Flying discs put a new spin on golf
Dec. 29, 2003

By EDWARD M. EVELD
Knight Ridder Newspapers

KRT PHOTOGRAPH BY AIMEE SANTOS/KANSAS CITY STAR Katie Ward of Kansas City, putts at the first hole at Rosedale Park in Kansas City, Kansas, in October, 2003. Ward and other women gather on Thursday until daylight-saving time ends.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kristie Carduff was dating a golf nut.

Not the familiar little-white-ball golf but golf using flying plastic discs. She figured she’d better try it, so she went with him.

“I quit after 10 holes. I was so horrible at it.”

Six years later the 26-year-old Carduff is a professional disc golf player; she’s been one since 1999. As in other sports, that means she tours and wins money, although most disc golf professionals keep their day jobs.

Carduff is among dozens of amateur and professional disc golf players in the Kansas City area. Hundreds of others play regularly around town, which happens to be a great place for disc golf.

In fact, unknown to many, Kansas City is a disc golf mecca. And it’s about to get bigger.

The Kansas City Flying Disc Club is building two new courses and five other parks in the area have public courses.

It’s no accident the expansion is coming to parks in the central city, said Jack Lowe, club president. Club members like the idea of “taking back the parks” from the nefarious activities they sometimes host. It’s healthy to bring a sporting activity to underused parks, he said.

Why expand? More courses will mean more opportunities for people to play, including young people, Lowe said. The club has about 200 members and is growing by about 10 percent a year, he said.

Club members participate in a program called First Flight, in which they visit schools and festivals to teach youngsters the rules and etiquette of the game. Plans are to have a First Flight clinic the first Saturday of the month once the Blue Valley Park course is ready.

Carduff can take credit for bringing more area women into the game. After her first experience, she tried disc golf again, fell in love with it and with the guy who introduced her to it. She married Beckett Carduff in 1998. When she competed other places, there seemed to be plenty of women to play against, but not here in Kansas City.

She started her own recruitment drive and had little success until a friend suggested a “girls’ night out,” a women-only gathering. That did the trick. Now 15 women play Thursday evenings at Rosedale Park in Kansas City, Kan.

“We just turned it into a really fun night,” said Carduff, a brokerage firm sales assistant. “The rules on girls’ night out is that there are no rules.”

Players love the sport’s easy camaraderie — a newly met player is often an instant new friend, they say — plus the lack of stuffiness and intimidation.

When Carduff’s early tosses rose 20 vertical feet like Mary Tyler Moore’s tam, veteran players on the course offered advice and encouragement, not stifled sniggers.

“I came in knowing nothing,” Carduff said. “I have a little bit of everybody in my shot.”
Players like to tell their “I just stumbled into it” stories about how they got started in the game.

Paul Eklund, 40, also a professional tour player, got hooked one day in 1997 when his softball game at Rosedale Park got canceled. A buddy had a disc.

That was the start. After he began meeting other players in the disc golf community, he was hooked. He dropped softball.

“From then on, it kind of bloomed on me,” said Eklund, who got his 11-year-old son, Matthew, hooked, as well as his dog, Cody, who caddies. Cody wears a saddlebag that holds Eklund’s discs. Cody also models impeccable etiquette for humans, Eklund said.
Eklund and Lowe have organized a tournament here, called the Kansas City Wide Open, for years. The prize money this year totaled $17,800, more than double the purse in the mid-1990s.

“Our courses and the way we run our tournaments attract world-class competitors,” said Lowe, who has been president of the local club for three years. He works at Sprint.

Talk of touring and tournaments might leave the impression that all disc golf players focus on winning, Carduff said, but that’s not the case.

“In most sports it’s all about the competition,” she said. But in disc golf, “you can be very competitive, or you can just go out there with your friends.”

For fun. And camaraderie.

“It was honestly not the game that first drew me in,” she said, “but the people.”

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PLAYING DISC GOLF

The object of the game is to complete the course in the fewest number of throws. Instead of sinking a ball in a hole, players use a plastic disc to hit a target, usually a metal cage set on a pole.

Here are a few of the rules from the Professional Disc Golf Association tournament rule book.

Of course, you can make your own game as casual as you want, but a few parameters will help.

• Diverse terrain and wooded areas are natural obstacles. Players may not alter them to decrease the difficulty.
  
  
• Players first “tee off” by the order of their names on the scorecard. On subsequent tees, the lowest-scoring player goes first.
  
  
• After teeing off, the player farthest from the hole — a target that’s usually a metal cage on a pole — goes first.
  
  
• If a disc comes to rest above the playing surface in a tree or other object on the course, its lie is marked on the playing surface directly below it. If that isn’t possible, the lie is marked immediately behind the tree or other object.
  
  
• A disc is declared lost if a player can’t find it within three minutes of going to the spot it was last seen. All players must help in the search. A player with a lost disc adds a one-throw penalty to his score.
  
  
• Par is 3 for each hole, although newcomers are advised to set par at 4 until they become more comfortable with the game.