One Grand Disc Golf Tour

02-24-09

I’ve been seriously considering going to Italy’s Acrobatic Paganello in April. I had the good fortune to visit Rimini, Italy for the 2003 FPA World Championships. It was one of my best travel experiences ever!

So, I called Tito, a local jammer to let him know…WE NEED TO JAM!
Ironically, he had gotten a call from a newer jammer who had plans to meet an Italian woman jammer at our local spot (The Sinkhole) at 4:30 that very day! Bonus!

In order to get my wimpy body prepared, I went to the gym and then played a round of speed golf (-7 with 2 bogeys in 18:17) I got to the field a bit after 4 and stretched out for a while. Geoff Gregory showed up first. Fabiana and her two non-playing friends showed up shortly thereafter. However the call of the mall was deafening and the girlie girls bolted so they could SHOP, SHOP, SHOP.

The wind was up and a bit inconsistent but enough to tough out some big combos. Fabiana is from Rome where there is a HUGE resurgence of freestyle Frisbee. She claims that there are 20 jammers that meet regularly in a local piazza. Some of whom are among the very best in the world. “Fabulous” Fabiana was hooked a little over two years ago and is already showing great progress.

What really impressed me was her glowing attitude and burning desire to improve her game. We were pretty well warmed up by the time Tito arrived after an electronics install job several miles away.

Fortunately, the field lights came on as we jammed between soccer players, LaCrosse games and Football scrimmages. Tito gives good spin which resulted in some killer combos including one that finished with a body roll to a tip, to a scarecrow brush-back roll that went back out for a perfect set seal! (Ask a freestyler) At one point, as some teens were warming up for soccer, I could hear them during combos saying “Holy Crap! No Way! Did you see that?” I love that.

After we had burned all of our collective energies we swung by Tito’s place to listen to some music and talk. Eventually our growling stomachs urged Fabiana and I to take off for Universal Studio’s City Walk to eat and meet with her friends and their dates. We nearly missed out on food but luckily the Hard Rock Café was still open and we got our fill.

It seriously stunk that she was leaving the next day to go back to Montreal where she is currently working. But if there had been any doubt about going to Italy in a few weeks, that had been soundly replaced with eager anticipation. Stay tuned!

Shawn & Juliana came into town after La Vie en Rose. We got together to play T2 on Thursday afternoon. Before I went to bed that night Shawn had sent me this link to a video of our round. Very impressive. I plan to look into this program as well so that I can start posting some of my photo collection and pix of cool things and people.

Tomorrow: To Sarasota for SunKing’s Tour Del Sol #2 and family stuff.

02-22-09

Sorry I haven’t made an entry for a while. I have a great excuse but I’m going to save it for when I’m actually in trouble. (Won’t be long now)

So, I get a call from two different guys about this course going in north of Daytona in Holly Hill. The guy putting in the course has been playing long enough to have a 3 digit PDGA # but, unfortunately this guy is a disc retailer. He doesn’t spend time on course design.

I hear all sorts of horror stories about the layout and I figure I’d better go up and take a look at it myself.
One of the locals shows me around and it is no wonder that the players are already calling it “Holy Hell” instead of Holly Hill. This project is a classic example of what NOT to do.

Firstly, the tee pads are already poured and they don’t even HAVE baskets. Though the tee pads are the first thing you step onto at a course, it is the last thing you want to install. If the course is intended to have any real challenge level, in many cases, the tees shouldn’t even be concreted for a year AFTER the installation so that the course can be tweaked. “LETS JUST GET IT IN THE GROUND NOW AND WE’LL FIX IT LATER” is the worst of all possible install ideologies because you are building the flaws into the course. You wouldn’t build a car that way. OK, maybe Chrysler would.

Hole 1 is between a ball field and a kids playground. Righties will probably throw down the park road. Hole 2 is backed up against the ball field fence and goes across the park road back toward another ball field. If it hyzers out, the disc will probably end up on or around the #3 tee pad.

#3 runs along a ditch and railroad track, directly down the park road again and under an oak tree in the maintenance building parking lot.

Cross the tracks to #4’s tee, which is connected to the sidewalk. #6 has a tee with a light pole directly in front of the tee. Holes #7 & 8 again are running between the railroad track and a tidal lagoon. Walking to #9, you must walk within 10 feet of the 10th pin. Hole #9 runs to the end of a peninsula. An early hyzer skip might end up on the 10th tee as it is only 2 feet outside of the putting circle.

