Here you can learn all about the Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park in West Liberty, Pennsylvania. The course is under an hour's drive from Pittsburgh and is known among longtime pro disc golf fans for being a course used at the 2015 Professional Disc Golf World Championships and Pittsburgh Flying Disc Open tournament.
Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park is ranked #65 in the most recent World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 released annually by us here at UDisc. The rankings are based on millions of player ratings of over 16,000 disc golf courses worldwide on UDisc Courses, which is the most complete and regularly updated disc golf course directory in existence.
Read the whole post to get a full overview of the place locals typically shorten to "Moraine" or jump to a section that interests you most in the navigation below.
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- Basics: Times in top 100, year established, designers, cost to play, & availability
- History of Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park: Basic Info
- When did Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park open?
2004 - How many times has Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025 Top 100? - Who designed Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park?
Keith Clark, Chris Deitzel, J. Gary Dropcho, Leo Liller, Bryan Wright, Tim Wright - Is Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park free or pay-to-play?
Free - When is Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park available for public play?
Year-round, dawn to dusk
History of Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park
As disc golf clubs go, Pittsburgh Flying Disc (PFD) is an old-timer. It was founded in 1981 as an organization for general Frisbee enthusiasts and oversaw its first disc golf competition in 1982. For reference as to where that falls in disc golf history, 1982 was just five years after the first patent for a disc golf basket was filed and a year before the first bevel-edged discs came to market. Over the decades, the club has kept disc golf growing steadily throughout western Pennsylvania.
Today, it assigns what it calls "course promoters" to tracks under its purview. Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park, a jewel of the local scene in a popular park about 40 minutes' drive north of Pittsburgh, has three promoters assigned to it. Their responsibilities include setting up workdays where volunteers clean up the course or improve its infrastructure, communicating with park officials about larger maintenance needs and upcoming events, as well as organizing and promoting leagues and tournaments.
One of those promoters is Chris Lachendro. He talked with us about the course's background and the special place it holds in his own disc golf story.
"I didn't start playing disc golf until 2009, and Moraine was the first course I ever played at," Lachendro said. "I played and then that was it – that was all it took. My uncle introduced me to it, took me and the family out, and then I think I played every day for the next two weeks. I went to Moraine, and the first couple of years before I had any kids, I was probably playing nine rounds a week on average."
Though it made Lachendro fall in love with the sport, the Lakeview course at Moraine State Park was never envisioned as a great place to take beginners. Its thinktank of multiple designers, in fact, had just the opposite in mind. They wanted to create a spot where experienced disc golfers could test their mettle.
At the time the course was being built just after the turn of the century, western Pennsylvania already had Schenley Park, an all par 3 course with beginner-friendly distances built in the late 1980s in east Pittsburgh, and Knob Hill, a course moderate in difficulty and length about 25 minutes' drive north of the Steel City. The idea was that the new course in the state park would offer the logical next step in difficulty: hard.
"It is designated a championship-caliber course, and it does hold to that name," Lachendro said. "It is in the woods, up and down hills. It is not a short course."
The park was particularly supportive of the PFD's efforts because, unusually for the time period, it was park officials who'd initiated talks about building a course in 2003. Carving out many of the championship-length fairways took a year of hard labor, but volunteers from PFD and the state park staff worked together closely to make it happen.
"2004 is when the initial course was put in the ground, and that included a lot of maintenance to clear brush and stuff – it was just woods and fields at that point," Lachendro said.
Though the park supported where it could, it didn't write a big check to fund the course's creation. For example, the PFD raised the money for the facility's first baskets – around $8,000 – by running a large charity tournament
By the time the trees were cut and the infrastructure was installed, the team had created one of the longest courses in the world at the time and one of the few with numerous non-par 3 holes. Renowned course designer John Houck even highlighted the course's design as cutting edge in the first issue of Flying Disc Magazine in 2008:
Moraine State Park is a great example of the growing trend toward courses with more par four and par five holes. While there are still those who believe that disc golf should stick close to its roots (where every hole is a reachable par three), many designers and players feel strongly that two and three fairway-shot holes add a lot more to the game than just extra throws.
