A family plays at one of the 16 disc golf courses in the Aland Islands, located in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. (Provided photo — Rebecka Eriksson/Visit Aland)

LAKE PLACID — While the little-known sport of disc golf has been slowly growing in the Adirondacks — there are currently three courses in the Tri-Lakes region — it has been exploding nationwide. An increasing player base wants more and nicer courses, better gear and new experiences with the sport, and both private and public entrepreneurs have taken note of this.

Disc golf is played much like its namesake of golf; disc golf players try to throw a Frisbee-like disc from a tee box to a raised metal basket in as few strokes as possible. Courses are usually nine or 18 holes and include many of the same kinds of obstacles and hazards that regular golf courses do. Disc golf players typically carry three kinds of discs: putters, midranges and drivers.

Another similarity between disc and ball golf is the prevalence of tournaments. The Professional Disc Golf Association and the unaffiliated Disc Golf Pro Tour host the biggest of these tournaments, often drawing large crowds from around the United States to a single region to watch the best in the sport compete — crowds that buy food and drinks, that need lodging, and that spend their money at local businesses.

The 2022 PDGA Professional World Championships is an example. The major brought 3,800 people to a small town in Kansas. Three thousand spectators, along with 800 players, caddies, staff and volunteers were there as the best players in the world competed for $200,000, according to the PDGA. For perspective, this purse is twice as large as the 2023 Ironman Lake Placid triathlon.

The prize money is only increasing, according to the PDGA. The organization aims for what it calls a “sustainable” 15% yearly growth; however, due in part to a title sponsor of L.L. Bean, the purse has ballooned to $275,000 for the 2023 PDGA Professional World Championships.

A competitor throws a putt in July during the 2023 PDGA Masters Disc Golf World Championships in Flagstaff, Arizona. (Provided photo — Marking)

The 2023 PDGA Professional World Championships will be a joint venture between the PDGA and the DGPT and will be hosted at the Smugglers’ Notch Resort in Jeffersonville, Vermont, from Aug. 30 to Sept. 3.

Resort officials are hoping the larger-than-ever cash prize will bring even more spectators to the region, according to Nick Hover, the disc golf and mountain bike operations director at Smugglers’ Notch Resort. While he would not comment on the event’s financials, he estimates that the championships will result in anywhere from 1,200 to 1,400 spectators — not including staff, players and caddies — for each day of a four-day tournament.

The Smugglers’ courses — Brewster Ridge and Fox Run — opened in 2012 and 2015 and rank 4th and 7th best in the world, respectively, by the UDisc website/app, and both are rated 4.9 out of 5 by UDisc users. In 2022, more than 11,000 rounds of disc golf were played between the two, according to Hover.

Cranberry Township, a small community north of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is also attempting to cash in on the prospect of hosting a major. After the 2015 PDGA Professional World Championships in Pittsburgh drew disc golf dignitaries to Cranberry’s hotels, the town commissioned and built a course at its North Boundary Park with the hope of drawing the tour back, according to a Jan. 15, 2019, news story from the local NPR affiliate WESA.

The new course is one of the longest in the world and was designed specifically with hosting tournaments in mind. A nature trail that was built alongside the course was done so deliberately to help spectators move from hole to hole during a major event, Project Manager Laurin Meeder told WESA when the course opened in 2019.

A visitor throws a putt at one of the 16 disc golf courses in the Aland Islands, located in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. (Provided photo — Rebecka Eriksson/Visit Aland)

The investment in hosting tournaments seems to have paid off. Although the course opened only four years ago and had to weather the worst of the pandemic, Cranberry has already been the home of a Disc Golf Pro Tour event, the Butler County Disc Golf Classic. The Classic saw 100 players competing for $10,000 in prizes, and it brought the world of disc golf to Cranberry’s hotels.

The event was a “silver series” DGPT event, which are often hosted as stepping stones to prove that a group has the organizational chops and playable courses to host gold or elite series DGPT events, with the final prize being a PDGA tournament or major.

“If a local organizing committee is going to submit a serious bid … they should be well versed in how to run a large scale, high profile event,” PDGA Communication Director Danny Voss told the Lake Placid News.

Voss also said that to run a major event, like a world championship, a women’s world championship (there is a women’s and an open division) or a youth or amateur championship, courses must be designed to certain specifications.

Voss points to the U.S. Women’s Disc Golf Championships as an example of why this is necessary. In the 2022 event every age group was offered. Players could compete either in the Female Open Division — the best female players in the world regardless of age — or in age groupings from under 8 years old to over 70.