Hole #12 is a 305” shot with a 4’ fence on the right to a sewer treatment plant. YUM! No one is allowed to climb the fence (Yeah, that’s gonna happen) #13 is down a strip of land about 50’ wide. #14 carries a bit of water and aligns perfectly with the neighbor’s sliding glass window. 17 goes across a small retention pond, the walking path to 13, a ditch and another retention pond and ends up about 15’ from the park’s main sign.

Cross the railroad tracks back to hole 18, which is another 300+ hole with the pin less than 15’ from a ball field fence, a side walk and 10th street, which is the preferred hyzer route.

The park is in NO way conducive to a disc golf course and the design only made matters worse.  This was intended to be a beginner friendly course.  Instead, this was one of the most dangerous courses I had seen anywhere!

We had walked it in the rain. After my buddy took off, I walked the course again with my camera.
18 DISCatchers had been ordered. I sent the photos to Innova and they stopped shipment.

Yet the Holly Hill parks department is determined to install an 18-hole course despite the fact that they’ve been told that it is unsafe. (I wish I could see that sort of passion coming from a park whose land IS conducive.) Even the designer admitted that it may have some safety issues when queried by Gateway.

Some Innova guys were in town for a convention and checked it out…”not conducive”.
A high profile Gateway guy was in town, I took him up to look at it and he said “There is no way a disc golf course should go into that park”.

The course was slated to be a “beginner friendly” track. I can promise you with no reservations whatsoever that a new player with only 1 disc would stand little to NO chance of his disc surviving until the 17th hole.

This is what I’ve been clamoring about for years. You’d think someone that had been playing since the early 80’s (or before) would have enough experience to design a course. But he hadn’t the first clue about ANY of it. Safety was right out the window. The course wouldn’t even remotely appeal to the intended demographic. I can’t believe that he even pursued the property

I truly hope that this course serves as an example that, even though most people firmly believe that they have what it takes to design a course, very few people have the basic understanding to make it work. Pure and simple, this is poor work in a bad location.

This will be an unpopular sentiment but…In my opinion, I think every manufacturer should remove the “how to install a disc gof course” instructions from their web-sites and list the links & contact info for the disc golf design group. Disc Golf standards are incredibly low because we ALLOW them to be. Imagine how much higher quality our sport would be RIGHT NOW if EVERY course had been conscientiously designed by a paid designer.

I’ve just been informed that there is a new course going in near Jax, FL and it is being done by a newer player. There are two guys in Jax with a TON of experience and they have nothing to do with the project.
Disc Golf is one of the fastest growing sports in the world. But this practice of allowing ANYONE to design courses is not only inviting a serious lawsuit in this age of super fast-beveled edge discs, but it is also keeping us SMALL-TIME, because so many of the courses are so obviously cheap and cheesy.

It has to change if disc golf is to ever be taken seriously.

Sorry about the soapbox.

02-05-09

We had our big meeting with the City of Orlando Parks and Rec folks at Bill Frederick park at Turkey Lake.
Our goal was to listen to what they needed and had planned for the park.

Many things were disc-ussed, most things from our perspective were a surprise to them and vice versa.

Most of the discussions revolved around the master-plan for the park.  However, amazingly, Turkey Lake disc golf course has been at the park for around 25 years and it is NOT on the park blueprint! (????) In fact when I designed and built T2 I had no clue that there WAS a master plan which included an amphitheatre where the approach to #1 is and a wedding gazebo directly behind blue tee #2.

Bottom line in all of this is that I will now have to redesign a new blue tee for #2 (we may be able to save the red tee with the brick structure that we built), completely redesign T2 # 1 to go around the amphitheatre, and lose the very cool long position on “Original” 18.

I’m currently not convinced that I can match the quality of those holes but I’ll probably be in those woods this afternoon after helping my roomie unload an unwieldy French door from his van at a work-site across town.

The good news is that Bill Frederick Park at Turkey Lake is one of the highest revenue generating parks in the City or Orlando, and disc golf brings in the highest traffic and probably the highest money as well.  The disturbing thing is that I didn’t track my work hours in the early stages of T2 and lost my daytimer a year or so back so I don’t have those numbers once I DID start tracking them.  They respond well to volunteer hours, park entries and revenue generated.  We are only now getting things in place to track these numbers.

