Work Hard, Play Hard

We've been having some pretty amazing weather in the midwest where I live lately. The other weekend my wife and I were even able to get out for a few walks. One of them took us to a nearby disc golf course that my friend has been working on for most of the summer. After retiring from teaching for thirty years, he started working for a local university where he mentors students and helps them be successful in their college career. Through that position, he helped a student write a grant to create a nine hole disc golf course on some of the wooded property the university wasn't using.

They received the $10,000 grant, and ss I said, over the course of the summer, he has been working very hard on this project clearing trees and other obstacles to make way for the fairways and baskets. I've been out to the course several times to both play and help out. It's been a lot of hard work, but the front nine holes are totally playable now, and the back nine have been fully funded and are getting ready to go in.

Given my connection to this course and the amount of time I have put into it, I wanted to take @mrsbozz here to show her around, so one Saturday morning a couple weeks ago we headed out to play a round. As you can see, the course sits alongside a family trail system that has been on the property for ages. The main intent of the grants is to get the public invested and interested in what the campus has to offer, so a disc golf course fits perfectly with that.

There isn't a ton on signage yet, but they intend to change that and the weekend after we played this course, they actually added tee signs at each of the holes. I haven't seen them yet, but I am looking forward to them. Oddly enough, you might think $10,000 is a lot of money for a disc golf course, but realistically, that only covers the cost of the baskets and the concrete that they poured for the tee pads. All the other work is on a volunteer basis.

They still have a bit of cleaning up to do, but this is the first thing you see when you arrive at the course. If you look really hard, to the right center you can see the practice putting basket. It's like a putting green in real golf where anyone can just toss some discs to warm up before a round.

This is the path you take to the first hole. It's just ahead to the right of the photo and if you look really closely again, you can see a orange arrow attached to a tree pointing the way.

They did a really good job with the tee pads. The cement looks really good and the gravel they filled in around it helps to give you a bit more run up space without having a big drop off on the edge of the pads. I'm not sure how it is in regular golf, but in disc golf they talk about holes in terms of lines. There is still a fairway and "rough", but when you are trying to get to the basket, you look at it in terms of lines. As in, what line do you want to take to get your disc from point a to point b. To the right of the tree in the center of the fairway or to the left of it, etc.

In the hole above, the ideal line is to the right, but then the hole curves to the left after the ridge in the distance and the basket is off to the left.

Like I said, they still have some work to do, but the plan is to get an industrial wood chipper in there to get rid of most of the brush, then they will lay the wood chips down in the fairway to give an obvious path from the tee pad to the hole. As I stated before, the course has been so successful, and has generated a lot of excitement. So much so that a local business called KZoo Bullion has offered to sponsor the rest of the course. It turns out one of the owners is a Northwood University graduate and an avid disc golfer, so it was a match made in heaven.

As we were playing I noticed this branch down across the course, so I moved it out of the way and let my buddy know that I had taken care of it. He was grateful and thanked me for helping out.

I ended up getting something like 4000 steps from playing this round of disc golf, so I am going to include this as a #wednesdaywalk post sponsored by @tattoodjay. If you are interested in my final score, I ended up shooting 7 over par. I had a couple double bogeys towards the end of my round that did me in. I started off good shooting par on the first three holes though. Then it was a string of bogies followed by the two double bogies and then a par on hole 9.

I'm really looking forward to getting to work on the back nine and helping out with that. This is going to be a really awesome course when it is finished. @mrsbozz and I are even thinking about donating some money and sponsoring a hole. The course is setup in the UDisc app, so if you are in the area, check it out and throw a round!

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