Here you can learn all about Sibbe Disc Golf in Sipoo, Finland. About a 20 or 30 minute drive east of Finland's capital, Helsinki, Sibbe is best known as one of the host courses for Tyyni, which is Europe's largest disc golf tournament. One of very few Finnish pay-to-play courses when it opened in 2016, it has constantly improved to meet the exacting standards of Finns who have more (mostly free) disc golf options in their country than anywhere other than the United States.
Sibbe Disc Golf is ranked #56 in the most recent World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 released annually by us here at UDisc. The rankings are based on millions of player ratings of over 16,000 disc golf courses worldwide on UDisc Courses, which is the most complete and regularly updated disc golf course directory in existence.
Read the whole post to get a full overview of Sibbe or jump to a section that interests you most in the navigation below.
Post Navigation
- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost to play, & availability
- History of Sibbe Disc Golf
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Sibbe Disc Golf: Basic Info
- When did Sibbe Disc Golf open?
2016 - How many times has Sibbe Disc Golf made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Top 100? - Who designed Sibbe Disc Golf?
Juha Kytö, Mikko Wikman - Is Sibbe Disc Golf free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Sibbe Disc Golf available for public play?
Seasonally – all summer and parts of spring and fall. Exact opening and closing dates are weather-dependent.
History of Sibbe Disc Golf
The meeting that led to the creation of Sibbe Disc Golf wasn't supposed to be a meeting about creating Sibbe Disc Golf.
"It kind of started, I could almost say, accidentally," said Juha Kytö, founder of Natural Born Disc Golfer (NBDG), the organization responsible for Sibbe Disc Golf and its pro shop.
NBDG wanted to host a series of tournaments on temporary courses at various locations not too far from Helsinki, Finland. They'd identified a recreation area east of the city owned by Joensuun Tila Oy with a harbor, swimming and water sports, hotel, campsites, café, and more as a promising location and had set up an appointment to meet with management. Kytö's colleague, Mikko Wikman, went to the meeting hoping for a productive talk and ended up getting much more.
"His pitch was, 'Can we rent some land and organize an event there – bring 18 baskets, play a day of disc golf, and then see what happens,'" Kytö said. "When he came back, there was an idea to build a permanent course."
Joensuun Tila is built on land once operated as an experimental farm by a Finnish Nobel Prize winner in chemistry named Artturi Ilmari Virtanen who earned his prize for agriculture-related innovations. The organization says on its website that it "continues to be developed with the idea of 'what’s new today' in mind—the same idea with which Artturi used to start every work day of his." While listening to Wikman talk about disc golf and how fast it was growing in disc golf-crazy Finland, they were certainly open to the new and were the first to recognize how well a permanent disc golf course could help them achieve their main goal: Attracting visitors with outdoor recreation.
NBDG, on the other hand, initially "saw disc golf and nothing but the disc golf" according to Kytö, and it took some time for them to recognize the massive potential synergy between the sport and Joensuun Tila's other offerings.
Still, NBDG leapt at the offer to build a new track near Helsinki. The parties arrived at a deal to split the initial course construction costs and have NBDG lease the land from Joensuun Tila, maintain the course, and oversee day-to-day disc golf operations. In order to pay the lease, the course needed to create a revenue stream, which meant it would have to be pay-to-play – something sure to ruffle feathers in Finland where nearly all courses were free.
"I think there were only two other courses at the time that were pay-to-play," Kytö said, referring to all courses in the country.
And, at first, critics likely felt vindicated by the early conditions at Sibbe.
"It wasn't good – it was terrible," Kytö said. "Everything was fresh. There was a lot of groundwork, a lot of places where the ground had been turned upside down and instead of grass there was mud and clay."
But NBDG was dedicated to making the course worth the price, and they smoothed out its rough edges soon enough. Grass sprouted, mulch was spread, fairways became more defined, and little flourishes on various holes upped players' aesthetic experience. The course also got constant attention, so problems common at many free courses like high grass, unclear out-of-bounds lines, or damaged infrastructure were non-existent at Sibbe.
In addition to the course's constantly improving conditions, it got a big boost when NBDG started the Tyyni tournament in 2017. Kytö was inspired to create Tyyni after attending an event called the Glass Blown Open in Emporia, Kansas, in 2016 that to this day remains among the largest disc golf competitions ever held with 1,120 participants. He wanted to create a European version of the massive event, and Tyyni was the result.
By 2019, Tyyni was welcoming nearly 1,000 amateurs and professionals to compete on several courses near Helsinki. Sibbe, of course, was among them and hosted final rounds for the top divisions where the most popular players – such as pros Simon Lizotte and Eagle McMahon – competed.
