Before building a house in Bad Sobernheim, Germany, about 60 miles/97 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt (I'm from the U.S. and my wife is German), I'd previously lived in disc golf-crazed Charlotte, North Carolina, and also spent five months in one of Europe's hot spots for the sport, Oslo, Norway. In both places, I'd had multiple great courses within 20 minutes.
While we'd chosen our region because it offered many things we loved and wanted, there was no convenient disc golf course. I dreamed of establishing one in my town and building the sort of welcoming community around it that had kept me in love with the sport for over 15 years.
About a year after moving, I finally felt motivated enough to send an email asking local officials if they'd be interested in disc golf. A year and a half after that email, DiscGolfPark Bad Sobernheim was installed and ready to offer everyone in my community free, healthy recreation.
Being a disc golfer pining for a course nearby didn't make me unique. That feeling has kickstarted tons of projects, including one of the world's best free disc golf courses, Faylor Lake in Pennsylvania, as well as New York City's first disc golf course. But something singular I did have going for me was the huge amount of wisdom I've absorbed as a longtime author and editor for this blog.
While researching the world's best disc golf courses, the creation of disc golf tourist destinations, building courses in environmentally-sensitive areas, and more, I've talked to some of the most successful, ambitious, and accomplished course designers and builders from around the world about their philosophies and strategies. As an editor, I've spent plenty of quality time with information on related topics gathered by other contributors. Without that knowledge base and an acute awareness of the wide variety of statistics UDisc publicly offers, I'm sure my quest to build a course in a little German town where disc golf was virtually unknown would have failed or, at the very least, taken much, much longer.
Luckily, the ideas and data that were such an immense help to me are all available on this blog or through other UDisc publications and tools, which means hopeful course founders have free access to them. Below, you can learn some important lessons about getting support to build your area's first course as well as where to find many of the resources that helped my project find success.
Be Ready to Commit a Lot of Free Time
With emailing, presentations, meetings, grant-writing, running events with temporary baskets to drum up interest, and eventually helping with installation, the course turned into my part-time job.
Committing this sort of time isn't easy to do, so make sure it's possible with your current schedule and responsibilities before you start the process. If you have a significant other, you'll want them aware of and on board with what you're trying to do and the demands on your time it's likely to have.
Always Communicate Professionally, Clearly, & Succinctly
Your communications with local leaders will tell them a lot about whether you're the type of person they'd like to work with. When you write emails, make calls, or attend public meetings, make sure your thoughts are clear and well-composed. Almost no one reads a manifesto in their inbox or pays attention to rambling remarks.
You might also want to think about your social media personality as some officials may research someone before beginning a public project with them.
Learn What Local Decision-Makers Want
If there's one thing you take away from this post, it should be this: To get support for disc golf in a place where it's not well-known, you have to win people over who have never played it and may never want to.
One thing this means is you'll need to explain disc golf in very simple terms a lot, so develop a quick explanation. More importantly, it means you should never expect any decision-maker to be as excited about disc golf as you are. You have to give them reasons to spend time and public funds beyond "disc golf is awesome."
I've heard this from various course designers, but Jeff MacKeigan and Cara Hovius of ChainLink Disc Golf said it most directly. During an interview for "Goodbye Corporate Canada. Hello Disc Golf!" that details their story of voluntarily leaving high-level jobs to promote disc golf around Toronto, McKeigan told me that early on he "just assumed people would respond to, 'This is a really good thing; we should do this.' But people were busy or there were no responses."
Quickly, the pair figured out two rules any area's disc golf pioneer should keep in mind:
- Learn what goals local decision-makers have.
- Show how disc golf can help achieve them.
In my case, my region already promotes quirky outdoor opportunities for tourists such as traveling down unused railroad tracks on contraptions pedaled like bikes and a barefoot path. In my first email, I leaned into the tourism opportunities of disc golf, and it was enough to land a meeting with the region's tourism head and the mayor of my city's municipality.
In that meeting and many subsequent ones with other officials, I also highlighted these advantages of disc golf:
- Healthy and low-cost activity for all ages
- Supports community-building
- More environmentally-friendly than most other outdoor sports facilities
It's likely that one or more of these benefits will be exactly what interests your local decision-makers. Do your best to find out which, and emphasize it in your initial and follow-up contacts.
Good resources to learn more about these pluses of disc golf are...
- How Far You Walk During Disc Golf Rounds & Why It's So Healthy
- Nature Trail Disc Golf Courses: Healthy, Educational, And Just Plain Fun
- Disc Golf Provides U.S. Veterans Support & Community
- New Zealand Rest Home Invigorated By Disc Golf
- Disc Golf In Schools: K-12 Teachers Bring The Sport To Class
- Illinois Course Shows Disc Golf & Conservation Can Go Hand-In-Hand
- Disc Golf + Toronto & Region Conservation Authority: A Slow Burn Love Story
It's also extremely valuable to have stats showing disc golf's growth generally or in regions like or adjacent to your own. You can find those in UDisc's Disc Golf Growth Report and Disc Golf Health Index. If you're looking for specific stats not located there, send an email to [email protected] explaining what you're hoping for, and we'll do our best to help you grow the sport.
