Welcome back to another edition of The Fried Egg Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, managing editor at The Fried Egg, and today we dive into the world of disc golf architecture. You heard that right, disc golf, and it turns out to be a really interesting subject. But first, this episode is brought to you by the Frida Egg Pro Shop. You can find it at proshop dot thefridagg dot com. We've got all sorts of things from tumblrs to photography prints to cold weather gear which might be relevant to
a lot of people's situations right now. But today I'd like to point out our Fried Egg white liampolo. It's made by b Dratty, so you know it's high quality. You know, it's made of b Draddy's famous Peruvian Pima cotton, so soft, so breathable, and it has the Frida Egg logo tastefully stitched into the pocket. It's just a great standard,
everyday polo fit for a bunch of different situations. So get your own at pro shop dot The Friday great way to support the pod, all right, So today's guest is John Howke, who is widely regarded, even universally regarded as the leading designer in disc golf. He's behind courses like Harmony Benz in Columbia, Missouri, see the Ranch in Talco, Texas, and Hillcrest Farms on Prince Edward Island. These courses are considered to be among the very best in the disc
golf world. And just last year there was a tournament at Hillcrest Farms and I'll put a link to a video of it in the show notes. I want you to see it. It's a pretty stunning place. So until recently, I had never really thought about disc golf architecture. And here I have to apologize to any listeners who are avid disc golfers. I have a great deal of respect for the sport, but I just don't know a whole lot about it, So parts of this episode might seem a little basic to you. But trying my best, I
was aware of disc golf. I just hadn't really put it together that the sport had to have something like its own tradition of design, just like golf does. And it turns out that the world of disc golf architecture has a lot in common with the world of golf architecture. Disc golfers love to talk about courses and rank courses they travel to see new places. There's a healthy debate
about what makes for good design and poor design. Disc golf even has its own issues with distance and technology and the obsoleting of older courses and things like that, But there are also some big differences. There's a lot less money in disc golf, for better or for worse. From my perspective, maybe mostly for better. The courses are really natural, and abundance of trees is a good thing for disc golf because trees are the main hazard in
the sport. The properties are pretty small because a disc doesn't travel as far as a golf ball. There doesn't need to be this intensively cultivated short crop turf because disc golfers are just standing on the ground instead of playing off of it. Maintenance is really manageable. Just about everybody walks. Golf style carts aren't available or even practical most of the time. In the green fees I mean, a lot of disc golf courses are free to play,
especially the ones on city land. Some do charge, but the rates are really low. One of John Howke's newer courses, seal a Ranch, charges twenty dollars for unlimited play, all day. And keep in mind that see the Ranch is regarded as one of the best disc golf courses in the world, certainly one of the most ambitiously designed. So I find all of this incredibly appealing. I feel like golf could
actually learn a good bit from disc golf. And at the same time, disc golf is at this interesting place in its history where it's growing, getting more popular, attracting more money, and that money, on the one hand, will allow architects like John Howck to do more and to realize their visions more fully. On the other hand, part of what's attractive about disc golf and part of what it does better than traditional golf is usibility and affordability. So disc golf is going to have to figure out
how much it really wants to change as it gets bigger. Anyway, that's why I wanted to talk to John Howck, and without further ado, here's my conversation with him. I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset when I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset.
And when I find my ball in a fried egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida egg, Frida egg egg Frida egg Bride egg Lie. I'm about ready to run off the golf course.
So why don't we just start by talking a little bit about your background in disc golf, the sport, and then how you got into disc golf course design.
Sure. Well, I loved frisbee since I was a little kid. I have a very clear recollection of being maybe in third grade and playing catch with a friend and not not even wanting to catch it sometimes, I just I just loved the way it would hover and land. I was just fascinated by it. So I by the time I got to seventh eighth grade, this was now mid seventies, ultimate was starting to get big, and you know, so we learned about it and we would play, you know,
two on two or three on three. I remember teaching myself how to throw a sidearm, which took hours, throwing the throwing my master frisbee into the garage and picking it up and throwing it again. Of course, now I can you know, I can teach a kid how to do it in two minutes. And by the time I got out of college, I was very sure curious about it. You know, in those days, if you played frisbee, you
did everything. So we did disc golf, we did freestyle, distance, maximum time, aloft, all that stuff, and by the time I got out of college, I actually had a chance to kind of make a living doing freestyle demonstrations around the country. So at that point in my career, I was really focused on freestyle. But it became clear that disc golf was about to explode, and so I ran my first disc golf well overall event that included disc
golf in nineteen eighty four. I had to design the course for that event, and that was the beginning at Zilk Park in Austin, Texas. And as far as golf, you know, my dad started pulling me around in a little red wagon when I was five, and he always liked to be the first one on the course, so we were up early and he'd be out there and pull me along until I was old enough to start
playing on my own. I will also never forget the day I think we were on about hold twelve and I was, you know, probably give or take one hundred and fifty, and he and all his friends were around sixty. And that was the day he told me that the highest score doesn't win, So I almost gave up the sport that day, but I hung in there, and you know, my whole thing was was promoting the sport and trying to get more people involved, and to do that we
needed more courses. And so thankfully that's you know, right around the time that people, particularly here in Texas where I was at the time, we're really getting interested in it, and the phone started ringing and we started putting in disc golf courses.