Thousands of disc golfers watched video coverage of Tyyni rounds at Sibbe featuring such elite players, and quite a few of them added the track to their wishlists. You can see some footage from the 2019 Tyyni and what the crowds on the ground looked like for the final round lead card in this video from SM Productions set to start on the lovely hole 4 at Sibbe:
Along with Tyyni benefits, Sibbe got a huge bump when the demand for outdoor recreation exploded during the COVID pandemic. The surge of new players coming into the sport often saw Sibbe through a very different lens than longtime disc golfers.
"When the COVID boom came – after that, the feedback turned completely upside down," Kytö said. "Most of the visitors were like, 'How is this so cheap?' How can I play three or four hours, and it costs only like six or seven euros? What's the catch?'."
The thing is, there is no catch.
"We don't do it for maximum profit," Kytö said. "It is totally to create something unique that people can enjoy. We could do it a lot more efficiently if we raised the prices a lot, but the aim is not to do a premium-super-diamond course where only the elite can play. We still want a lot of people to come play and enjoy the course as much they can while doing it sustainably."
How Hard Is Sibbe Disc Golf?
Sibbe Disc Golf had two layouts in 2024, the Yellow aimed at newer players (though it still has many holes that would be fairly long for junior and first-time disc golfers) and the Blue layout that's a few steps up in difficulty from the Yellow. This is how they stack up:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| Yellow | Mid-Length | Technical | Moderate | 177 | +3 |
| Blue | Very Long | Technical | Very Challenging | 223 | +12 |
*Scoring average and par rating constantly adjust as more people score rounds with UDisc. These numbers reflect stats from the time of publication and may have changed slightly since then.
In 2025, Sibbe will unveil its Black layout. Intended for professional players and skilled, experienced amateurs, the Black layout is the design used for the Tyyni Open and Finnish Nationals. Once it has enough plays after opening later this year, you'll be able to find its ratings for distance, technicality, and overall difficulty on Sibbe Disc Golf's page in the UDisc Courses directory along with hole distances and more for all the course's layouts.
To learn more about what the categories for distance, technicality, overall difficulty, and par rating mean, check out these posts:
What's It Like to Play Sibbe Disc Golf?
Sibbe has multiple layouts for different skillsets, but they all offer great views and abundant exposed rock that's fairly common in the Nordics but interesting and exotic to players from almost everywhere else. They also use the area's elevation changes to create both the fun of seeing discs soar in the empty air over a downward slope and the challenge of using just the right power and nose angles to get them to drop in the perfect spot.
You can expect a mix of park-style holes with scattered trees intentionally left to force specific lines as well as more densely wooded holes with tight fairways – some of them, like you can see in the photo below, extremely tight.
The things that really make Sibbe stand out from the generally high-level courses Finland offers, however, derive from the constant attention it recieves.
"Everything is always in mint condition," Kytö said.
Mowing fairways, keeping out-of-bounds clearly marked, covering muddy areas in mulch – all these efforts that volunteer-led clubs need to find time for or have little control over are taken care of immediately at Sibbe. The NBDG team listens to player feedback carefully, too, and when they hear about persisting issues, they do their best to address them – sometimes with creative solutions.
One example Kytö gave of this was when a particular spot kept being wet and muddy near a green. The team had heard complaints about it and set out to fix it, calling in expert landscapers who suggested expensive piping and irrigation. But the NBDG team had another thought. They asked the landscaper whether they could just dig a hole in the spot to collect the water, drying out the surrounding areas while the water gathered in the hole. He told them that, in theory, that should work.
"An excavator came and dug a hole for us and suddenly everything else around it was dry – problem fixed," Kytö said.
The idea didn't just make a problem disappear: It created an attraction as the pond is now a beloved feature of the course for many players.
Along with a fun design, great upkeep, and quick problem-solving, Sibbe's reputation has continued to grow thanks to its caretakers' willingness to embrace change and continuously offer players something different.
"We turn things around," Kytö said. "Even the locals who play two, three, four times a week, they have a new course play every year – that's the goal."
Of course, the other offerings at Joensuun Tila make Sibbe a special place, too. Non-playing companions (or you during a disc golf break) can hit the lake for swimming, paddleboarding, and more. Need lunch or dinner? Try the PannuCafe. There's minigolf, barrel saunas (because it's Finland and there must be a sauna), and a nature trail, as well. Those planning to make more than a day out of it might also be interested in the hotel or campsites on the property.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Sibbe Disc Golf
Three real reviews of Sibbe from disc golfers on UDisc:
