Here you can learn about one of the world's best disc golf courses: Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå in Sweden. The course is operated by the local Skellefteå Discgolf club, but it is notably in the same town as very popular disc golf equipment manufacturer Latitude 64°. The company considers Skellefteå a flagship for its ethics of course design.
Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå is ranked #74 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 Skellefteå 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 Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå: Basic Info
- When did Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå open?
2000 - How many times has Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå 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 Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå?
Tomas Ekström, Jonas Rudholm, and others from the local Skellefteå Discgolf club - Is Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå available for public play?
Seasonally in warmer months. Exact opening dates are flexible and weather-dependent.
History of Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå
Put on your warmest Sunday best because we're going to church way up north. Why? That's where the story of Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå begins.
A whopping nine-hour drive north of Stockholm, Skellefteå is the main city in the Skellefteå municipality (around 75,000 residents) on Sweden's east coast. Back in the mid-1980s, a group of youth in the small Skellefteå suburb of Bergsbyn got interested in Frisbee sports and fell particularly hard for disc golf. For over a decade, their only real course was a nine-holer built near a church.
During those years, local enthusiasm for disc golf outgrew the confines of that small track. By 1996, the disc golf club had over 100 members and the sport was appearing frequently in regional newspapers and media outlets. Disc golf had the potential to explode, but Skellefteå needed a different sort of course to handle the boom.
After a number of tries to secure good land for disc golf fell through, the club finally reached a deal with the city to lease a former agricultural area in 1998. It was far from perfect, to say the least.
"The original state of the land was terrible," said Johannes Högberg, a Skellefteå resident and media manager for Latitude 64°. "You couldn't do anything there."
For the most part, the property was a thickly wooded, swampy mess. Many failed attempts to make the land less waterlogged eventually convinced the club to pay a local farmer to reshape it so their future fairways would dry out enough for grass to grow. With most of their money thrown at the lease and proper drainage, club members had to resign themselves to the long, slow labor of clearing trees with hand-held tools.
The club's vision of a longer, more difficult course came ever-so-slowly to life over the course of a year. By the spring of 1999, grass had sprouted and they'd carved fairways through the dense forest of birches and evergreens. The new course was again just nine holes, but those holes were much more demanding than anything from Bergsbyn.
Still, once Skellefteå's disc golfers got a taste of something better, they couldn't help wanting a bigger portion. They leased more land, did more work, got the farmer back out for more drainage, and by 2000 had 18 holes with concrete tees in an area where only disc golfers ever wandered. They also began charging a small fee for the course to help with upkeep and maintenance costs. It speaks to how much the area desired disc golf that the nominal payment netted the club the equivalent of $65,000 USD in 2002.
Thanks to this success, the club's goals expanded beyond just having a special place to play disc golf.
"There was a vision not just of making a good course but making everything around it good, too," Högberg explained. "The club wanted to book companies, have a place where you could buy snacks, and have a little pro shop."
The amenities surrounding the Discgolf Terminalen grew and improved as the course did, creating an ever-better all-around experience for an ever-increasing number of visitors. Soon, the first layout the club had built was so full of newer players that experienced ones were finding it hard to fit in rounds. So in the winter of 2006, the club broke ground on a new, championship-level layout on property adjacent to their first course: the Black layout.
In the years between then and now, the layouts at Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå and the infrastructure that supports them have only gotten better and more refined. The club has installed multiple tees to all of its 50 baskets so that players at every skill level can find something to enjoy.
The course has left stamps on disc golf history, too. In 2008, Skellefteå hosted a PDGA Major called the Scandinavian Open, and local Jesper Lundmark – one of the world's top disc golfers in the late 2000s and early 2010s – won the Open division. This was the first time ever that a European had won the Open division at a PDGA Major, and Lundmark remains the only European to win a Major in Open (he added a second at the European Open in Finland a year later).
Additionally, the course brought together the people who founded a leading disc golf equipment manufacturing company that's still based in Skellefteå.
"Latitude is deeply connected to the course," Högberg said. "One day the founders were hanging out there, like they used to do, and they were like, 'I heard the patent for making discs is going out. We should do our own stuff just for fun. It should be easy to make it better.' Easy...yeah. But then they did it!"
Last year, the club connected to Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå had 299 members, and the course attracted 12,000 paying visitors. The course has become such a fixture that the land it's on has been granted special status from the municipality as exclusively reserved for disc golf. This means that, despite being on public land, the sort of heartbreaking losses suffered by Järva a couple of years ago aren't likely to happen in this more northerly Swedish disc golf paradise.
How Hard Is Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå?
Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå offers multiple 18-hole layouts that offer a wide variety of disc golf experiences. This is how its easiest and hardest layouts based on score relative to par stack up:
| Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* | |
| Easiest Layout | Yellow | Mid-Length | Technical | Moderate | 199 | +7 |
| Hardest Layout | 2023 Skellefteå Open MPO | Very Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 275 | +23 |
*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.
You can find this information on all of Skellefteå's layouts (with the exception of par rating) by checking out Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå 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 Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå?
Högberg told us one of the most important things to those involved with Skellefteå's design is getting people to take disc golf seriously.
"First of all, [they want] to have it feel like a professional sport, not just something you do around people having a picnic in a fairway," he explained.
Importantly, professionalism isn't equated with making the course a grueling slog for all but the best players. Instead, it's about keeping things like tees, baskets, signage, and flora maintained to a high level. The club mows the grass frequently in warmer months and makes sure that areas off fairways won't eat discs.
"If you throw a bit wrong, you should be punished, but you should also find your disc," Högberg said. "There's a lot of work just clearing up the rough so you can walk there and get your disc. But you'll still have difficulty getting out."
To avoid those tough scrambles, you'll typically need more precision than power in Skellefteå. The fairways are nearly all wooded, and the design often challenges you to hit specific landing zones rather than testing your max distance – especially if you stick to a layout suited to your skill level.
But perhaps the biggest trademark of the course is that it rarely defines a single route to a basket. Typically, players are forced to opt for one of multiple lines.
"The big thing is you have to make choices," Högberg said. "A lot of holes, you could throw it in different ways – there are two or three openings to the fairway and you can go wherever...you really have to make a plan for yourself about how to play it."
One thing there isn't much of at Skellefteå is elevation change, but the challenging hole designs and option to play multiple distinct layouts seem to be more than enough to thrill most disc golfers.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå
Three five star reviews of Discgolf Terminalen Skellefteå from disc golfers on UDisc:
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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 2023.
