Cory Wickline really loves disc golf, but before March 2023, it wasn't something he was considering as a career path. Then he and some friends saw two men searching the pond in front of hole 8 at the Scrapyard Disc Golf Course near Charlotte, North Carolina.
One of the men was Joseph Phillips, whom Wickline recognized from content put out by Another Round Disc Golf, a disc golf store started in Charlotte that is now being franchised in cities and towns across the United States. Phillips and his business partner Kyle Deck own the enterprise, which pairs disc golf with on-tap craft beer (often a winning combination).
"We were like, 'No way! What's up?'" recalled Wickline. "And he said, 'Hey, if anybody hits an ace, fifty dollars to the shop.' We were like, 'Well, that's great.' And then we all missed horribly, of course."
After losing out on fifty bucks of store credit, Wickline and his coterie started talking with Phillips as he teed off on the next hole. Phillips was describing his vision for Another Round, and Wickline's group encouraged him to open a store in their town of Greenville, South Carolina, around two hours' drive away from Charlotte.
Wickline said Phillips responded, "Why don't you do it?".
While Wickline thought little of the quip at the time, it planted a seed. Just 13 months later, the seed had sprouted into Another Round Greenville, which Wickline and his wife Corinne now run together while homeschooling their three children.
Like with any new business, there have been tough moments, but Wickline said the store had a very successful first year overall. One reason is his and Corinne's focus on expanding the local disc golf community through leagues tailored to groups that aren't top-of-mind for organizers of typical competitions. Those groups include beginners, women, and people who work evenings and weekends.
Beginning a Beginner Disc Golf League
The disc golf league for beginners was one of Another Round Greenville's (ARG's) earliest initiatives. In the shop's first month, Wickline received a call from a new disc golfer asking for any local doubles rounds where he could learn the game. Wickline knew of a league, but the player had already been there – with mixed results.
"The player said, 'I went to that one, and I'm sure there were nice people there, but I got stuck with a guy who made it very clear that I was not to get in his way,'" said Wickline. "I would say there's a very small percentage of the people who take it that seriously, but he unfortunately got paired with someone who took it very seriously, and that's when he ended up calling me."
Because one of the core tenets of Wickline's approach is cultivating players' love for the game, he decided to start a beginners' league of his own that would allow new players to learn without fear of exasperating prickly veterans. It's also called the "Learning League" because some members may have played the sport for a while but never learned the basics.
"We ask, 'Is this your first time doing it? Or are you three years in and you scored really terribly, and you just want some tips and tricks and play with other people?'" said Wickline.
The league takes place not far from the shop at the nine-hole Sterling School disc golf course. Sterling has fairly short holes and, like many pitch and putts, offers a perfect place for beginners to learn the ropes without being punished by water or dense woods.
Wickline brings a bag full of beginner-friendly discs participants can try out and offers advice on what discs beginners should avoid. More often than not, Wickline ends up giving away a few discs that players fall in love with during their rounds.
He also recruits veteran players that volunteer their time to teach skills fledgling disc golfers will want to improve at – putting, approaching, forehands, throwing form, disc selection, and so on. Each league starts with a lesson from these experienced disc golfers. After that, groups are made for the rounds, each one having an advanced player who can provide friendly advice to the beginners as they play.
"Of course everyone's gonna throw their forehand differently, everyone's gonna putt a little bit differently," said Wickline. "But we just say, 'Here is what might work for you – here are a couple tips and tricks that aren't on YouTube.'"
Another interesting aspect of the league is that fun and growth – not score – are the emphasis.
"We don't ask score, we don't care about your score," said Wickline. "We often say 'whoever has the most fun wins' is kind of the tagline of the thing."
ARG's beginner league nights last about two hours, with a half hour spent on group instruction and an hour-and-a-half on playing rounds. But with the shop so close by, the fun often continues after play stops. The league includes closest-to-pin (CTP) prizes on various holes, which award the person who lands closest to a hole's basket from its tee store credit to ARG. There are also random-draw prizes that give all participants a chance to win discs to take home.
These leagues happen weekly for a month or two, take a short break, and then start up again. You can get in touch with ARG if you're in the area and interested in participating.
Women's Disc Golf League and the Early Birdies Club
Along with beginners, ARG also organizes disc golf leagues focusing on women and those with jobs that have atypical schedules.
The women's league was started by Corinne to allow women to play disc golf in their own space.
"We get a really good turnout for it; it's a core group of about 20 or 30 women that show up for that," Wickline said. "We want this to be a safe place for women to come out and just play without being mansplained how to throw a Frisbee."
Another group is the Early Birdies Club, a league started specifically to give service industry and shift workers the chance to play when their work hours don't align with the weekend mornings or weekday afternoon time slots disc golf leagues usually occupy.
Wickline got the idea when he asked two restaurant workers to come play a weekend tournament and they declined because their work hours overlapped with the entire event. The league has now been running for over four months and starts at 8:30 every Tuesday morning at Timmons Park in downtown Greenville.
"We normally average about 20 people that come out to that, too," said Wickline. "And that is a completely separate crowd from the people who come out to the women's league and a separate crowd from the people that come out to the beginners' league."
The hope is that offering events targeted at players whose preferences are often overlooked will enrich and expand the sport's player base in the region.
" We're trying to bring disc golf to people," Wickline said. "We're trying to meet you where you are rather than you having to change your schedule."
Starting Your Own Disc Golf League
If ARG's example has you interested in starting a targeted league in your own neck of the woods, it's worth knowing what factors Wickline attributed the success of ARG's leagues to. A big one was having a strong, regionally-focused social media presence.
" I think a lot of it is actually having your social media reach the people who matter to your local business," said Wickline. " We're not as concerned about your disc golfer in Arkansas; we're concerned about the disc golfers in the ten counties that make up the upstate of South Carolina, and those are the ones that we focus on."
Wickline posts on social media frequently – everything from new discs in the shop to signing events to memes. The constant posts mean most disc golf enthusiasts in the Greenville area see the shop's name and what it's up to in their feeds regularly.
"Most of the stuff I'm showing are things that we're doing and how you can get involved," said Wickline. "Here's a volunteer opportunity this weekend, here's a tag round that you can come out and play, here's a free thing that we do on this day, here's a beginner's league – all that kind of stuff."
The second success factor is sticking to this mantra: "If we take care of people, people will take care of us." Wickline didn't mean this solely in terms of more patrons coming to his family's shop, either. He interprets it as believing that the more opportunities disc golf gives to people, the more people will make disc golf a regular part of their lives.
"They need to know we care about them, we want them to do well," said Wickline. "And so I think we focus on that and keep that in the forefront of our mind, that it's these people we actually want to empower in disc golf."
Whether you're an individual trying to create more engagement with disc golf in your community or a club or shop hoping to expand disc golf's player base in your area, ARG's tactics and success hopefully provide some inspiration for what's possible.
"We're building a culture here," said Wickline. "We're in it for the long run. We're not in it to make a quick buck here. We are in it to just build this entire thing and this community that we love here in the upstate of South Carolina."
Both UDisc Leagues and UDisc Events are entirely free for you as the organizer and all participants. Scoring (including real-time leaderboards), registration, making groups, and even keeping track of handicaps – we take care of it all so you can focus on amping up the fun. Your league or event will also be on its host course's UDisc Courses page and findable by anyone searching for events and leagues in UDisc, making it more visible to a huge number of disc golfers.