So it sounds like you have a bit of a background in golf as well. When you started designing golf courses, were you drawing on some of your experience with traditional golf.
Absolutely, I mean, you know, the disc golf world is a little divided. Some people think we're brothers or cousins, and some people think, you know, we might as well be disc golf and snowboarding. I certainly don't take that view. I also have a lot of respect for golf. I mean, there's there's a reason why it's one of the most popular sports in the world, and you know, four hundred years of learning how to do things right. Clearly, there are things about disc golf that are very different and
we need to emphasize those. But there's so much about golf that we can learn from and incorporate or you know, use variations of. So it was really important to me to learn as much as I could about golf, you know, learn which principles we could incorporate, which principles maybe we couldn't, which we could use varieties of. And so I've always been a big advocate of learning from golf.
And we'll get into some of those similarities and differences later on. I'm very curious to dig into the details there and talk about design, But just to begin with the basics, do disc golf courses usually have eighteen holes?
Well, that's so funny you asked that because a statistic just came out last week. I would have said easily yes. But apparently where give or take fifty to fifty or sixty forty between eighteen and nine or sometimes other numbers. I mean, we go I think as low as three or four, and we go up to twenty seven. There's a thing in Michigan where there's a lot of twenty four's. I don't know where that came from. But eighteen, you know, for whatever reason, you may know the history of it
better than I do. But eighteen is a sacred number, and if we're not doing eighteen, we're usually doing nine.
Gotcha. Okay, how long are disc golf courses typically? How long are the holes? And what's the mixture of pars and you know, what are we looking at?
Well, the rule of thumb on distances was always about a third. There have been substantial improvements and changes in our technology over the last ten twenty years, so that's not so much the case anymore. I think when you're at the highest level, par threes are almost all going to be you know, to seventy to three seventy. Occasionally they'll be a little shorter. Occasionally they'll they'll be a little higher.
And we're talking feet here.
Yes, I'm sorry feet. Yes, we do everything in the feet excepting where we have to convert from meters and you're a player, so yes, but exactly we typically use feet instead of yards, and so you know, par four for us typically about double that, so you know, five point fifty to seven fifty for the top players. Again, par fives, you know, eight hundred to eleven hundred typically that kind of thing. So, but yeah, discs are flying farther and that's that's been a real issue for us.
I mean, I know you all have an issue with older courses being somewhat obsolete. We have that problem times ten.
Oh well, we'll dig into that later for sure. What do the pins look like in disc golf? They're these baskets or do you call them pins?
Some of us call them pins, we call them baskets. We call them targets. Typically, the center poll is give or take five feet tall, and there's a a basket that's about two foot diameter and about two and a half feet off the ground, and then there's a series of chains above the basket. And if you've ever seen I don't know if they even exist anymore, but they used to make basketball nets out of chain, right, so wider at the top and narrow at the bottom. That's
what that's what our chains kind of look like. And that allows you to throw a shot that's flat and it hits the chains and drops into the basket.
And I have to say, when the disk hits the chains, it makes this very satisfying sound.
That is the sound of life for many disc golfers.
Yeah. So do disc golf courses have teas and greens as golfers would understand them?
Teas? Yes, of course. Our te'es. You know, we run up on the tee and the only golfer who does that is Happy Gilmour, right, but we do that almost all the time. So the tea's are always, if possible, a flat, hard surface. We're experimenting with a lot of different surfaces. You know, a rubber has been experimented with over the last couple of decades. Turf is becoming popular now.
The king is still concrete in my mind. But the idea is you have to give the players a level, predictable surface for players to run up and so a tea pad typically on my championship courses we do six feet wide, twelve or fifteen feet long. They need to be flush with the ground so that people don't have to step up onto it and so they can't you know, fall off it. As far as greens, that is one of the huge, huge, huge differences between our versions of golf.
In your version, I mean, the greens are like a whole different world, right, all of a sudden, you're using a different a very different club. The ball is not leaving the surface. It's about reading and pace, right. That doesn't happen with us. You know, we have discs that we call putters and that we use in short range. But they're just kind of taller and rounder than all the other discs we use, right, they're not that that kind of night and day difference that that traditional golf uses.