We put discs in their hands and got them around the practice basket for a while then played hole 1 on The Original.

One issue that has come up has us a bit concerned.  PDGA tech-standards has just set up a tiering system for disc golf targets.

The OLD Mach 2 baskets (which are considered Mach 1s with a set of inner chains) has been placed in the “Standard” category, which will be good through a B-tier event.  The Orlando Open would like to put on an A Tier in the near future but we would need to upgrade the baskets in order to make that happen.

With the economy as it is, this is a baaaad time to ask for money but they see us generating it where others are not.  And these baskets are a pretty long-term investment as the 25 year old Mach 2s would attest.  The great thing about this is that those old M2s would likely then be split up and placed in 2 separate parks as rec 9 holers, thus giving us broader coverage.

They’ve only recently started counting gate entries.  Their method is obviously missing plenty of people who are there to play.  Even with these lower-than-actual numbers, we have been averaging 100 players a week (which isn’t really impressive by many park’s standards as some do well over that per day) but considering there is another good disc golf facility about 10 minutes away that is free and they can stay until dusk, I think BFP@TL is still gaining ground despite the fact that people have to pay to enter and must leave well before the sun sets.

Next: “Holy Hell”

02-01-09

Orlando Disc Golf Club’s usual Saturday morning handicap was cancelled so that some members could prepare for this afternoon’s member-appreciation party at the VP’s place.

In light of next week’s Barnett Disc Golf Championships event, I went there to enter and get a round in.  I had planned to hit the gym, which is part of the Orange County Parks and Rec building (also on the grounds) but I met a couple of local advanced level players who were pretty much ready to go.  I took a very short run, a couple of putts, a couple of Roc shots and headed out.

It was breezy and cold (for Florida) but at least the playing surface was still green.

Afterward, we headed over to the parteeee.

ODGC VP Mark Janssen and his fiancé, Linda have a nice corner lot with a, deck & Jacuzzi, a garage turned studio for the 3 bands he plays in.  And, of course, there was beer…and chili, veggies, chips etc.

Matt Monzka brought a game called Kan Jam that was invented by a friend of his up north.  The game requires 4 players, 2 teams of 2.  One team mate throws a “lid” type of disc from 50’ at a plastic can with a slot in the front.  If the disc goes through the slot it’s an automatic win.  But it’s a very hard shot.  So the smarter strategy is to try to get it close to the top and your teammate can try to jam it, brush it, guide it, cuff it…into the Kan.  1 point if the disc hits the side of the Kan…unassisted (before it hits ground) 2 points if it hits the top with or without an assist and 3 if it goes in through the top.  Play to 21…exactly.  Click here for the full rules, which I may have misquoted.

We also had a 5-hole par 2 course set up around the house, which actually played pretty well.  Bill Burbage hit 3 aces in his first round of two loops, but had a double-bogey “4” as well.  I had straight 2s on the first loop of 5 but aced #s 1&2 and nubbed #3 on the 2nd loop to end up with a –2/18 for round 1.

Round 2 (2nd round of 10), our host, Mark Janssen had 2 aces and took honors.

Round 3 was going to be an “off-hand” round, where we play with our less talented appendage but turned into a worst-shot-doubles round.  I was teamed with a fairly new player who was having some trouble grasping the concept of worst-shot as well as a few of the standard disc golf rules.  On hole #5, which had to hyzer-arc over the road, we ended up with a quintuple-circle 12 (that’s 10 over par on ONE hole)

That was trying, but what annoyed me most on the round was that my partner hadn’t yet developed a respect for the bushes and plants around the course.  Breaking off healthy branches and stepping on plants etc.  She knows now.

One of the members requested I break out my jam & juggling stuff.  As I’ve stated before, below 50 degrees I no longer have an opposable thumb.  I don’t know the actual temp but it was pretty cool and my hands were less than responsive, but I pulled off a few minutes worth of juggling stuff.  I broke out the jam disc (on a brick patio) and went dropless for the first few minutes.  My only real drop came when I tried a verrry restricted “Oliver” pull.  And that was only because I was wearing too much clothing.

Members of one of Mark’s bands filtered in and had a practice session while some ODGC stragglers hung-out and yakked.  The party was to run from noon to 4pm.  I left the remainder of the party around 8:30 in favor of an Epsom bath and a bad Spartan movie.