an infusion of money from someone who doesn't get about money, if that makes sense. The the same reason I give all my prize money away. I've been doing it for like the last four years.
I I name an organization to donate my prize money to is the same reason I'll be giving away the money from this company. I'm not going to die with money under my mattress. I'm going to die, Brooke. Everything I make is going to go to. And so these disc sports where there's no way to see a profit in them probably for many years, if ever they need someone who can throw money at it that doesn't care about where it's my return coming from.
I had one more part of that the tradition of Frisbee on the bottom of the first Frisbee, it said invent games. That's the that's the core of our of, of flying disc sports. And there haven't been a whole lot of games invented. So I also want to like get behind whatever and encourage people to invent new disc sports that I can now get behind. All these things take millions of dollars and that's that's
where the money goes. And so if I mean like, look, we're making great discs, they fly great. They're good plastic. If the discs weren't good, it didn't have good plastic, no one's going to buy them because it feels good, right? Like, right, no one's going to, no one's going to shoot worse on the course just because they're all supporting this thing. They believe that. I mean, in nature, these discs are unbelievably good. They fly great. The plastic is super high
quality. So they're great discs when other people make great disc golf. So then the choice is which great disc do you choose? And with my company, when you are throwing Stokely discs and team discs, you are fundamentally promoting disc golf in a way that no one else is doing it. And you're you're part of this. We can we call it the flock where we're we're going to formalize the name. So all my discs are bird names. So we're calling it the flock.
But when you're part of the flock, you are growing the sport of disc golf to the people. Disc golf doesn't reach. You want to grow the sport. This is one way to. Do it. Throw a disc. It's just as good as any other company's discs, but you are growing the sport when you do it. Wow, I like that. That's that's the biggest thing. I don't, I mean, I'm telling you I will die. Absolutely. I don't think you're better in
person than my girlfriend. Been together 5 1/2 years, not traveling with me. When I met her, I said I go, I go good news and bad news. I go good news, I make a lot of money. Your bad news, I give just about all of it away. Like everything I don't need. Well, I, I told her when I met her, I said, look, we'll be, we'll stay at hotels every night for the last five years and go, it's going to be a roof over your head. There's going to be food on the plate.
You are not going to see a savings account because everything I've made above what it takes for us to get through this week is, is out the door for some cool thing that I want to do. And by the way, if you look interview, that's just how I buy my drugs. Like that's this is what this is excited. I'm going to go do this cool thing over here.
And then I then and then I get the dopamine hit from like, you know, whatever, whatever fun thing I think, you know, I don't know, weird when it comes to money, man, I don't like having money. I like making money. Another marketing question I want to ask you is the undercover shopping. I've seen videos where you've got the clever little mustache on, kind of go in the store and do some undercover shopping. That's not you. Is that you? And it looks like me, but no, I
don't have a mic back. So what was that? How did you come up with that idea and what's been the the outcome of those adventures? So as I'm traveling, because I'm, I'm in the Stokely Discs, you know, you know, Sprinter van with the Stokely Discs logo on it, people think I'd sleep in it. I don't. We stay in hotels, merchandise and I'm going to pro shop, but we're already in about 300 pro shops in our first year, which is just mind blowing to me. That's awesome.
Every, everyone's down with this. Everybody's like, this is really cool. Cool. You know, we want to be a part of this, right? So everybody, all the pro shops have been great. So I've been visiting pro shops, but as I'm making my way back around now, I go to a town where there might be like, like, let's say there's a couple pro shops in this small town and one of them already carries my discs
and one of them doesn't. Well, it would kind of be crappy of me to like just skipped a story that carries my disks to go make a sales call. What about you guys? You know, they were early adopters. So that then I was thinking, well, how I need to do something to make, you know, I got to visit these places too. So if I'm in town, I'm like, I want to visit, but the I just, I
want to make it fun. So one of the big things I added to the list of like probably one of the ways I'm going to be making less money, but I don't care because it's fun. I am adamant about promoting. I call it shop Local 1st. I believe that the single most important key to the growth of disc golf in our sport is all of the local entrepreneurs that are boots on the ground doing grassroots promoting of disc golf in their town. Like all the big manufacturers
out there. The BIG4 manufacturers have have all like they've put millions of dollars into the sport. These I'm friends with all the big manufacturers. I respect all of them. They've done so much to grow the sport and donated so much money and what what they've done has been they've done a lot of positive, but nobody is doing as much as as the guy that just opens the pro shop because he loves dog court woman, right, guy or girl, whatever.
