When you love disc golf, it's amazing to see kids having tons of fun playing it. So after I worked with my town's government where I live in Germany to get funding and permissions to install the first public, free disc golf course within an hour's drive (read some of that story with tips for doing it yourself here), one of my main goals was to help young people learn how to enjoy it.
For the last two years, I'd been doing this through fairly short programs that were just one day and lasted a few hours tops. But earlier this year, the local sports club asked me to offer something longer-term, and I suddenly needed activities to fill a once-a-week course that would go for 10 weeks.
Luckily, I had a lifeline that I hoped would save me from hours of devising disc golf games and drills: DISCKids. This was a project funded by the E.U. organization Erasmus+, and they were holding a workshop in Latvia that promised to give European residents interested in youth disc golf training the tools to create successful programs.
The event ended up offering everything I was looking for (besides, alas, good weather). What's more, the games and drills I loved in Latvia and have been successfully using since my trip (notably with kids and adults) are freely available to everyone on DISCKids' website.
After the workshop, I talked with DISCKids' organizers to learn more about how the project got started and the philosophy behind it. You can learn all that, too, if you're interested, or jump straight to where to find the games by clicking or tapping a topic below.
Post Navigation
- How DISCKids went from concept to EU-funded reality
- Why a Finn with a Ph.D. in biomechanics created the disc golf games, drills, and more at DISCKids' core (and how he knows they work)
- Where to find the free disc golf game and drill collection from DISCKids online
The Story of the EU-Funded DISCKids Project
The person who instigated the creation of DISCKids, Garret Hubing, was in a situation similar to my own. He lives in the central German city of Göttingen where there's an enthusiastic group of disc golfers based around a single local course. A number of adults in the group, including Hubing, had kids interested in disc golf, so he started a weekly youth training.
While he'd figured this weekly meet-up would be fairly easy to organize, he soon realized that without coaching resources, putting together engaging sessions week in and week out would be unsustainably time-consuming.
"We were a diverse group, including a six-year-old girl who only wanted to play fun games and a 12-year-old boy who would have preferred to do technique analysis and approach drills, so I had my work cut out for me," Hubing said. "I knew a couple of good games from Germany’s coach certification program, and the kids all liked playing them, but I really felt like I needed more ideas for what to do with such a diverse group of kids."
Hubing happened to work for an organization called blinc e.G. that specializes in assisting projects with getting EU funding and managing approved projects. So he was familiar with the EU's Erasmus+ program, which is aimed at supporting initiatives related to education, training, youth, and sport. Given Erasmus+'s focuses and Hubing's predicament, his next step isn't hard to guess.
"After working there for several months on other projects, my colleagues began preparing a set of the Erasmus+ project applications for the yearly deadline in March," said Hubing, referring to March 2023. "I decided to write my own project application on a topic that interested me: disc golf for kids."
International partners were a must for the application to meet Erasmus+ goals of fostering international exchange among EU countries, so Hubing reached out to Germany's national governing body of disc sports, the Deutsche Frisbeesport-Verband (DFV), for help finding them. The DFV's leader Jörg Benner sent emails to other national disc golf organizations, and leadership from Latvia and Finland responded quickly and positively.
Hubing then organized calls with all interested parties where they agreed on goals and methods that Hubing used to create the roughly 60-page proposal necessarry for a shot at Erasmus+ funding.
The proposed project – to be called DISCKids – would make it easier for disc golf trainers throughout the EU to create youth programs with three focuses:
- Inclusion: Highlighting disc golf's high level of accessibility and consciously maximizing that potential (i.e., making it easy for kids who can't or find it difficult to succeed at other sports find success with disc golf).
- Health-Enhancing Physical Activity (HEPA): Making disc golf training sessions more than just standing and throwing – adding running, jumping, endurance, balance, and more through relevant, engaging activities.
- Fun: Using games and drills that keep all participants active, smiling, and wanting more, not standing around waiting for their turn to throw or feeling lousy about leaving a knockout-style game early.
EU funding would enable six inclusion-focused events spread throughout the three countries, two in-person clinics for disc golf coaches, and translation of a treasure trove of disc golf games and drills created by Jouni Kallio (more on him and those activities in the next section) from Finnish to the more internationally-understood English.
When the March deadline came, Hubing sent off the application, knowing he and everyone else involved would be in the dark about its status for most of the year.
"You submit the application in early March, and you don't hear back from the evaluators until October when you either get a 'yes' or a 'no,'" Hubing explained. "There is no revision process, and you don't know anything about your chances of selection until, suddenly, the project is either rejected or fully funded."
To his delight, Hubing received a "Yes" when October rolled around. DISCKids was funded to the tune of €120,000 (around $135,000 USD) through June 2025. Planning for the events and clinics started and work began on translating the drill and game descriptions and developing a website to host them. Calls between the project leaders in all three countries helped things stay coordinated and on-track.