Find the Right Place for a Disc Golf Course
Along with building a strong case about why disc golf works for your community, you'll want to have a place in mind where it works. These are some of the most important considerations to have in mind when you scope out locations:
- Safety
This has to be your top priority for any course. No matter how wonderful an area would be for disc golf, if it's almost always filled with people (picnickers, kids on a playground, joggers, etc.), it's not a good place to propose a course. Most importantly, we don't want anyone to be hurt by a disc. Additionally, if someone ever is, it could mean all the work you put in to get a course could go up in smoke. - Visibility
Though it can be hard to make this jive with safety precautions, putting a course where a decent number of people will see the baskets and players enjoying themselves is hugely important for growing the sport. Seeing a course and getting curious is the second-most-likely way for someone to discover disc golf (#1 is playing with a friend or family member who knows about it already). - Maintenance
Typically, the best place for an area's first course is a park that's already regularly maintained by public entities. Remember, you're just one person in a place without a disc golf community. It's unlikely you'll have the time or energy to single-handedly maintain a quality disc golf course, and it's harder to sell a project that will create a lot more work for public maintenance teams. - Topography
Throwing to baskets in an open field isn't much fun for anyone, but neither is losing discs or getting scratched up while retreiving them. With those two things in mind, look for an area with enough obstacles to keep things interesting but few or no areas where discs can be easily lost – e.g., deep water or inpenetrable brush. An area's first course should be enjoyable for beginners, and if they lose discs or climb through a bunch of thorns their first time out, it's less likely they'll come back. - Parking
Unless you're in a city and have lots of suitable areas accessible by public transport, players will need somewhere to park. Make sure the location you choose for your proposed course can handle the traffic you hope it draws.
Going into discussions with a specific place in mind and thoughtful reasoning for why you've chosen it will increase the chances that local leaders take your proposal seriously and consider it in more concrete terms. Even if the spot you choose doesn't work for unforeseen reasons, it helps them understand what an ideal disc golf location looks like and could help them think of alternatives.
Pitch a Course for Beginners, Not Yourself
If you're interested enough in disc golf to lobby for a course, you're likely an experienced player. But to successfully introduce disc golf to a community where it's unknown, you should be envisioning a course that's fun for beginners – not one that will leave them swearing off the sport a few holes in. As much as it may pain you to hear it, that means thinking of holes at distances around and below 200 feet/61 meters.
These distances will also make the course more suitable for children and seniors – a point you can make in the pitches you'll hope to give to community leaders.
This is advice I'd heard from various designers before presenting my idea for a course to local officials, but the strongest argument I've come across is in a recent Release Point post on disc golf in Iceland – the country with the most disc golf courses per capita. The country's first disc golf advocate, Birgir Ómarsson, had tried to get the scene started with advanced-level courses and seen little success for around a decade.
Things changed after a course went up in a small park in Reykjavík, Iceland's capital and main population center:
We had a park in the middle of Reykjavík, and it was the first course lots of people could see," Ómarsson said. "It was the first easy one we put up. We actually thought it was too easy, but everything started to roll on after that course. Making an easy course – almost like a putting course – is the way to go.
All that said, planning multiple tees that offer a beginner and more advanced experience on each hole can be an effective way to accomodate beginners while also entertaining more experienced disc golfers who might visit (and locals who eventually graduate from "beginner" status). That's how DiscGolfPark Bad Sobernheim is set up. Keep in mind, though, that multiple tees mean more upfront investment in signage and tee materials.
It's also highly advisable that you work with a professional course designers who has experience creating safe, fun courses.
To see more evidence for the power of short courses, check out these posts:
- Why Does Disc Golf Need 'Pitch & Putts,' Anyway?
- Pocket Disc Golf Courses: Short, Sweet, & Welcoming
- Iceland Disc Golf: Cold Place, Hot Scene
Look for Opportunities & Allies
A big reason my push for a course found such relatively quick success is that I happened to be pushing for it at a time when local government was making a serious effort to overhaul the park where the course now stands. That effort is still ongoing, but disc golf became the first major step in it because I found out about and attended an open meeting where citizens were invited to share and collaborate on ideas with community leaders. There I met a city official who got behind the project and helped guide the plan through the official channels of approval.
Look at local papers and/or local government websites to see if similar opportunities exist near you.
Additionally, try to find organizations in your area that would be likely to welcome disc golf and lobby for their support. In my case, there's a sports club adjacent to the park where the course now stands. By forming a good relationship with them, I found an ally that was well-known and well-connected in the community. Teaming up with them has leant disc golf events legitimacy in locals' eyes and opened up opportunities to work with school and business groups.
More Steps to Come
Hopefully the advice and resources above help get your own dreams of building a local disc golf community off to a good start. In a second post coming soon, we'll cover steps that come once your project is approved – considerations before and during installation, building local interest, making your course visible to non-local visitors, and more.
