Juan Pablo Lopez is the owner of the Parador Palmas de Lucia, a beachside hotel in southeast Puerto Rico. Last year, he noticed an unfamiliar vehicle repeatedly visiting a long-abandoned coconut grove bordering his property.
"I'm thinking, 'What's with this bus?'," Lopez said, "I'm here and this bus keeps showing up, and then one day I see someone throw a disc through the palm grove. I'm like, 'What just happened here?!' It was three guys, they weren't from here, and each one was throwing a disc through the grove where you had grass that was like three feet [one meter] high."
After a few more days of this, Lopez's curiosity overwhelmed him. He approached the visitors and asked what they were doing.
Such scenarios — Puerto Ricans seeing disc golf and getting curious enough to ask about it — are exactly what Patrick O'Neill and Brittany Hertle hoped for when they founded the disc golf promotion organization Traveling Chains PR. The couple had moved from Florida to Puerto Rico over the course of late 2022 and early 2023 after falling in love with the island nation during a vacation. Now they live in a bus, travel the island, and promote disc golf with mobile baskets and a hoard of loaner discs donated by clubs and disc golf companies every chance they get.
The sights that had intrigued Lopez were special, though. He'd witnessed the organization working on a huge milestone in its mission to grow disc golf access in Puerto Rico. Discover what it was in the story below.
Why Promote Disc Golf in Puerto Rico?
O'Neill admits that a bit of self-interest sparked his and Hertle's desire to increase disc golf's popularity in Puerto Rico. After the couple decided to move there, O'Neill researched disc golf options and discovered it had just one course: the hard-to-reach Almendros Disc Golf Course on a small island off the nation's east coast.
"The first thing I did was say, 'Alright, where are we gonna go in Puerto Rico to play disc golf? Holy crap, there's nowhere," O'Neill recalled. "So that was kind of the first moment when I thought, 'We're gonna have to fix this.'"
But the couple's desire to see their favorite sport grow in Puerto Rico wasn't simply self-serving. O'Neill had discovered and become obsessed with disc golf on a pitch-and-putt that was the first course in the Florida Keys, so he'd witnessed firsthand how quickly the game could create community and help families connect. He and Hertle wanted Puerto Ricans to have the opportunity to experience those benefits.
"There are a lot of people on this island that deserve access to this awesome game, and it's kind of sad that it's taken this long to bring access to Americans," O'Neill said. "That's kind of weird to say, but we have 3.5 million Americans who live here in Puerto Rico."
Puerto Rico is officially an unincorporated territory of the United States. Those born there are full U.S. citizens though they can't vote in national elections if they reside in Puerto Rico.
As O'Neill and Hertle prepared to move in 2022, they reached out to people who might share and support their vision. They eventually found a core group that consisted of two staff members from Dynamic Discs, international media director Fabian Oloarte and Dynamic Discs and Westside Discs team manager Gabe Diaz-Serrano, as well as disc golfers Agner Muñoz and Kyle Blackmore.
Through the help of this team, O'Neill and Hertle secured a promise that Dynamic Discs would donate 18 top-of-the-line baskets if Traveling Chains could discover a good location for a course.
The search was on.
Spreading the Sport & Finding Yabucoa
Hertle went to Puerto Rico a few months before O'Neill, found the bus they planned to turn into a home and transporter of their mobile disc golf showcase, and laid other groundwork for the couple's big move. When O'Neill joined her in April 2023, things revved up.
"We basically drove around the island, found any park that we could set up in, and we had five mobile baskets we could set up," O'Neill explained. "We'd get all sorts of questions – 'Is that a mosquito catcher, a horse feeder, a trash can?'"
Though they spoke little Spanish, the couple succeeded in getting curious people to understand how the sport worked, and they'd occasionally draw big crowds. For instance, young children passing by Traveling Chains in a park in the west coast city of Añasco one weekend got interested and quickly drew in their parents and extended family. O'Neill said the group size was constantly 20 or more from then on. The crowd drew the attention of the park director, who eventually invited Traveling Chains to display disc golf at a summer sport camp with over 400 attendees.
Another big success was when a town on the east coast asked Traveling Chains to set up in a baseball stadium, and they had 150 kids play disc golf with them each Wednesday for three weeks.