Jumping to the present, DISCKids has nearly run the course of its funding and, according to its organizers, largely accomplished what it set out to do. Perhaps the biggest surprise to Hubing was how effective the clinics – one in Finland and the one I attended in Latvia, both led largely by Kallio – proved to be. Though attendance was relatively small, the new toolkit attendees left with was huge.
"It was never the idea to host 100 coaches from all over the EU," said Hubing. "That would have been amazing, but DISCKids isn't a huge project and its ambition was mainly to create online resources. The in-person clinics were a bonus, which turned out to be very successful for the people who attended. I think we had around 20 coaches in Finland and 25 in Latvia. We had participants from Czechia, France, Slovakia, Latvia, and Germany."
Hubing said he had two main takeways from his DISCKids experience. One is that there are lots of people who want to run effective youth disc golf trainings, and if you give them the right resources and connections to others with similar interests, great things can happen. The other was that the success of DISCKids with an EU-backed review committee suggests that leaders of disc golf communities should more actively seek backing from programs like Erasmus+.
"Disc golf is very compatible with some core European values: inclusion, social cohesion, healthy outdoor activity, accessibility for everyone, etc.," Hubing said. "This makes it ideally suited for publicly funded projects and initiatives in the EU. If a few more disc golfers could manage to write a few more applications at the local, regional, national, or international level leveraging the inclusive and egalitarian aspects of the sport, we could end up with more courses, more players, and more resources for growing our sport."
The Ph.D. Behind the Disc Golf Games & Drills
Jouni Kallio lives in Jyväskylä, Finland, where he works for the city developing sports services. He's been a board member of the Suomen Frisbeegolfliitto (SFL, translates to Finnish Disc Golf Association) focusing on coaching systems and junior activities for three and a half years.
His interest in advancing techniques for teaching youth disc golf started before he joined the board, though. It was sparked when he accompanied his youngest son to a disc golf training run by Jyväskylä's disc golf club.
"I went to disc golf practice just to help because my youngest kid was attending," Kallio said. "I got the instruction, 'Go take these 15 kids and go putt.' I don't think that's a practice. I had to figure out a way to gamify, to make it interesting."
Kallio had been involved in sports both mainstream and niche as well as other physical pursuits like breakdancing and tap dancing his entire life. He also holds a Ph.D. in biomechanics (the study of the mechanics behind living organisms' movements) and is married to a P.E. teacher. In other words, he knows a lot about how effective, motivating, and fun sports practice should look, and he wasn't seeing it at disc golf training sessions.
The status quo for kids practices in Jyväskylä at the time seemed to be standing in lines with occasional throws and knockout games where the players whose skills needed the most work got the least practice.
He figured there had to be a better way that someone had already developed, but when he tried to find resources online, he couldn't locate anything that quite hit the mark. So he decided to make them himself, adapting many games and drills used in other sports, which he knew thanks to both personal experience and academic research.
The activities he created emphasized including everyone in the action at almost all times, making disc golf practices true exercise (e.g., games that require running quickly and train stength), and – the big one – fun. Though not every idea was a hit, Kallio eventually had a collection of over 30 activities (many with lots of potential for variation and reinterpretation, which he encourages) that both met his goals and the juniors loved. As Kallio's methods became the standard in Jyväskylä, attendance at youth disc golf trainings steadily ticked up.
Today, a whopping 40% of the membership in Jyväskylä's club is juniors.
While starting out on the road to those impressive results, Kallio began circulating the games that worked among other trainers in Jyväskylä's club.
"Then I thought, 'Why only share it with other coaches in our club?', so I made a website and put it out to the SFL and to the other clubs," Kallio said.
After the SFL saw the site, they worked with Kallio to move its content to their official website and make his methods the standard of junior training in Finland.
So when the prospect of promoting youth disc golf throughout Europe with the help of Erasmus+ funding landed in the SFL's inbox in the form of DISCKids, they knew they had something special to contribute. Indeed, translating instructions for how to run Kallio's many drills and games as well as an instructor course for youth trainers – along with developing a website to host them – ended up being the core undertaking of the DISCKids project.
And is Kallio fine with all his work going up online for free for anyone to take and use? He said it's exactly why he did it in the first place.
"The reason I started devoting so much time to this is I felt like I was useful," Kallio said. "I felt like there was a clear need for something that I could maybe offer."
Disc Golf Games & Drills: A Free Resource
To see how to run over 30 disc golf games and drills developed by Kallio and made available in English for free thanks to Erasmus+ funding, check out the DISCKids website.
Three of Kallio's favorites are these:
There's also more about the DISCKids project, tips for planning youth trainings, and an online instructor course you can go through at your own pace.
