Here you can learn all about DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course in Santa Cruz, California. Opened in 1984, it has been a bucket-list course for disc golfers for decades – especially longtime lovers of the sport's pro side who've watched many years of the Masters Cup being played there. Known for tight fairways, frequent roll-aways, and its Top of the World hole, "DeLa" is a disc golf legend.
DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course is ranked #88 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.
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- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost to play, & availability
- History of DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course: Basic Info
- How many times has DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course 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? - When did DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course open?
1984 - Who designed DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course?
Tom Schot - Is DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course free or pay-to-play?
Free but there is a small fee for parking - When is DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course available for public play?
Year-round
History of DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course
In the early 1980s, disc golf was seeking a true home in Santa Cruz. Players had built a course at the city's Cabrillo College in the early '70s that had been closed after a few brief years due to lack of space. In '78, a course opened on the campus of the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC). That lasted just a few years before the school wanted it gone due to concerns over liability if someone was hit with a disc.
But for Tom Schot, a co-designer and builder of those first two courses and a leading member of Santa Cruz's enthusiastic, expanding group of disc golfers, it simply wasn't an option to have nowhere in the city to play his favorite sport.
"We really had no choice," Schot said. "We needed a spot to play disc golf. I didn't want to stop the energy that was happening at the time."
The spot Schot thought could work was DeLaveaga Park. With over 500 acres, the park had no shortage of space, but that didn't mean there weren't obstacles.
"It was kind of an off-limits place," Schot recalled. "It was overgrown with brush, overgrown with poison oak, and it was where all the people would come and dump their garbage. And off-roaders with their big trucks and motorcycles would go up there and just chew up the ground...Nobody thought it would be a good spot for a course, but I just kept saying, 'We can do this! We can do this!'"
True to his word, Schot and a small group did, indeed, do it.
Throughout '82 and '83, holes were planned (primarily by Schot), trash was picked up, brush and poison oak were painstakingly cleared, and stand-offs with off-roaders were had. The city took notice of the disc golfer's efforts and provided trash bags and a large dumpster for the group to put refuse in. Schot also mentioned one extreme measure the disc golfers took to fight the tradition of dumping trash in the park.
"We would dig through the piles of garbage and find addresses and call the people at the addresses to come pick up their junk," Schot said.
The result of all this hard work was a course with 18 targets consisting of four baskets bought directly from the Father of Disc Golf himself, "Steady" Ed Headrick, and 14 posts. DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course—more often called simply DeLa—had finally been born.
Things still weren't perfect. Schot said off-roaders continued to come in, now ripping out baskets and posts along with tearing up fairways, and some dumpers carried on bringing their trash to the property. But with a permanent home to protect, the disc golfers didn't back down from these challenges. Slowly but surely, disc golf grew while the other activities tailed off. A club was formed, more and more posts were replaced with baskets, holes were tweaked, and DeLa's reputation began to spread.
"People from 100 miles [161 kilometers] away were coming!" Schot recalled, with excitement in his voice even nearly four decades after the fact. "There just weren't courses that were exciting like DeLaveaga. And I was always marketing it as the world's best course, kept telling people, 'You gotta come play DeLa.'"
Despite the growing notoriety and success, the course and club's durability had to undergo one more big test. In 1986, the ball golf course that was also in the park wanted to expand onto the land used for disc golf.
"The ball golfers had the money, the people on the board, but we fought," Schot said. "One player's wife was an attorney and we made a big presentation to the board of directors, and we got them to acknowledge that we had first right to the property."
After this victory, Schot said disc golf at DeLa "just kept going."
Amazingly, besides holes that were added over time and a few changes in playing order, Schot says the course's design has changed very little from his original 1983 layout. He admits to being "astonished" that a course he created with no overarching philosophy besides using what the land had to offer has withstood the test of time as well as DeLa. Even with the huge advances in disc engineering that have allowed for greater and greater distance, DeLa continues to be accessible enough for amateurs to enjoy while challenging enough to impress the world's best – a feat few courses from any era can claim.
Though DeLa certainly owes a lot to its designer, something Schot heavily emphasized about the course is that no one person can ever take credit for it.
"The thing about DeLa is that it took such a big effort from everybody to make it what it is," Schot said. "I was at the right place at the right time, but it wasn't just me. It was the love people had for coming up there...the excitement people had for coming together and playing on this piece of property. Once the players started taking ownership, it was the most gratifying thing I could imagine."
And it's not just the still-thriving club that continues to improve and maintain the course or even people who've simply played DeLa that now feel a part of that ownership. With the audience for disc golf videos growing and a tournament which DeLa partially hosts, the Masters Cup, being one of the most-watched competitions in existence, disc golfers all over the planet are beginning to feel like DeLa is a part of their heritage. Unwittingly, that small group of Santa Cruz disc golfers in the '80s created not just a home for disc golf in Santa Cruz, but a place that would eventually seem like home to the disc golfing world as a whole.
Oh, and by the way, that ball golf course that tried to take over DeLa? There's now a permanent disc golf course installed on its property and its pro shop sells discs. Similarly, UCSC now has an 18-hole disc golf course on campus.
How Hard Is DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course?
DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course's configuration changes fairly frequently as it's an old course with various possible basket positions and even number of baskets available. However, its Winter 18 layout that was active at the time we last updated this post in February 2025 provides a solid example of what to expect from most layouts in terms of length and difficulty.
| Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| Winter 18 | Long | Technical | 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.
Note that DeLa holds to an old school of disc golf thought that all holes should be par 3s. The high scoring average is, in part, due to adherence to that philosophy.
To see the current active layout at the course, check out DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course on UDisc Courses.
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 Disc Golf at DeLaveaga?
It's interesting that DeLa's allure is made up in part of something that many would find off-putting. Schot termed it "elements of disaster."
What he was referring to will be familiar to anyone who has played DeLa or watched footage of it being played. Baskets are often put in positions where errant putts or drives can sail down steep hillsides covered in thick, nearly impenetrable brush. Roots and trees in the fairways can stop or redirect discs that otherwise would've landed in ideal spots.
And roll-away potential? Yeah, there's more than a little of that. Just take a look at two shots from JomezPro's "Heartbreaking Disc Golf Shots" compilation from 2019 both filmed at DeLa:
Such small catastrophes are so common on the course that it's come to be known as "getting DeLa'd."
But, like a Halloween haunted hause, DeLa has turned its seemingly random malice into an attraction. It has a number of fairly short holes, but the threat of disaster makes them thrilling. Lines are tight, upshots are precarious, and anything can happen with just a moment's lapse of concentration. "Getting DeLa'd" almost feels like a rite of passage all serious disc golfers who find themselves near Santa Cruz simply can't pass up.
A less charming hazard at DeLa is an abundance of poison oak, a shrub that causes an itchy rash that can last up to two weeks. Long pants and socks plus learning to identify the plant so you don't stick your hands in it could be beneficial before you play DeLa. Washing any exposed skin and your clothes ASAP after playing can also help reduce the possibility of getting a rash.
But even the most bogey-filled scorecard or most severe poison oak worries can be forgotten for at least a little while when you get to the iconic view over Santa Cruz to the sea from the course's last hole, Top of the World. This is a signature hole not just for this course but for all of disc golf. If you ever hear someone talk about a "Top of the World-type hole," know that the Top of the World is at DeLa.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of DeLaveaga Disc Golf Course
Three real reviews of DeLaveaga from disc golfers on UDisc:
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we updated it. Some information has not been changed since the original publication in 2020.