And so for you, being on the green and being off the green is a big deal, and for us it's more of a continuum. Right. When we're closer, we're using the putter. As we get further out, we're still going to use the putter, and the shot is similar. But as we go back, there's no point where we go, Okay, I'm off the green. You know, life is different. So in my mind, there are design elements for our green areas.
You know, I still refer to the area around the basket as the green typically, but it's it's not at all like what happens in the in the traditional golf world.
And I should mention that for those who don't know much about disc golf, that disc golfers use a number of different discs for different situations. I'm not sure how many disks disc golfers usually use. Is there is there a limit?
We do not yet have a bag limit, So it's you know, typically when people are starting out. We recommend just three a driver, a mid range and a putter. But you know, once people get serious about it, they can carry thirty or more and may have up to one hundred in their arsenal. You know that they may take out, you know, depending on the course and the weather.
So discs will vary in speed, which is the biggest factor in terms of distance, but also in the carry the glide, whether they like to go right, it all how much they want to go left, which you know we refer to as understable and overstable. And with our discs, even though we're able to curve them either direction, and believe it or not, we have disks that you can throw that will go to the right and then come
back and break to the left or vice versa. When our disks, particularly drivers start to slow down, they always fall one way. We call that paid so a right handed backhand. If it's still in the air and it runs out of gas, it's going to fall to the left every time. And if you throw a side arm or forehand, when it runs for a right hand or when it runs out of gas, it's going to fall to the right every time. So huge, huge, huge variety
in discs and don't forget. You know, we also do skip shots, we do roller shots, we do upside down shots, and those you know, different discs are are good for different of those shots. And every model comes in a variety of plastics for more durability, different grip, and every disc comes in a variety of weights, typically between you know, one hundred and forty five grams and one hundred and seventy five grams. So it's very different from choosing clubs.
And as they age and start to get beat up, they'll fly a little bit so they can get seasoned, you know. Club quote. Club selection for us is a very can be a very complex decision.
This will be I think reassuring to a lot of traditional golfers who get obsessed with their gear. Hearing that there that there's this extent of and variety of equipment and disc golf the disc is both the ball and the club. It seems like, yes, it takes on this sort of extra importance, right, and you can.
Yes, if you're someone who likes to get obsessed, you can get very obsessed about discs.
So just generally speaking, if a traditional golfer were to walk onto a disc golf course, what would look different, what would be kind of unfamiliar about that environment.
Well, the first thing you notice is our courses are are so different from each other, right, I mean, for you, if you've never been to a course before, you know, before you get their pars probably going to be between sixty eight and seventy two. The fairways are going to be, you know, give or take a certain width. The par threes are going to be in this range, and the fours in this range, and the fives in this range.
With us, you have no idea what's coming. There are courses that are more or less wide open with wide fairways. There are courses that are all in the woods where the fairy you know, instead of a three hundred and fifty foot hole with just a couple of trees, it could be a two hundred and fifty foot hole through a five foot fairway that has a thousand trees. So you just never know. And I think we probably have more variety in terrain. Two. You know, we love big hills.
There's more variety in the type of terrain we use. There's more variety in our design. So you'll probably notice almost always there's no big clubhouse. There's almost never a carpbarn, but you know, once you get on the tee, it's it's really the same kind of idea.
What does it take to maintain a disc golf course? I'm sure this depends on the kind of land that it's on, but what are the typical sort of like maintenance standards for a disc golf course?
I would say in general, maintenance on a disc golf course is pretty similar to maintenance in you know, a city park. The height of the grass is not a big deal for us the way it is for you, all right, and that's that's a good thing and a bad thing. So you know, if we're typically at four or five inches, that's that's fine for us. We just don't want it to be so tall that we can't find our disc. So the the you know, species of
grass not a big deal for us. And again you know, not having the greens as you do where you know, height, species, dryness, all of those factors are so important that that really doesn't happen for us. So we we actually have more issues with tree branches growing into the fairway because we're so dependent upon trees or you know, brush growing up. So maintenance is very important to us. And if a course isn't maintained, it becomes much less of an enjoyable experience.
But our maintenance is very different from your maintenance.
You don't necessarily need an agronomist in the way that a golf course need an agronomist. It's just, you know, mow the grass where you need to mow the grass. And I've also noticed that disc golf courses, when they play through these heavily wooded areas, the ground will be natural, right, It'll be dirt, which is the usual kind of natural state of ground that's under a thick canopy of trees. That can be part of a disc golf course as well.