But they open the pro shop and now they're running leagues and now they're promoting the game and putting courses in the ground. I'm a big fan of, you know, free market capitalism. I'm a big, you know, go USA. Like I love our system because the way that our system works and I want to polarize my audience by being yay USA. But the way our system works is that if you own a pro shop, if you get another course put in the ground, you're going to make
more money. And that is what that drives people more than anything to, to grow the sport. And, and when I run leagues, I I'll be able to sell more discs that grows the sport. I the pro shops to vendors, the pop up course runners to tournament directors to clubs, the private courts owners. These are the folks that are growing the sport more than me or any manufacturers. So that was longer than I intended, but that's these are the people we need these people more than anything.
I am adamant that we need our community to support these people by buying their discs from these stores. They need to buy their merchandise from these stores. When you buy directly from a manufacturer, you're not doing what's in your best interest because you are not keeping the person in business that you need to run leagues in your town and get new courses. So shop local first doesn't mean don't buy from the manufacturers doesn't mean don't buy online.
What it means is give your local retailer first dibs at your business. You know have a a orbit selling Ricky Wysocki selling. Call. Them if they don't have it, get it. If they don't, if they can't get it, go online and buy it. Go to the manufacturer, like get the disc you want, but start give that, give that person first dibs at your business. It's in our sports best interest.
So when I'm traveling, I'm going into these stores and all I'm doing is I'm shooting content to promote their store. I'm in town. Let's put eyes on your shop. Let's promote. So I said I'm going to lose money by doing this. I make about 6 times as much money when you buy a disc from me direct as you do when you buy it from a pro shop that I sold the disc to that it is 6 to 1
difference. And I'm still telling people if they sell Stokely discs in your town, buy it from the local store because I need that local store to grow the disc golf, to grow the sport I love in your town. Now if that store very Stokely discs so they don't have the discs you want, go to stokelydisc.com and buy it from me. I still want your business. I still want your money. I still want to sell you golf disc, like give that local vendor the first dibs.
So boots on the ground. I'm out actively promoting stores and doing everything I can to help help these folks. Now we need these people with every time a pro shop goes, at best our sport takes a hit. Our entire sport. Yeah, that's very true. OK, I got one last question for you, but before I ask, I'm going to put a little seat in your head. I'm going to try something different with these interviews. I want you to be able to ask me
questions at the end. So anything you've wondered about or or just curious about, you can ask me. But before we get to that, I want to ask you one last question. So you've mentioned a lot of the challenges that you've gone through, some of your past that your that and how disc golf has been a very positive force in your life to help you to be where you're at right now. What would you tell that one listener right now that is in
that similar situation? They've got a lot lot going on, a lot of challenges in life, but disc golf seems to be that saving grace. But they're still kind of trying to struggle. What's a piece of advice you would give that person? Yeah, so that the first piece of advice would be, don't expect one piece of advice to be the fix. There's the thing you have to do, and people are notorious, and I've done it. You've probably done it. People don't do what's in their
own best interests. People make decisions every day that is contradicts what would be in their own best interest. You need to make decisions that are in your best interest. And the biggest thing you can do above all else is seek out the people that have what you want and figure out how to. And usually the way you figure out how to get what they have is by asking them and learning from there. So. So when I wrote my biography, you know your biography. It's the story.
Of my life, I get to put 11 sentence as the introduction on the Page 1 you know one quote you know they're supposed to sum up what I believe in in 55 years of life. And what I wrote was go where the love is not where it's supposed to be most important thing. And the reason why I wrote this was because when I was a little kid, I came from a crappy family. I had a great mom and then a bunch of not great people in my
in my world. I sought out family where the love was and I went where the love was not where it was supposed to be. It's supposed to be from your family. Well, turned out it was a bunch of hippie disc golfers at a park. Doesn't matter. The love was there. So I went and got it from where it was. But when I say seek out the people that have what you want. If you see someone that's happy, talk to them about being happy.
