Disk golf
 |
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| Highest governing body | Professional Disc Golf Association |
|---|---|
| Registered players | 84492, 25127 current |
| Clubs | Yes |
| Characteristics | |
| Contact | No |
| Team members | Single competitors, doubles |
| Mixed gender | Yes, but usually in separate leagues/divisions |
| Type | Outdoor |
| Equipment | Flying disc |
Disc golf (also called frisbee golf, or frolf) is a flying disc sport in which players throw a disc at a target, and is played using rules similar to golf. It is often played on a course of 9 or 18 holes, but other formats are common. Players complete a hole by throwing a disc from a tee area toward a target, throwing again from the landing position of the disc until the target is reached. Players seek to complete a course in the lowest number of total throws.
The game is played in about 40 countries and according to a 2017 study there are about 35,600 active members of the PDGA worldwide.
Disc golf was first invented in the early 1900s. The first game was held in Bladworth, Saskatchewan, Canada in 1926. Ronald Gibson and a group of his Bladworth Elementary School buddies played a game of throwing tin lids into 4 foot wide circles drawn into sandy patches on their school grounds. They called the game Tin Lid Golf and played on a fairly regular basis. However, after they grew older and went their separate ways, the game came to an end. It wasn't until the 1970s that disc golf would be reintroduced to Canadians at the Canadian Open Frisbee Championships in Toronto.
Modern disc golf started in the early 1960s, but there is debate over who came up with the idea first. The consensus is that multiple groups of people played independently throughout the 1960s. Students at Rice University in Houston, Texas, for example, held tournaments with trees as targets as early as 1964, and in the early 1960s, players in Pendleton King Park in Augusta, Georgia would toss Frisbees in 50-gallon barrel trash cans designated as targets. In 1968 Frisbee Golf was also played in Alameda Park in Santa Barbara, Ca. by teenagers in the Anacapa and Sola street areas. Gazebos, water fountains, lamp posts and trees were all part of the course. This took place for several years and an Alameda Park collectors edition disc still exists, though rare as few were made. Clifford Towne from this group went on to hold a National Time Aloft record.
Two early coordinators of the sport are George Sappenfield and Kevin Donnelly, who, through similar backgrounds and the help of Wham-O, were able to individually spread the sport in their California cities. Donnelly began playing a form of Frisbee golf in 1959 called Street Frisbee Golf. In 1961, while a Recreation Leader and then Recreation Supervisor for the City of Newport Beach, California, he formulated and then began organizing Frisbee golf tournaments at nine of the city's playgrounds he supervised. This culminated in 1965 with a fully documented, Wham-O sponsored, citywide Frisbee Golf tournament. This highly publicized tournament included hula hoops as holes, with published rules, hole lengths, pars, and prizes; an event in which Walter Frederick Morrison, the Frisbee inventor, was in attendance. In 1965, Sappenfield was a recreation counselor during a summer break from college during which, he set up an object course for his children to play on. When he finished college in 1968, Sappenfield became the Parks and Recreation Supervisor for Conejo Recreation and Park District in Thousand Oaks, California. Sappenfield planned a disc golf tournament as part of a recreation project and contacted Wham-O Manufacturing to ask them for help with the event. Wham-O supplied frisbees for throwing, and hula hoops for use as targets. However, it would not be until the early 1970s that courses began to crop up in various places in the Midwest and the East Coast.
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