The course's length and many tight fairways remain challenging to this day, and the PFD and park have constantly worked to keep Lakeview at Moraine in great condition. For proof of the longstanding commitment to quality of Lakeview at Moraine's stakeholders, look no further than how it has been among the World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 every year since the official rankings began in 2020, which was a full 16 years after the course opened. It also has a long track record of hosting events attended by top-tier professional disc golfers, particularly during various iterations of the region's best-known tournment, the Pittsburgh Flying Disc Open, and, most famously, the 2015 Professional Disc Golf World Championships, which is a roving tournament hosted in a new place each year.
Of course, no history of this course would be complete without mentioning the honor it had of providing the setting for the phenomenal and only Basket Dash competition released by disc golf media company JomezPro. The video from 2017 says "series premiere," but it seems the obvious safety issues that came with the contest's premise of playing a hole as quickly as possible while one player raced around uneven terrain in an ATV led to its quick demise.
Thankfully, they were crazy enough to make one – and it happened to be on the famous "lake view" hole that gives the stunning course in Moraine State Park its name:
How Hard Is Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park?
Lakeview at Moraine State Park has three layouts, and all are designed for experienced, skilled disc golfers. This is how its easiest and hardest layouts based on score relative to par stack up:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| White Tees | Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 190 | +5 |
| Gold Tees | Very Long | Technical | Very Challenging | 229 | +13 |
*Scoring average and par rating constantly adjust as more people score rounds with UDisc. These numbers reflect stats from the time of publication and may have changed slightly since then.
To see hole distances and more for all of this course's layouts, visit Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park's page in the UDisc Courses directory.
To learn more about what the categories for distance, technicality, overall difficulty, and par rating mean, check out these posts:
What's It Like to Play Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park?
As we've already mentioned, Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park is designed for players with plenty of disc golf experience under their belts.
Coming in at around 6,440 feet/1,963 meters, the course's shortest layout, the White Tees, averages almost 360 feet/110 meters per hole. Sure, the pars are generous if you've played disc golf for a while (there are more par 4s and 5s than par 3s), but the course's length paired with its high level of technicality due to many densely wooded fairways are the makings of a brutal round for all but the most intrepid first-timers. At 7,526 feet/2,294 meters and 8,816 feet/2,687 meters, respectively, the Blue Tees and Gold Tees step up the pain even more.
But the aspects that would make the course a slog for most beginners are exactly what longtime disc golfers love.
"The hack thing to say about any given course is it requires every shot, but Moraine really does," Lachendro said. "You're gonna throw down a hill. You're gonna throw up some hills. You need a lot of things bending to the right or left depending on where you are. And then it's all tight and in the woods. You don't get a free hole where it's just kind of a gimme."
It's impressive, too, that a track that's been around for this long has needed only relatively minor tweaks to continuously impress and challenge modern players with modern discs. Other than additions of multiple possible pin positions and a progression in tees from dirt to rubber mats to today's concrete, the course is still largely in its original form.
Along with holding up over two decades of advancement in discs and player skillsets, Lakeview at Moraine offers something very few free courses do: A large swath of land used exclusively for disc golf. Moraine State Park is a busy place that welcomes over a million visitors a year, but the part of it where Lakeview is constructed has nothing but disc golf infrastructure.
"The entire course is on its own," said Lachendro. "There is not shared property. We share a parking lot, I guess, with the beach although it's a large parking lot. In playing the course you do not come into the bike trail. You do not come into the local playground. There are no picnic tables. There are no hiking trails. It is just you in the woods on the course."
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Lakeview Disc Golf Course at Moraine State Park
Three real reviews of Lakeview at Moraine from disc golfers on UDisc:
