Here you can learn all about Idlewild in Burlington, Kentucky. Famous among professional disc golf fans for hosting elite-tier tournaments attended by the world's best players, Idlewild is a challenging monster that's long been one of the top free-to-play courses in the world.
Idlewild is ranked #24 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 Idlewild 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 to play, & availability
- History of Idlewild Disc Golf Course
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Idlewild Disc Golf Course: Basic Info
- When did Idlewild Disc Golf Course open?
2000 - How many times has Idlewild 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? - Who designed Idlewild Disc Golf Course?
Robert Herbert, Fred Salaz - Is Idlewild Disc Golf Course free or pay-to-play?
Free - When is Idlewild Disc Golf Course available for public play?
Year-round
History of Idlewild Disc Golf Course Course
The collaboration between course designers Robert Herbert and Fred Salaz that resulted in Idlewild all started with a phone call over a quarter century ago.
"Fred called me in the autumn of 1997 and asked if I'd be interested in helping him design and install a course on some land in an area designated to be a new park," Herbert said. "As I recall, it was to be a replacement for Limaburg Park, which was adjacent to and being swallowed up by CVG [Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International] Airport, for a new runway. We were disappointed to see the course at Limaburg being pulled out but were determined to make the new course at Idlewild even better than Limaburg."
Herbert agreed to go take a look at the land, but getting there wasn't exactly easy. There weren't roads leading to the new park's future location yet, so he and Salaz had to park beside the road and jump a fence to get a glimpse of the area where they hoped to build a course. When they saw it, though, it was clear their trouble was more than worth it.
"Right from the beginning, Fred and I could see the land we had to work with was very well suited for disc golf: nice elevation changes, some open areas, some tight woods, a beautiful lake, a long and wandering creek," recalled Herbert. "Simply put: a typical, gorgeous, Kentucky countryside atmosphere."
Both Herbert's and Salaz's eyes for what could make up a good disc golf course had been trained by playing many large events across the United States. Herbert had finished top 10 in the Master's divsion at the Professional Disc Golf Association World Championships the previous two years, and Salaz was 10 years away from being inducted into the Disc Golf Hall of Fame.
Herbert was an avid traditional golfer as well as a disc golfer. As such, he was used to a version of golf where par on a hole felt like a true achievement and birdies were few and far between for the average player. The disc golf available in the area at the time was far from that, consisting mostly of what Herbert termed "pitch and putt" courses. What he saw when he looked at the new parkland were all the ingredients needed to cook up something that could challenge the best disc golfers around.
It took a little convincing, but Salaz got on board with the idea of creating a course with distances and lines geared toward the capabilities of elite players. With that end goal in mind, Herbert and Salaz got to work designing and building Idlewild
Though they had the help of a small group of volunteers they called "The Wrecking Crew," Idlewild didn't open for over three years after Herbert and Salaz's first visit. While the land's many trees and the sheer size of the course they wanted to build didn't help speed up the process, a huge reason the construction took so long was that they weren't allowed to use power tools on the property at the time.
"Everything we cut was cut using a bow saw, mattock, pick ax, et cetera," Herbert said. "So we would go in, cut a few trees, and dig out the roots so nobody would trip on them while playing the course – doing everything by hand. Needless to say it took a while."
Even after they first decided the course was ready to open, it was far from the well-manicured track players encounter now. Herbert said that when they had a tournament at Idlewild to show it off in 2001, the course got bad reviews because it was simply too rough. The critiques only motivated the designer duo to make the course the masterwork they knew it could be. Members of the Greater Cincinnati Disc Golf Association (Idlewild is just a half hour's drive from the center of Cincinnati, Ohio), Boone County Parks (the local parks department), and the permission to use power tools were all integral parts of that process, which included building 17 bridges and creating retaining walls out of over 6,000 small cylindrical pieces of concrete.
As the course's rough edges got smoothed out, its notoriety grew, and it's now widely considered one of the United States' most demanding courses as well as a must-play for seasoned disc golfers. That reputation has only grown since the course became a regular stop on the Disc Golf Pro Tour in 2017. Video coverage of that event has exposed a huge number of disc golf fans to the course's diverse fairways and beautiful topography. And Herbert couldn't be happier about all of it.
"Designing and working on Idlewild has meant more to me than being chosen Rookie of the Year, finishing in the top 10 at Worlds three times, finishing third in overall winnings in 1995, or any of my 56 wins on tour," Herbert said. "Being creative – and having no restrictions on such beautiful land – to help make a challenging course for the rest of the world to see...I guess it's similar to the feeling an artist experiences. I know Fred feels the same."
How Hard Is Idlewild Disc Golf Course?
Idlewild has multiple layouts, all of which will be most appropriate for experienced disc golfers. These are how its two 24-hole layouts stack up in terms of difficulty and other factors:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| 24 Short | Very Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 227 | +18 |
| Main 24 | Very Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 234 | +19 |
*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.
For these statistics on the 18-hole layouts you may have seen professional disc golfers play, go to Idlewild's page in the UDisc Courses directory.
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 Idlewild?
If you're someone who plans to visit Idlewild because you like what you've seen on tournament coverage (or maybe even in this post), the long-running tournament director of its Disc Golf Pro Tour event, Adam Jones, thinks you should know something.
"The films never do it justice; the photos never do it justice," Adam Jones said. "You don't get the true feeling until you step on that course, you're throwing those shots, and Idlewild starts to eat your lunch."
The Boone County Parks director, David Whitehouse, also emphasized the course's difficulty.
"I hear from people all the time who say they just started playing disc golf and tell me, 'I’m gonna go play Idlewild,'" Whitehouse said. "I'm like, 'That might not be the best place to start.'"
What makes it so difficult? Essentially, the land offered Salaz and Herbert all the elements that can create difficulty for disc golfers, and they utilized those elements with devilish efficiency.
The property has plenty of forested areas, so many of the holes feature tight lines where one bad tree kick can spell disaster. Water hazards are frequently in play, whether it be ponds forcing scary water carries or out-of-bounds creeks surrounding small greens or being a threat down an entire fairway. Elevation? There's that, too. There are a number of holes where players have to reckon with big inclines and declines as they line up their shots or slopes that mean a throw that's slightly overcooked could glide much more than slightly past the basket.
And we can't forget to mention distance. The 24-hole layout has three par 3s over 400 feet/121 meters, which is a big ask for the majority of players.
With all that said, it's also important to point out that with all the challenges, there's also something else an experienced disc golfer can expect at Idlewild: to have a lot of fun.
"No matter how bad people's scores are, they still love playing it," Jones said.
It's a testament to the quality of Salaz and Herbert's design that a course so difficult has been rated so highly. Those high ratings suggest that even though the majority of people score badly there, they don't see it as being cheated by poorly constructed holes but recognize that they were humbled by a truly elite course.
Finally, Idlewild is a short drive away from Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport and is actually on land leased by Boone County from the airport. This means you can expect lots of airplane noise during your round.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Idlewild Disc Golf Course
Three real reviews of Idlewild from disc golfers on UDisc:
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we updated it. Some information has not changed since a major update in 2021.