It can. I think we're starting to move out of that era a little bit. Part of what I tried to do in my designs in particular is give people more options. You know, when we're in a wooded environment, which means clearing a wider fairway, leaving some trees in the middle for people to go around. I mean it's almost like having you know, multiple fairways on the same hole.
And what happens when you do that is if you get to the point where you're letting more sunlight in, it's going to be easier for you to have grass in there, which which is a really nice benefit. As a matter of fact, I'm doing one course now in Pennsylvania, you know, where after they cleared the most of the wooded holes, they went in and put seed down. And I came back and I mean it was incredible, you know, for disc golfers to have, you know, grassy fairways in
the woods. But we did that in New Orleans too, at the park day from Me course where they seated everything and it almost looks like a golf fairway with some of the trees left. So, you know, the difference in maintenance makes disc golf courses a lot less expensive to build and maintain, even though you know, we're starting to raise the bar there, but it makes it, you know, less expensive to play, less expensive to install. And our thing is, you know, we need to it's more about
discovering the holes out in nature than building them. Now we're doing more building, and I don't want to say that golf architects don't discover, but it's a big difference in emphasis there. We kind of you know, carve out of the woods. We don't clearcut, you know, I mean, for us a fifty foot fairway in the woods is gigantic.
So we're talking a little bit about terrain here, you know, as a golfer, and I'm sure there are many golfers who would disagree with me about this. This is a subject of debate. But to me, the ideal piece of land for a golf course would be attractive links land. Right, you have sandy rolling terrain, not many trees, if any, firm turf that the ball can roll along, interesting contours that have been shaped by the sea, sandy base to the soil that you know, you can just kord of
dig out and you have bunkers. That to me is really the ideal land for a golf course. It's where golf began, It's where many of the best golf courses are. If you were to say what the ideal piece of terrain for a disc golf course would be, what would come to mind?
That is a great question. You know, our whole thing in design is to capitalize on the natural assets. You're giving me the opportunity to say, with the natural assets are going to be ahead of time, you know. The important thing is is we want to create an experience for the player that emphasizes decision making, recovery options, you know, fairness and wits and fairness and rewards for execution. So the three things that we always say we look for
are mature treaties, interesting terrain, and water features. And we're typically happy if we can get two of those, and we're really happy if we can get three of those. And the four things that we're always looking to create and these you know, I kind of codified these back in the nineties and you'll recognize them from the Gulf World variety, balance, character, and strategy. So we would want interesting terrain. What does that mean. It's going to be hilly.
It's going to have a good number of trees because that's what we use for obstacles, and we want the design to be complex and rich, So the trees are really important. Water is actually turning out to be a topic for debate. Water features if you use them right, are great, you know, because you know, same thing for us, the esthetics are important. So my ideal property would have
a lot of variety in the terrain. It would it would be hilly, there would be firms and raised areas that we could use for tees and landing areas and greens, a lot of slopes, and you know, like I said, trees and water are critical. So those are all aspects of it. And when we need to, you know, we plant trees. We're getting at the point where, you know,
we can actually build mounting features. I just created some really neat mounds because we had the opportunity to do one, but the client's budget was devastated by COVID, so we're keeping that available for future projects now.
So it sounds like earth moving is on the horizon. I was going to ask what kinds of alterations to the landscape you might make in creating a disc golf course. Is earth moving typically part of it or not? Do you remove trees? Sounds like you sometimes plant trees.
Historically, earth moving not a big deal for us, but we are we are headed in that direction cautiously. I really have been focusing on landing areas, and I've been working on well defined landing areas, you know, on par fours and par fives. You know, again, we want to give the players good footing on landing areas. So you know, the first time I got to work with an excavator was a revelation for me because I had an area that was rocky and you could hardly walk on it.
And the guy went in there and leveled it out and got the rocks out, and I had a beautiful, you know, landing area with good footing for the players and a slope coming down into it and a slope coming off of it. So it had great risk rewards. So we're just heading that way. I've done you know, several courses where we've done a little bit of it. Most designers haven't had the opportunity to do that yet. I've got some projects coming up where we're going to
have more of that opportunity. But I think the first step for us is they're going to be key parts of the fairway, you know, like the landing areas on par fours and five. We did this at Harmony Bins a little bit where you know, we're able to create a flat area on the side of a steep slope so that if you hit that landing area, you're going to get rewarded with good footing and you'll have a run up and if you miss it, you know, you
have to deal with the slope. So we did some of that at the International Disc Golf Center on the on the W. R. Jackson Course, and so we are slowly incrementally heading that way. So since about ten years ago, you know, you'll you'll see sculpted features on courses here and there, but I think as we move forward, we're going to see more of that. So because man, I'm telling you, working with that excavator was was.