If you see some. If you're if you have substance abuse problems, talk to someone that has stopped using drugs. If your business is failing, talk to someone who's successful at business. Go talk. Go figure out from the people who have what, what, what you want. Go how many people actually like, oh, I've had three failed marriages and I'm crappy relationships. And if you ask them, well, how many people with good relationships have you grabbed and said, please tell me what you do?
Nobody does this. Go see, I want my marriage to be better. OK, well, do you know anybody with a good marriage? Go talk to them. And and that's not one piece of advice, but that's an overarching strategy. So I have a page called, well, two things. I have a Facebook page called Stokely's Longest Drive. It's my non disc golf stuff where I talked about all sorts of things related to career happiness and all that. And then I have a Discord server called What's Scott stokely.net/discord?
Twice a week I go do a live a live open discussion on mental health, physical health, you know, same thing. I'm in really good physical shape, right. Well, then you didn't. You probably ought to listen to me if you want to get into shape because I have something that I can teach you that make me an expert. But if I'm in better shape than you, then I know something that
you don't. All of my channels, my longest drive page mainly, and my Discord server yet are all about me trying to share these things that I've learned in life that you can learn from me because you didn't want to learn from 30 year old me. 30 year old me didn't know what the hell he was doing. But 55 year old me is really good at life. But there's other 55 year old me's out there in your town and your disc Golf Club that are good at life. You got to seek these folks out.
One final thing, not to just, you know, go on a rant, but if somebody has something you want, which means they're good at relationships, career, happiness, sobriety, life, health, if they're good at those things, I will almost guarantee you that that they are also then the same type of person who would like nothing more than to help someone who asks them.
Like nobody with a good marriage isn't going to be like happy to talk to you about how to make a marriage good because the qualities that make a good marriage are probably the qualities that make you want to help someone who's looking for help. Seek those people out. That's what I did when I was 19 years old. What does Dan Roddick do to be happy? Why is TD why? How come TD Ugaldi just had a bad tournament? Why I went to TD Ugaldi said,
why aren't you mad right now? I went to and I just kind of observed. I didn't talk to him. Why? I'm very close with Dan Roddick, but I also observed how he led. He's the, he's the greatest promoter in the history of disc sports and I and, and you know, he probably is our sports greatest leader. And although let me rephrase that, he is our sport's greatest leader. And I just did, I got close to him. I was, I became a DDC partner for eight years and I just watched.
How does he lead? Why do people follow him? Because someday I'm going to lead and people are going to follow me. I don't have nothing offered today, but but someday I'm going to. And but where do I learn that? Learned it from him. Yeah, yeah, always be learning. I love that. And, and yeah, I think one of the biggest I got here from that, from what you just said, is that don't be afraid to reach out for help, you know, reach out for help.
People are willing to help and they want to help help you out. So all right, so did you think of any questions for me? I'd love to answer any questions real quick as we wrap this up. Yeah, yeah, let me let me go on a 10 second rant about that, about reaching out for help too, which is yeah, you may not. You should watch this video. You probably noticed I'm a man and men and women face different struggles. I can't even speak to the struggles.
Women face because I hate. 1 I can speak to men, but I I can tell you for a fact that they're not the same because the the not only are we different, they're the support systems, the empathy, the everything that's out there is different from men, that it's for women. And so without meaning to, it turns out that a lot of men are following me because I'm speaking to them, not in a generic political correct.
All of us are AB and C. No, I'm speaking to them as a man about struggles men go through and reaching out for help is kind of contradicts what men are in fact to a point that men have they struggle with things like when I'm in a relationship with a woman, the more I need help or show vulnerability or weakness, all of a sudden my partner feels less safe, less secure, and now I'm treated differently. I better keep my damn mouth shut.
