If you’re wandering around Creekside Park and see a blue bucket on top of a wooden stake, don’t be confused – it’s a hole for Flin Flon’s disc golf course. The 18-hole course used trees initially as targets, but now has temporary holes up.
“This is the second year that we've been waiting on grants,” said Bryan Garrett, who designed the course.
“We're just getting to the point that it'd be nice to get some proper permanent baskets installed. We're thinking of looking into going to some of the different corporations and organizations around town... We’re looking at maybe $10,000 tops, with the top of the line baskets and everything involved. It's not a massive, massive expense and once you're done upkeep is almost nil.”
Not only would new baskets provide a more complete experience, but it may lower maintenance costs for the course.
“It's still far from perfect,” Garrett said.
“Sometimes we’ll come out and somebody has ripped [a hole] out of the ground and it's disappeared. The other day I was out and somebody had just gone and snapped them over, because they're just little two-by-twos holding up the bucket. Stuff like that will happen that it's not going to happen to a permanent basket.”
The group has found success in a disc golf club at École McIssac School. In 2019, they’re hoping to carry that over to the high school. Mark Wendlandt will be organizing a club at Hapnot Collegiate.
“The ones that started in the in the disc golf club in junior high are now coming to Hapnot and they've expressed an interest in having a club,” he said.
“I'm going to spearhead that here starting September.”
Flin Flon’s course drew praise from Xavier Tomanek-Pomanski, an amateur player who competes in tournaments under the Professional Disc Golf Association. He has three career wins in 20 tournaments.
“We've actually had we had a pro come up maybe about a month ago and he really enjoyed the course he thought the course was laid out really well,” Wendlandt said.
“So that was a nice compliment to Bryan and and how he set things up.”
Garrett said designing a disc golf course is about using limited space to create interesting fairways.
“I put a lot of focus on finding areas throughout the Creekside Park that would both force you to draw really nice lines between trees and different obstacles, as well as having a few holes that were more open for people who like to want to have big long throws,” he said.
Wendlandt said the course has seen increasing use, with calls coming into the city about what the blue targets were.
“For the first while, it was basically just three of us using the course, but then more people have come out with us,” he said.
“Now when we go out, quite often we run into other groups of people playing, people we didn't even knew played… The most recent time, it ended up being a neighbor from two doors down to me, he was out playing with his kids and having a nice afternoon of it. I had no idea they even knew it existed.”
Wendlandt explained that disc golf is played with specialized discs.
“There's drivers, putters, mid range ones, little ones, ones that curve hard to the left, to the right, that sort of thing,” he said.
“When you’re starting out, I'd probably say playing with three discs is optimal. You want a driver, a mid range and a putter. Then you can get crazy - my friends and I fill up a backpack with 30 odd discs.”
The disc golf club will be holding a Discover Disc Golf event during Culture Days this fall, with everyone welcome to attend and get a taste of the sport.