A competitor throws a disc in July during the 2023 PDGA Masters Disc Golf World Championships in Flagstaff, Arizona. (Provided photo — Marking)

“They (courses) need to have a decent bit of diversity because the skillset is diverse,” Voss said.

Female players outside of world-class can’t be expected to throw farther than 230 feet over a water carry, according to the PDGA website, and players under 8 years old shouldn’t be expected to play on a pro-level course with a 200-foot lake.

Voss said it’s not typically possible to have one course that will serve everyone — being challenging enough for pros and friendly enough for amateurs. Therefore, the standard for all majors is two or more courses, which often complement each other.

The 2021 Open World Championships was played on a tight, wooded, technical course and on an adapted “ball golf” course, according to Voss. Those courses, one being forested and shorter and the other open and longer, require different styles of play and are a truer test of players.

Because multiple courses are needed, how dense an area is with courses is a major factor in bidding, and almost nowhere in the world is more dense with courses than Emporia, Kansas.

People play at one of the 16 disc golf courses in the Aland Islands, located in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. (Provided photo — Rebecka Eriksson/Visit Aland)

“https://visitemporia.com/” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>Emporia is a town of around 25,000 people in eastern Kansas. It’s also the self-proclaimed “disc golf capital of the world” having “more baskets in the ground per capita than anywhere else in the world,” according to the town’s website. Emporia currently hosts seven courses in the town limits and has four others within a 45-minute drive.

Emporia is also home to several large events each year. Dynamic Discs, a disk golf manufacturer with its headquarters in Emporia, runs the annual Dynamic Discs Open. Last year, the event had more than 180 players and offered $85,000 in prizes, according to the PDGA website.

This year’s Open was the fifth stop in three years the pro tour has made in Emporia, which includes the aforementioned 2022 World Championships.

So how did a small Midwestern town become disc golf mecca? The city, with public money and private sponsorship from Dynamic Discs, hired designers and built courses as an investment in tourism and local players. That investment includes the shining jewel of the region: The Supreme 18.

The Supreme 18 opened in 2022 and was built specifically for the 2022 World Championships. The course features almost 11,000 feet of fairway, seven “water in play” holes and concrete tee pads, according to the disc golf website DG Course Review. The course was designed by world champion Eric McCabe with the goal of challenging the best players in the world.

A competitor throws a disc in July during the 2023 PDGA Masters Disc Golf World Championships in Flagstaff, Arizona. (Provided photo — Marking)

Led by this monster course, disc golf has also proven to be an economic winner for Emporia. Susan Rathke, who at the time was the director of the Emporia Convention and Visitors Bureau, said in a 2018 article in The Journal that disc golf had already accounted for $2 million in economic impact for the town.

Outside the U.S., Emporia is not the only community to tie its finances to disc golf or call itself the disc golf world capital.

In 2020, the Aland Islands, a Swedish-speaking autonomous region of Finland in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden, did something similar. The government there built 16 disc golf courses in an effort to make themselves the ultimate destination and boost tourism during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Mats Adamczak, a local data scientist and project organizer, told udisc.com in an Oct. 21, 2021, article that he believes the $230,000 USD investment was money well spent. Adamczak estimated that the new courses resulted in 12,000 overnight stays on the islands from 3,000 tourists. This was estimated to have added roughly $1.15 million USD to the Aland Islands’ economy in the first 10 months of 2021. By 2025, disc golf could bring in 100,000 overnight visitors a season, according to Adamczak.

UDisc has a website and an app for disc golfers that helps them discover more than 14,000 courses around the world, keep score with friends, track throws and round statistics, and find and follow events.

UDisc’s own metrics suggest that in the same 10-month period in 2021 tracked by Adamczak, there were more rounds played (35,000) than the local population of the Aland Islands (30,000). UDisc notes that the U.S. state closest to this metric is Maine, which has fewer than 0.1 rounds played per resident.

To see Adamczak’s TEDx Talk titled “How disc golf saved our economy” on YouTube, visit https://youtu.be/JufN4xiAoik.

Nationally and internationally, the sport of disc golf is growing, perhaps one day to rival even its namesake. Public and private organizations, from islands in Finland to small towns in Kansas are betting on this possibility as they build infrastructure for their communities and help boost their economies — vying to become host destinations for tournaments and drag in tourist dollars.

Visit udisc.com to find disc golf courses around the region — and the world.

A visitor throws a putt at one of the 16 disc golf courses in the Aland Islands, located in the Baltic Sea between Finland and Sweden. (Provided photo — Rebecka Eriksson/Visit Aland)