But men misinterpret that and they think, Oh, well, now I can't talk to anybody because if I've seen weak and vulnerable, my partners and less attracted to me or, and then so men are like, Oh my God, I got to keep my mouth shut. Well, no, you don't need to keep your mouth shut. You just need to not be vulnerable in front of a person who's counting on you to be strong. You can go over here and be vulnerable where that person ain't. They don't get to see you being
vulnerable. Go crying your best friend's shoulders, best friend, you crying your best friend's shoulders. That's that's where you need to be vulnerable. Not in those areas where as a man, you have to be strong, but there's places. And so go seek out as a man, go seek out help, but go seek out places where you're safe to seek out help. And it ain't everywhere. There's select places we need to go. They exist. And closest place they exist is with our closest male friend,
not our group. I'm so glad you brought that up because it's so powerful. Yeah, I have. I actually have a group of men that that I trust and rely on. We have a regular Tuesday morning meeting where we go have breakfast. I haven't able to go as often just with the new job, but I'm working it out to where I can see them more often. But it is just that it's a place we all, we all have the similar faith, we have similar beliefs.
So when we talk, we know we're talking from the same plate place, but we don't talk go there the judge each other. We go there just to be guys, be goofy, be dumb, but we also go there to be vulnerable. And it's amazing. It's so helpful to talk to other guys that have very similar struggles and challenges because from the outside you're like, well, dude, he's a dude. He's making it. He's successful. He's over here.
He's got a great marriage. He's and you find out that, yeah, they've got a great marriage, but it's not without struggles. Yeah, he's got a great business that's growing, but it's not without his challenges and days that he's like just barely getting by, but he's doing what he needs to do. So it's great to be able to talk to other men that are going through that similar struggles and challenges that you are and know that they're just doing what they what they can do to make it so.
Yeah, I think that's great advice. So, and, and this is, again, this is just, it's, it's there's a lot of, I don't want to go off in the total tangent here, but there's, there's a lot of mixed messages men get now that they never got in the past. And we are told to be vulnerable in front of our partners. We want vulnerability, we want this, we want that. Well, we don't get the reactions
we want. Well, the reason we don't get the reactions we want is that in most cases that isn't necessarily what the person wanted. They wanted our partners want us to be strong. They want us to be met. But in 2025, you're not supposed to say that. That's toxic. And it's like, well, no, guess what? Guess what? No, it No, it's not. My partner will tell you flat out, if I said to her right now, how would you feel? If I was just crying in front of you, she's like, I would feel unsafe.
You need to be a man. Yeah. And she just verbalizes what I think a lot of people say. But you're not supposed to in 2025 S, you know, we got to be man. It's OK to be a man that's wrong with being a man should be proud to be a man. But you need to figure out where to be vulnerable and it's going to be with man. It just is in my opinion. Don't get mad at me in the comments or get mad at me. I don't care. I'm I'm speaking what I believe. No, I want, yeah, I want speak what you believe.
Speak what? What you, what you feel. So I think that's fantastic. People are going to hate, but I'm sure there'll be a plenty of other people that are glad. So what questions do you have for me? Oh, God, is there a God? What's the meaning of life? No, no, no, I OK, I got a question for you. So you're back with DD, right? All right. So I would love to hear and I'm going to go ahead and give you the platform. This is this is my marketing part of my brand. I'll give you a platform to
pitch this. The thing about all the house at this companies, I'm friends with all these. I'm friends with Roscoe, I'm friends with Anders and Thomas and Svante. And do you see like these are all my friends and I love every one of them and I respect them and they're great people who ran great companies. And the perception was that when house at this came in that now the decisions are being made that weren't being made by disc
golf people. And there has been ill feelings in the community towards the House of disc companies because of this. And of course, people that don't know the ends just think, oh, well, now there's this company's this and that company's that. They're not behind the scenes realizing that the the original owners are pulling their hair outgoing. No, we don't like these decisions either, but we're not in charge anymore, right? And but that you know, to the outside, all it is is dynamic.
Did this cast the plast change the plastic dad or whatever like that's all they see. So my question is. What are you going to do? To to let people know that these companies are still being run by the same they're not sorry. They're they're still most of the core good people that made you a fan of your companies before are still almost all of them are actively involved in the companies. How do you how do you turn public public opinion about this because you got an uphill battle.
Oh. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And that's a great question, a question that I've asked myself that the from the moment I had a conversation with David Berglund of Latitude 64, when he talked about when he called me and asked me about my interest in coming back, It was a question that I still asked myself last night after some conversations I had with some of our team players. I can't go back and change the past, you know, I don't have that power. I wasn't involved when I left.
Things were like still on the huge climb from the pandemic as far as sales and as far as interest in disc golf. They were climbing high when I left dynamic Disc, and I didn't leave because I didn't like Dynamic disc. There were some personal reasons going on in my life. I felt like I needed to be closer back with my family. So I was an outsider watching things happen and I my heart broke when I saw some of the news of people getting laid off.
I got mad when I saw certain decisions being made about pricing and things like that. I was like, what are they doing with this? What is going on over there? But I was on the outside, so I can't really speak to a lot of the decisions that were made, whether they were great decisions, bad decisions, why those decisions were made. Of course, I have my own personal opinion about it, but I can't change that. I can't change any of that.
All I can do is move forward with what I have before me. And right now what I have before me is it's less people here for sure, but the people that are here have that same passion for the sport, the same passion for the brands and they want nothing but to see the sport succeed and of course the company succeed because it's not that we want to make money a lot.
That's the thing that makes me mad is these, yes, the people that invested in us, they invested because they want to see growth and they want to make money. But I've met some of them and they just want to see success, right? And yes, some of their decisions are based on the numbers that we have out there and decisions
that have to be made. They're not fun decisions, but their decision, it's like, I mean, let's just be honest, some of the decisions that were made is so that we are still here. If some of those decisions weren't being made, we may not even have what we have now. So I'm glad they made those decisions. Am I glad that some people had to lose their job or. Get laid off or decided to quit.
No, not at all. But these we're here and what we have now is, like I said, a group of people that have a passion for the sport. And this just as you say, you're making money to do, to see, to live out your goals and to live out your mission and your vision. Same thing here. Our goal is to grow the sport, yes, to be a successful business so that we can do something we believe in, which is see this sport we love grow and succeed.
And so now my, my job is to not allow the negative stories to be what people hear about. And that's all that people concentrate on or focus on. My job is now to continue to tell the story of what we're doing behind the scenes to help the sport grow and to help be passionate people and enrich people's lives here through the sport of disc golf. I'm simply just going to show what's going on and what's been
missed all these years. It's a tough thing because now I've got to kind of turn the tide. And man, that tide is the everyday.
I learned this tide. The turn is heavier and heavier than I thought it was, but it's still there and I still believe in it. And that's what drives me is to make sure we we continue to tell the stories that's happening here, whether it's our tournament directors, the great tournament sponsorship program we have with our plastic, we have, we've always had great plastic. The plastic has for some of the companies, nothing has changed.
There's we could get into the weeds of it, but you know, people keep saying, well, the plastic did this, plastic did this. Yeah, maybe a little bit changed because of manufacturing, but they're not all the same plastic. And like you said, people don't know the story behind the story. And so that's my job is to tell those stories to make sure that people don't believe the the misinformation that's put out there.
I know it's kind of a rant on my part of, of talking about what's going on, but that's that's what I believe is that I've just got to tell the story because no one else is telling it and other people were just going to believe what to put out there. Yeah, you got hey, like you got. You have an uphill battle and it's going to be smart. If I can I give you my my old man advice to you. Please do. So disc golf is the way disc golf works.
It's very tribal, it's very community and people are very loyal to their tribe and, and every, you know, the, the, the people dynamic that through dynamic with people through cast applies today. They that was part of their tribe and people felt betrayed. Yeah. They they, they felt betrayed. And there's, there is, there's that's the most difficult thing to overcome. So I'm going to give, I'm going to take a quick aside here. I'm a pro wrestling guy, OK? I do pro wrestling.
I'm a, I'm a heel manager. I do indie shows. I'm going to be doing another show here that I love. I love pro wrestling. And when you're trying to make a bad guy in pro wrestling, like a new guy comes to your territory or new guy if you, and I'm not talking about the modern version where everybody hangs out after the show signing autographs.