Despite clear interest in the sport from many people they met, Traveling Chains wasn't having much luck giving away a permanent course. They'd met with various mayors and other city and regional leaders, but they either didn't have the right space or weren't quite ready to let this strange new sport use it.
Then Traveling Chains arrived in Yabucoa. There, city official Rey Marte heard them out, learned that they were offering a free new attraction for his town, and helped quickly greenlight their project to construct Puerto Rico's first mainland disc golf course.
The place where Traveling Chains could build the Yabucoa course was a park next to a beach called Playa Lucia, and it hadn't been maintained in decades. It was overgrown and filled with trash. But O'Neill and Hertle saw a diamond in the rough.
"You have the beach on one side, mountains on the other, and hundred-foot [31-meter] palms all the way around you," O'Neill said. "The views are just world-class."
Building Mainland Puerto Rico's First Disc Golf Course
Playa Lucia is the setting from our opening scene where a hotel owner – who, it's worth mentioning, was formerly an internationally competitive kayaker – was approaching a group he'd seen throwing discs in an overgrown park for the last few days.
"I went to talk with them, and Patrick explained everything to me," Lopez recalled. "I said, 'Alright, I've been done with kayaking for about two years – I'll start playing disc golf with you guys.'"
Lopez pledged his full support for the course-building effort. He was excited to support a project that would inject vitality into a potentially beautiful area that had been abandoned his entire life. Lopez's support also meant a lot to Traveling Chains, who are well aware that their intentions could seem suspect to many Puerto Ricans.
"The reception isn't always the best," O'Neill admitted. "There are lot of people that are coming in with money trying to change the island in different ways. So one of our biggest challenges is getting people to see that we want to work within nature. We want to bring back their beautiful parks that haven't been used in 10 or 15 years due to a big population decrease or closed after Hurricane Maria hit and funds weren't allocated."
Lopez is one of Yabucoa's biggest employers, and when he threw his weight behind the project, tasks that had seemed monumental suddenly got easier. For instance, O'Neill had been trying to tame 30 years of overgrowth with a single weedeater, but Lopez convinced local government to step up.
"I talked to the mayor and sports director as a private business and put a lot of pressure on them to come cut the grass," Lopez said. "And they cut everything."
Lopez also got local government to promise regular maintenance of the area, fix up run-down gazebos, and put up signs saying what the course is and not to litter.
Now that Traveling Chains had found a place for the course, Dynamic Discs followed through on their promise to deliver baskets. They arrived on September 1, 2023, and Traveling Chains and local volunteers helped install them over the next two and a half weeks to create Playa Lucia Disc Golf Course. The mayor even came out to help get the final target in the ground.
"The first basket was goosebumps, and when we put the last basket in with the mayor, that was kind of a moment of relief," O'Neill said. "It was like, 'We have a course to play now.'"
So far, Traveling Chains has organized multiple events at the course, including the Playa Lucia Open, which was attended by many from outside of Puerto Rico, including multi-time U.S. Disc Golf Champion Will Schusterick.
But Lopez said the course isn't just an attraction for tourists interested in a tropical disc golf destination. It's completely changed the atmosphere of a formerly forsaken park.
"For many years, I was walking near this area, and I didn't feel safe," Lopez said. "It was abandoned, and crazy things could happen there – until disc golf showed up."
The park is also being used for recreation for the first time in Lopez's memory. He said he's personally run disc golf clinics there with children and seniors.
Dynamic Discs, too, is happy with what they've seen and heard out of Yabucoa, and said O'Neill and Hertle are "two individuals who exemplify the qualities we seek in partners."
"The success story of the Yabucoa course serves as a beacon of collaboration and community engagement," Oloarte, Dynamic Discs' international media manager, told us in a written comment. "It's a testament to what can be achieved when passionate individuals come together to promote the sport. We are eager to replicate this success in many other cities across Latin America."
Driving Ahead
Though they're ecstatic about getting Playa Lucia in the ground, it's just one big step of many Traveling Chains hopes to facilitate for Puerto Rican disc golf. They've already helped create an official non-profit organization for that purpose, Federación Puertoriqueña de Disc Golf Corporación, which will help assure local governments and donors that investments in the sport aren't enriching private entities.
Other than that, it's full steam ahead with the disc golf van life, with plenty of return trips to Yabucoa to get in rounds on mainland Puerto Rico's only disc golf course – for now.
