Here you can learn about one of the world's best disc golf courses, Maple Hill in Leicester, Massachusetts. A legend in the disc golf world, this still-operating Christmas tree farm has varied fairways carved out in the most charming New England countryside you can imagine, and it offers a number of layouts so everyone from beginners to the world's top players can find something to enjoy.
Maple Hill is ranked #4 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 picture of Maple Hill or jump to a section that interests you most in the navigation below.
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- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost, & availability
- History
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Maple Hill Disc Golf Course: Basic Info
- How many times has Maple Hill 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? - When did Maple Hill Disc Golf open?
2002 - Who designed Maple Hill Disc Golf?
Tom Southwick, Steve Dodge, Dave Jackson, Gage Benson - Is Maple Hill Disc Golf free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Maple Hill Disc Golf available to play?
Year-round except from a week before Thanksgiving to Christmas. It's on a Christmas tree farm and it closes due to tree sales.
History of Maple Hill Disc Golf Course
Steve Dodge has run the disc-making division of a major company, founded the most well-known professional disc golf tour currently in existence, and successfully crowdfunded the manufacture of a disc golf board game designed by himself and his brother. But it's hard to know how many of those things would have happened had he never made the decision to move to Leicester to be part of the team that created Maple Hill Disc Golf Course.
For two weeks each summer when Dodge was growing up, his family would visit a farm in Leicester, Massachusetts, situated on land that had been in the family for generations. The name for that property is Maple Hill, and it's an idyllic slice of rural New England with rolling hills, crumbling stone walls, and ponds. It's also an active Christmas tree farm. However, it wasn't during a visit to the farm that Dodge got inspired to build a course there. Instead, it was his time in a part of the world that's the next door neighbor to one of the best small towns for disc golf.
"I went to college down in Virginia, and I ended up starting my own business there – started my own business so that I could play disc golf more as a matter of fact," Dodge recalled. "And one of the courses I played was The Blockhouse in Spotsylvania, Virginia, where a guy named Mike Trapasso had built a disc golf course on a plot of land he owned. It occurred to me that, wow, this would be a great thing to do up at Maple Hill in Massachusetts."
As it happened, Dodge's cousin Tom Southwick, who had lived at Maple Hill his whole life, was getting similar notions around that time. He was being inspired by a course, Pyramids, built down the road from the future site of Maple Hill's disc golf course by his and Dodge's cousin Jason Southwick. Spurred on by having someone who shared the dream of a course at Maple Hill, Dodge didn't take long to make the decision to pick up sticks and move to Leicester to team up with Tom.
But before settling down to work, he had some research to do. After selling his company in Virginia to his employees, Dodge, his friend Dave, and two dogs went on what Dodge called "a three month disc golf odyssey." During this trip they played over 150 courses across the United States. All along the way, Dodge paid close attention to the elements that helped make courses stand out from the rest.
"I remember signage was important," Dodge said. "A course with good tee signs was almost always a good course. Courses with pro shops on site with someone I could talk to or ask questions were few and far between but always a step above. And the courses that I personally really liked were aesthetically pleasing. I'd much rather throw off of a hill than throw next to a hill and have a really nicely-shaped shot. That's just more fun to me and looks better."
Armed with his newly sharpened perspective, Dodge made his way to Leicester to become part of the group that would design and build Maple Hill Disc Golf. Tom Southwick, Jason Southwick, and Dodge were the primary designers of the first courses at Maple Hill.
"I'm pretty ridiculous," Dodge admitted. "So I felt it could be one of the best courses in the world from the start. That was the goal, and I believe I can reach goals no matter how out there they are."
With this lofty ambition driving it, course construction began in the fall of 2003, and by the spring of 2004, the first iteration of the course was playable. And though the course's quality was clear from the start, the early 2000s was not a time when disc golf was huge in Massachusetts or the surrounding area. That meant a private, pay-to-play course like Maple Hill took a long time to command a sizable customer base.
"How long before it was clear that it could actually be a business? Probably 10 years," Dodge said. "It was about that long before we could hire someone to manage the course, before Tom and I could have been struck by lightning and Maple Hill Disc Golf could have gone on without us."
While on that slow road to becoming self-sustaining, Maple Hill was more rapidly gaining a reputation as a destination course among U.S. pros. The course's annual premier tournament, which became known as the Vibram Open in 2008 and has been dubbed the MVP Open since 2018, consistently drew many of the sport's best players, who were leaving the course extremely impressed.
Through a mixture of word-of-mouth and the growing availability and popularity of media covering pro events, Maple Hill has grown far beyond a local treasure or a haven just for pros. The quality and challenge of its holes along with the beauty of its location have helped it reach the status its creators were aiming for from the start: being considered one of the world's best courses.
Manangement has also never rested on their laurels and always sought to improve the course. Some of the wide range of people who've donated their time and thoughts to Maple Hill's development over the years include Gage Benson, Cam Todd, Dave Jackson, Jay and Des Reading, Steve Brinster, Calvin Heimburg, and many more. Maple Hill is what it is today thanks to a think-tank of excellent disc golfers and course designers.
Additionally, it has been Massachusetts' most popular disc golf course for the last six years.
But perhaps there's no better proof of the success and notoriety that Maple Hill now enjoys than an anecdote Dodge shared when we spoke with him.
"My brother's a flight attendant, and he had a layover in London, and he went to the local course there and caught up with a threesome," Dodge narrated. "They said, 'Oh, you're American. We're going to America in a couple of weeks.' He asked why, and they said they were actually going just to play a disc golf course. He asked which one, and they said, 'Maple Hill, have you ever heard of it?'"
How Hard Is Maple Hill Disc Golf Course?
Maple Hill Disc Golf Course offers many 18-hole layouts that are suitable for players at a wide range of skill levels. The differences between the course's hardest and easiest layouts based on scores relative to par can give you a good idea of that range:
| Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating | Scoring Average | |
| Easiest Layout | Maple Hill Reds | Short | Technical | Moderate | 181 | +4 |
| Hardest Layout | Maple Hill Golds | Very Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 253 | +19 |
You can find this information on all of Maple Hill's layouts (with the exception of par rating) by checking out Maple Hill Disc Golf 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 at Maple Hill Disc Golf Course?
It’s actually easier to make a list of what type of golf not to expect from Maple Hill. So, here it goes:
At Maple Hill, don’t expect…
…entirely open, ball golf-course style holes.
…completely flat land.
…to get bored.
And that’s seriously about it. If you want anything from your disc golf not listed above, Maple Hill offers it up. Small and big shifts in elevation? Water hazards? A wide range of distances and required shot angles? Tightly wooded shots? Shots over more open fairways that still have enough trees to make placement important? Check, check, check, check, check.
Despite this variety, Maple Hill never loses a sense of unity, and its many different tee pads and pin locations mean you can always play a layout suited to your skill or mood. Listed here in order of difficulty are the tees available at Maple Hill: red, white, blue, diamond, and gold. There's also an Old Glory layout that mixes the red, white, and blue tees. Other configurations share tee pads at times, too.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Maple Hill Disc Golf
Three real reviews of Maple Hill from disc golfers on UDisc:
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we made minor updates to it. Some information has not changed since its last major update in 2024.