Fun intoxicating, right, Yeah, A lot of a lot of golf course shapers say that what does the what did the budget look like in terms of time and money? And where are those budgets headed.
Well, in terms of money, it's never enough. And in terms of time Championship course for me, I'm typically working two to three hundred hours, almost all on site. Some of it obviously is going to be at my desk. But you know, there's there's so much variety, Garrett, you know, I mean, because there's so much variety in the courses.
So when you're when you're into the bigger courses, you know where par is in the mid to high sixties, and particularly if it's in a wooded environment, because a lot of the a lot of the projects that I've been getting the last ten years where it's basically virgin woods and we have to carve everything out of it. So the biggest budget that we've been involved with so
far has been six hundred and fifty thousand. You know, even on the bigger courses, the average, which by the time it's all said and done, is probably closer to two hundred thousand. But I am dreaming and ready for starting to see some seven figure budgets because there's so much that that I can do that I that I haven't been able to do.
You.
I mean, I just I just did a course, started a course last year where I got to implement an idea and sitting on for ten years and just never had the right opportunity.
What I what idea was that it.
Was kind of a split level landing area. One of the hard things for us, and of the one of the real advantages that I think you have in your game is you have such a great correlation between brisk and reward, and you know, if you execute a little little less well than your hoping. Let's say, I mean you're you know, you missed the fairway by a little bit. Maybe you're in the first cut right, so you can recover,
but you have to make a great shot. So often in disc golf, Historically, you make a little mistake and you got nothing. I mean, you can be in the woods and the only thing you can do is pitch back to the fairway ten feet and then move up. So that has been a real mission for me, is to say, you know, small mistake instead of being severely punished, deserves an opportunity, right, the opportunity to recover. That's been
so lacking in disc golf. So this this split level fairway, if you hit any part of it, you're rewarded with good footing and you know, a decent shot up the fairway. But you hit the higher part, you know you've got an easier shot from there. You hit the lower part, now you've got more uphill to deal with, and that
kind of thing. So I've been real fortunate so far that I've had several clients that said, look, we want the best course that we can have, you know, give in our limitations, and they say, go and do what you need to do. I mean, when the owners of Cela Ranch, after much deliberation, agreed to spend seventeen thousand dollars to put the bridge out to the island so we could incorporate the island, and we have a beautiful par five with an actual island green. I knew that they were all in So.
Was that island there in the in the Yeah, it was. It was just about building the bridge out to it.
Yes, you had to up until that point you had to swim or I don't know. I think at the narrowest point it's only seventy feet out there, but you couldn't walk out there. But they built the bridge and we were able to incorporate that into the design. We're just getting into a situation now where I can create water features. I'm not a pond designer by any means,
but you know I can. I can recommend shapes where were you in peninsulas or greens or cheese or landing areas, and you know where the where the undulations are and the concavities and the ponds and lakes. Huge ability for us to uh enhance the strategy when when we have that kind of control.
So water on disc golf courses. You mentioned earlier that it might be something of a subject of controversy in the disc golf world, but just considering the relationship that players have with their discs, what's when when you have a water hazard on a disc golf course and somebody throws their disc into it, what happens.
Then, Uh, well, they lose a stroke. I probably shouldn't comment on some things that that might happen at that at that point, but let's say, you know, from a design perspective, if it's used properly, if people have the opp opportunity to play around it and play safe, that is key. Some courses at this point maybe don't always offer that. But if you add to the the risk, you know, and you use the water features so that it's beneficial to play close to it, but you don't
want to get in it, that's a huge deal. And I'll just tell you real quick. I don't know if you've seen this, but there are a lot of courses, you know, where they don't have the water, they don't have the natural terrain, and the designers, particularly for tournaments, they'll just put down rope and pretend that that's a pond. And you know, obviously that can enhance the strategy, but it's not the same, right. I mean, aesthetics are important
to us just as they are to you. And for someone to be on the wrong side of the rope and say, you know, I'm high and dry and you're telling me I have to take a stroke. Psychologically, it's it's very different. So you know, I'm not a fan. I would much prefer water. And look, we're we're at a stage in our development where we're trying different things and what works and what doesn't. And if somebody says, look, I don't have water, what am I supposed to do.
I'm not looking to pick a fight. I'm just saying it's preferable to have real water. Then just kind of pretending. So it's it's not for me, And you know, to me, I may have to spend another ten or twenty hours on that whole to get it to where it plays with sufficient strategy with without having to put rope down. But you know, to me, that's worth it.
If your disc goes in the water, do you go in after it?
Again, I'm under legal advice. You can use your you can use your imagination.
Yeah, okay, So as far as as far as hazards are concerned on a disc golf course, we've talked to water. That's obviously one. It seems to me that trees and disc golf are almost like bunkers in traditional golf in that they are kind of the primary standard hazard that creates strategy on a hole. You know, golf is played on the ground. You have to hit the ball off the ground, so obviously inconsistencies on the ground create a
kind of hazard for traditional golfers. Disc golfers play the sport through the air and trees obstruct their paths through the air. Could you talk about how trees are used on disc golf holes and how they create what you would consider strategy.
Yes, I love that question, And let me be clear, we love trees. We need trees, all right. Sometimes we have no choice but to remove them. But even in the cases where you know it's it's solid woods and we have to do something to create the fairways, my job is to discover, you know, the bigger trees, the nice groupings of trees, and work around those. I don't ever put a design on paper and say, okay, go
cut this shape out of the woods. And you're absolutely right about the playing surface, and when you come down to it, that may be the biggest difference in the biggest challenge for us. Like I said, you know, you have the first cut, and it's clear that people don't want to be in that right, it makes no difference to us. Sand traps so critical to traditional golf, mean nothing to us, right, we would just stand in it
and throw out of it. I've actually been been trying to figure out if there is an analogous thing in disc golf to a fried egg, and I haven't. I haven't been able to figure that out.
But maybe maybe getting stuck in a tree.
Well, getting stuck in a tree, yeah, actually used to be if you were above two meters used to be a stroke penalty. We got rid of that, although some designers can still use it if they want. So if you're if you're stuck in a tree, you bring your lie straight down and you may be behind the tree, which I think is what you were getting at. So we need to we need to ensure a variety of shots and a variety of fairway shapes because we want it to be, you know, a complex and rich experience.
So don't forget we're we're able to go around trees right in ways that you can't, and you know, using the skip shot or the roll shot, sometimes we can go underneath things. So we need to have a variety of fairway width, a variety of shot shapes, and so it's been a challenge and really a mission for me to try to find a way to use whatever we have, which is merrily trees the way golf designers use the
different cuts of grass and sand traps. So I try to get to where if you make a small mistake and you're you know, you're not an ideal position where you have a fair let's say, a sixty to eighty percent opportunity to get to where you want to on the next shot. You've missed the fairway a little bit. I want to make sure you know that you have
the ability to recover. So the primary thing that I do is take that area quote unquote off the fairway and open it up enough to open some alleys for you so that you know, now you've got to hit instead of a ten to twenty foot gap, now you've got to hit a four to five foot gap, and if you can hit that shot, you can still save your birdy or save your par as the case may be. But being able to do that, which is very time consuming, and you know it takes it takes a lot of
work to do it. It's very difficult because you know, if I miss the fairway, by a foot or if I miss it by three feet, I still want, you know, both of those players to have an opportunity to recover. But basically creating secondary and tertiary gaps off the fairway for people to recover. Now, there's there's other ways to do that than just you know, making tight gaps by using the elevation and the angle that the player requires. Sometimes the area you have to throw through is height
limited instead of just left and right. So those are all techniques difficult, but to me, really important techniques so that we give people the opportunity to recover from mistakes, because that's such an important part of the golf experience, I think, right, I mean, that's what shot do you talk about at the end of the day, right when you're with your friends. It's like, oh my god. You know,
I was really in a mind. I didn't know if I could get out of there, and I just hit it perfectly, or I threw it perfectly and I saved my birdie. You know, those are the ones that you talk about and right, those are the ones that keep you coming back in a lot of instances. So being
able to create that for people is really important. And I realized several years ago that if I can get better at what I do, people will enjoy the experience of playing the course and not even be able to say why right, because it has to work and it has to look natural. It can't feel contrived. They just have to say, yeah, you know, I got in trouble, I made some great shots and I can't put my finger on it, but I loved playing that course.
That's so true that the good, good design is often not noticed by the player, who nonetheless is having a lot of fun, even if they don't know how to express why yes exactly.
And of course, the downside of it, which I'm sure all golf course architects are familiar with, is the end result is people go, I could have designed that.
Yeah, that looks Easy's.
What's the big deal? Right? But that's where you want to be. It's like, well, you know, I mean, what does it take. You throw some bunkers out there, and you know, you put some mounds and you undulate the green and what's uh, what's the big deal? But the truth is there are hundreds of things that go into the decision making process, and so if you if you do it right, people can just enjoy it and you know, don't don't even know how much you really did.
Right, So it sounds like what you're talking about with trees and gaps between trees is essentially creating different options with different levels of risk and reward, ye, both off the tee and on recovery. So off the tee, maybe you have a gap that's pretty wide but kind of takes you the long way around or doesn't give you that great of an angle to the pin or the basket, and a narrow gap that kind of takes you straight there and if you hit it, you're great. But if
you don't hit it, then you're screwed. But then on the second shot, if you're off the beaten path of the hole, then you have again another set of gaps between trees, another set of options to choose between and decide what level of risk you're willing to bear. Does that sound? Does that resonate with you?
Yes, you're exactly right. And that's that's another thing that I really focus on. I mean, for me, the concepts of strategy and the goals of design are similar in golf and disc golf, that how we achieve that is going to be very different, right, and one of the most obvious things is you know, you can be standing on a tee and have two or three or four completely different routes that you can take right and anybody goes well, you know, I can make a hole with
four routes, but you have to balance all the options right. So, like you said, this route is easier off the tee. You know, I'm not likely to get in trouble. But even if I hit it well, I'm not going to be in as good a position as if I take the riskier route and I nail it and I'm exactly where I want to be. So to me, the first level is if I can make a hole with a bunch of different options and different players take different routes,
that's a win. But the bigger win is when one individual player, every time they step up to the hole, I'll say, well, I tried it this way last time and it really didn't work, so I'm thinking about going this way, or you know, my left to right shot really isn't working today, so I'm going to do that. And it's so important for me because back in the old days, when I first started playing, there was only
one way to play every hole. I knew before I got out of the shower that morning that I'm whole sixteen. I was going to throw a rock at this particular angle and seventy five percent of full power and it
was going to work or it isn't. So you guys, course management and strategy is such a big part of your game, and I've been trying to bring that into our game, and you know, just so you know, all that becomes so much harder for us because we have such a huge spectrum of skills between beginning players and players who are really good. So, and you tell me if you think I have my numbers wrong. Here, Let's say a young, fairly athletic person who's never played golf before.
You can, you know, give them a lesson and put him on the range for a couple hours, and odds are that first day that person's going to hit a ball two hundred.
Yards something like that. Depends on gender and age, I suppose, but but yeah, I mean, I think it's fair to say generally that if somebody's pretty strong and athletic, even if they don't have great technique, and even if they aren't keeping the ball in the face of the planet, then they can they can hit the ball a pretty long ways, almost almost right away. Yeah, so the.
Right not consistently, yeah, but it's doable. And let's do apples to apples. Let's say a young athletic male who hits two hundred yards and last time I checked, you're you're kind of middle of the pack on the PGA tour if you're averaging two sixty.
Right, it's a little more than that now, But I think you know, the point that you're building towards is that golfers, even though there's a big disparity between the distance of a professional that a male professional hits the ball and a male amateur in his twenties or thirties hit the ball. Even though there's a pretty big difference, that difference in disc golf exactly massive. I mean, it's it's not even if people think it's big and traditional
golf and disc golf. I've seen some of these professionals through the disc Oh my.
God, exactly. So let's say our guy in our example is you know, maybe seventy percent of the way to middle of the pack PGA guys, right, the gods of golf day one, not consistently, but in disc golf, you can start and work your butt off for a month to get to three hundred feet. And I mean, I know people who you know have been playing for years and can't throw three hundred feet and that is half or maybe even a little less than half of what
the what the top pros can throw. So you know, what kind of challenge does that make for the designer knowing that all these different people have to be able to use the course and enjoy it, and par has to make sense for them and all that, so, you know, and part of it comes from the design of the discs. Right as we make discs that can go farther, some people who are beginners may not even be able to take advantage of that technology. So it's kind of the
rich get richer. I don't know if that's true with drivers. Mean, I kind of assume if you give me a driver with a big head, I'm going to be able to hit farther. Is that not the case?
Yeah, But what you're talking about is pretty much exactly the case and traditional golf right now, in the sense that the design of the driver face and the spin model of the golf ball makes it so that players with a lot of clubhead speed can take advantage of those things in a way that a normal person would never imagine. And so it sounds like there's there's Is there a technology debate right now in disc golf? Are people worried about where disc technology is going?
Yes, However, in one sense, we're like the golf world in that the average person that says, Wow, you're gonna let me hit it farther, You're going to give me more spin control, you know, give me, give me a gimmick. And you know, you're not worried about courses being obsolete for them, but because of you know, where are our
design is? I mean, almost everything gets obsoleted as the technology changes and as the players get better, right, they're getting better conditioned, and they're now that they're making more money, they can train more. You know, they don't have to be working a job. You know, you can quit your job and go on tour more or less. So that that all is part of it.
So this we're talking sort of about things that are happening now, things that are changing in disc golf. Last question here, how do you hope disc golf design evolves in the future or where do you think disc golf design is going. Is there going to be a response to the increasing distances that the elite players are throwing the disc? Are there going to be changes related to more courses being built or greater budgets being spent on courses?
What do you think the next you know what ten twenty years look like in your field?
Well, I you know, the sport is growing, so it seems like it's growing so rapidly, and it is, but if you look back, it's been it's been really steady over the last few decades. You know, you mentioned I think maybe before we started that you'd seen disc golf on ESPN two recently. That's a huge step for us to have the finals of the Disc Golf Pro Tour covered on ESPN two an hour for the for the men and an hour for the women, and did well enough that it got replayed again a few weeks later,
and I think maybe even a third time. So there is so much in our future and with more players, bigger purses, you know, no doubt, we always want better courses. And you know, property owners understand that disc golfers are like traditional golfers and that they love their sports so much. They will travel, they will plan vacations around disc golf. They will choose where they take a job based on disc golf, they will choose where they go to school
based on disc golf. And so when those factors become an opportunity to bring income to a community or to a facility, you know, whereas twenty years ago a city would put in a disc golf course and just be
a drain on their budget. But now if I can build a private facility and I'm going to get green spees, I'm going to get lodging and the economic impact that comes with it, that just gives everybody an incentive to keep raising the bar, which I'm excited about because I have a vision for kind of the next level of what happens in course design, and then I have a
vision for for what happens after that. So you know, keeping in mind that you know, designing a disc golf course is a different set of skills from designing a golf course. That you know, we're going to have different needs as you brought up in terms of, you know,
the type of properties. But we're getting better properties, we're getting better budgets, we can we can do more in the design than we've been able to do and all that will allow us to make the experience not only more enjoyable for every buddy, but as you said, to make the tournament courses more challenging and more fair and more rewarding for the top players. So I mean, believe me, I have a vision for all kinds of design features and player experiences that we have not had the opportunity
to create. Yet. We are absolutely headed that way. There's so much that we haven't done, or so much that we've just kind of put our toe in the water and very very bright future. You know, those bigger budgets are going to be there, and it's going to be worth it because you know, whoever puts up the money is going to reap the rewards from the from the players that they get. So tell all your people in the golf world, start to start setting some money aside for disc golf. It's going to be worth it.
Yeah. Well, you know, from a golf perspective, something that is so so tremendously A number of things are tremendously appealing about disc golf.
To me.
A couple of things about the courses that I've noticed one and you talked about this, the courses the designs are about finding things in the landscape, and that's how golf really used to be. More there are designers in traditional golf who do that now. But you know, these courses are so natural and it's just lovely how the good holes use the landscape and use the natural features there.
But then at the same time, you know, the fact that they're natural allows them to be accessible, allows the green fees to be very low, and that's really appealing as well. And so I wonder if you're at all worried about that aspect of disc golf going away as more money and more popularity comes to the sport.
Two things. One, I think the old school, city heart free to play courses are not going away. Those are far into our future, always going to be there, so people don't have to worry about, you know, oh my god, we're building you know, these big disc golf resorts or whatever's coming, and we're going to lose where we came from. Okay, that's that's not going to happen. Number Two, for me, you're absolutely right right. Using the natural features is where we come from. It is a big appeal for the
sport and for our clientele. So I feel like, I need to stay on that path. There's going to be times when you know, this natural feature isn't quite big enough for me to use as a landing area. So maybe, you know, I need to do a little bit to make it a little bigger, maybe augment it. But I don't see us saying, okay, we're going to seat it like a golf course worse, and we don't. We can look beautiful without doing that, and we don't need that.
So somebody said to me, you know, if you if you had an unlimited budget and you could build whatever features you wanted to do and put the you know, big trees wherever you wanted to, I I'm not sure I'd want to do it that way. I mean, it's it's great to have more control, right, but using the natural features also make every course different from from all
the rest. So yes, I want to I want to have that creative control and be able to, you know, make the slopes that I want and the flat areas that I want, and the and the water features that I want. But it's always got to stay in line with where disc golf came from. And I mean, my god, look look at look at the backlash you know the golf has had over the years from using fertilizers and chemicals, and you know we don't need to go there, right and we live in an era where that is even
more frowned upon than it used to be. So the natural aspect of it is very important. I want to be able to keep innovating within that tradition and framework that disc golf has. Y would I love to be able to plant a huge tree somewhere as opposed to planning a fifteen foot tree and waiting for it to grow. Sure, but I think I think you're absolutely right. We would be disappointing our own clientele if we got too far away from just being out there in nature is such
a big part of it. So yes, bring on the big budgets, don't forget to hire a great designer. We'll keep it natural looking and we'll make it fun for everybody and challenging for the top pros. That is all doable. I've seen it. We're going to get there. Mhm.