I'm in the old days when there's actually bad guys that people hate it. If you wanted to make a bad guy, the best way to do it, if you really wanted to get people angry, was you wouldn't bring him in as a bad guy. You would bring him in as someone people liked, got behind, and then you betrayed them and let your people down because that is a different visceral feeling the audience would feel because they're like, I supported you. I bought your shirt, I took my kids to meet you.
You signed my autograph and pretended you were nice, you know, at the Expo, whatever. And I think people felt betrayed. They felt betrayed when these things were happening and winning them back is a lot harder than if if they simply just didn't like you and you tried to convince them to give them a chance. And the best way to do this is, is I'm telling you, you guys need to own it. Like you need to own every single thing that was wrong. And you need to own it with
yeah, that was a bad decision. We wouldn't do that again. We know why it was wrong. I totally understand why that pissed you off. That honesty is the first. And by the way, you're not going to win everybody back. But I think the honesty will and and the accountability I think will will win some of them back because they they don't want to not. Like you, they they. Just want to feel like they can trust you again.
Right, no, no, you hit it on the nail right there is that that's part of the battles earning back people's trust and the only I mean, I could say it over and over again, but I'm just going to have to show it and it's that's that's what I'm. And you also have to take time, and you cannot tell them when to trust you again. That's on their schedule. That's like when you apologize to somebody, you you cannot
decide when you're forgiven. You can apologize and then the forgiveness happens on their time, if ever. And that's just the way it is. But and now, of course, you also have there's still there's a new audience. There's people that don't know anything about anything that you can win over from scratch. I think they're I don't say it's easy. I'm trying to build an audience. It's not easy, but it's easier than the people, any people back. But yeah, I would go honest and
accountability. And then that's your. First time I think that's and I think that's why why people like you said with the whole wrestling and I laughed at that because I remember those they're like, wait, he was a he was a good guy. Now he's a bad guy. Like it was, it was like it threw you off. You want to piss someone off? Sell someone a $30 shirt, Sell. Sell someone a $30 shirt with your logo on it. And then all of a sudden betray them next week and now you've
just wasted 30 bucks. That's like, you know what? That OK, I'll give you one more example. Go buy a jersey from somebody on your sports team. And then then the next, next week, they demand a trade and you're like, wait, I just spent $100 on a jersey like. That is right. Because because you, you know, started off here and came down. So yeah.
Yeah. And that's why I think, I think that's why Dynamic Disc got picked on the most when all this went down is because we were the brand that was like, hey, come join our journey, Come help, come grow the sport with us, you know, and we took you on our journey and we showed you a lot of behind the scenes. And all of a sudden they felt
betrayed. But, you know, now me being back is, is, is literally an acknowledgement from a lot of the people in leadership that they needed to get back to what we did before, which was being transparent, being honest, owning what we do, you know, making decisions, taking risks, and then owning the consequences, whether they're good or bad. And just having people join us for the journey because we're all, you know, you know, we're all in this. We always had that.
We're all in this together to help grow the sport we love, to share the sport we love with everybody. So. We'll tell. We'll then tell the. Story. I love it. Tell the story of the journey back then that that that that that's a story people might TuneIn for. Hey, I appreciate man. I appreciate everything. I appreciate everybody's excited to have you back. Thank you for having me on seems how I'm a competitor and honestly between you and me, you're all going to be working for me someday.
But but I will remember those people who were nice to me along the way. So when you come to work for me, you probably won't start sweeping the warehouse floor. I'll probably start you with like a desk job. You're still going to start down here, but still down. Below, Right, right, right, right. Oh, no, everybody starts off. Everybody starts off low. But if they're nice to me, they skip these sweeping the, the, the warehouse floor and they started menial desk.
So yeah, I, I won't forget you when I'm, when I'm, when I'm the biggest. Thank you so much for that, Scott. I appreciate that. I'll I'll keep you to it. I'll hold you to that. So OK. You got it. No, thank you so much. I appreciate the conversation, Scott, and the transparency and the honesty. And I love the mission and everything you've got going on. So I appreciate that and thanks for being on the show. You're very welcome man. Say hi to everybody. Thanks. Bye. Bye.