Hole 4 – Disc Golf.. It’s A Thing!

We had the pleasure of connecting with one of our brand ambassador’s, Audrey Wicklander this week! Audrey gives us a deep dive into the disc golf world and her personal journey in it so far.

“What sport is it that you do?”

“Disc golf!”

“Golf?”

“Well kind of… it’s disc golf!”

“Disc…. Golf?”

“Disc golf!! It’s basically the rules of golf… just with Frisbees…. Kind of…”

“That’s a thing???”

This is how 90% of the conversations I have about disc golf start (and end) and usually I cannot get into a lengthy conversation about what the sport is and how I came about it… so I’m going to do that now! 

My name is Audrey Wicklander and I’m a disc golfer (PDGA #156781). I am 25 years old and have lived in the Metro-Detroit area all my life.  My golfing background is not extensive – my dad and grandpa both played golf and I would go with my dad to the driving range and try it occasionally. We went mini golfing a lot, I understood the rules of golf, and I genuinely liked watching it on TV but I knew that golf was an expensive sport so I did not want to join up and get all the gear just to possibly be bad at it or not like it. I played volleyball growing up but I stopped in 2013 and never picked up another sport after that.

Fast forward to late summer 2019, my boyfriend and I moved into a house in Melvindale (right on the south border of Detroit) and we discovered that there’s a little nine-hole beginner disc golf course two blocks from us. My boyfriend, Pat, had played disc golf a handful of times before and was an avid ball golfer. He bought an Innova disc starter pack from Meijer a week later and he started playing almost every day. I joined him but it definitely was not love at first sight between disc golf and I. Naturally, whenever you start something new you’re likely going to suck at it for a while and I’m a bit of a perfectionist so that didn’t go over all too well. Before I started discing, I could not throw a Frisbee straight so when I started throwing disc golf discs they were going in crazy directions. 

Brief story break! So what is disc golf? Disc golf originated in California in the 1960s and the rules are essentially the same as ball golf. You have a tee, you have a fairway, and you have a hole – except the hole is a basket made out of metal with chains that catch the disc and it falls into a ‘bucket’ (but we still call them holes, like “Hole 1” or whatever it is). Whoever has the least amount of strokes at the end wins. We measure holes in feet or meters instead of yards; there is usually one short and long tee-pad available at courses for amateurs and pros; and courses are usually 9-to-18 holes (and they’re usually free!). There is a Disc Golf Pro Tour that travels the world from February through October, the pros play Majors, Elite Series, and Silver Series events, and the top man and woman in the world make $1 million a year just from their manufacturer sponsorship contract. Disc golf is very much a thing!

For the non-disc golfers, disc golf discs are not Ultimate Frisbees. The discs are smaller, more aerodynamic, and denser than Frisbees so that they travel farther and faster. If you want to succeed in disc golf, you cannot throw a disc like a Frisbee because you will likely hurt yourself. The throwing of a disc, much like swinging a club, needs to be pretty precise and if you do it wrong – you will have bad results. Your body and timing have to be in sync to get the disc to go where you want it to go. When I started, I dislocated my shoulder a handful of times because of poor form. The combination of hurting myself and throwing in weird directions made me not like disc golf for a few months, but I kept going because I was in a bad place mentally at the time and it got me out of the house and spending quality time with my partner.

When did you realize disc golf was the sport you wanted to focus on?
It all changed when I threw a disc correctly for the first time. After that shot (which I still vividly remember) all I could think was, “I want to do that again!” I really dedicated time to watching videos of the pros and looking at what their bodies were doing, as well as listening to the critiques my boyfriend had about my form because at that point he was already deep into the disc golf rabbit hole. I spent all of 2020 just playing and enjoying the sport as I was learning the fundamentals. 

I started competing in tournaments in February 2021 and my first tournament was the Kent Lake Classic at Kensington Metropark in Milford, Michigan. I really struggle with my mental health, especially with anxiety,  so taking this step into playing a new sport in front of strangers was a massive leap for me. I was *very* nervous during that entire tournament but I met some awesome ladies and won in my division! I was hooked after that. I am a competitive person and I’ve only ever played team sports before that event so once I got a trophy that was just for me… that was it and now, I want all the trophies.

Sponsorships and ambassadorships was something I knew about from watching golf on TV and I eventually learned about the various disc golf companies from watching the pros on YouTube. Again for the non-disc golfers, there are many different disc golf manufacturers who produce their own molds of discs. ‘Mold’ refers to the shape of the disc because they are not all the same. Like ball golf, there’s putters, midranges, fairway drivers, and distance drivers. When looking at the four types of discs from putters to distance drivers, the rim of the disc moves from being more rounded to pointier in each step to increase its distance potential. The molds are also made so that the disc wants to fly in a certain direction – left (overstable), straight (neutral or stable), or right (understable). Most disc golfers carry between 12-25+ discs depending on how large their bag is and personally, I carry 20 to 22 discs during a tournament and every single one does a different thing in the air. 

The same molds of discs are present throughout almost every company but plastic types, stamp artwork on the tops of the discs, and the names of the molds change from company to company. The plastic types are the biggest differences from company to company since the plastic does effect what the disc does when it’s flying. Most disc golfers have their preference of companies, just like ball golfers with clubs and balls, and I instantly gravitated towards Discraft, a disc golf manufacturer started in 1979 out of Wixom, Michigan, which I’ll get to in a minute.