Here you can learn all about Olympus Disc Golf Course in Brooksville, Florida (formerly Gran Canyon or the Throw Down the Mountain course). After a fraught history as a disc golf course, it is now owned by six-time disc golf world champion Paul McBeth and disc golf-loving Major League Baseball pitcher Dylan Cease. It's known for huge elevation changes and unusual terrain resulting from a previous life as a quarry that differentiate it from almost every other landscape in Florida.
Olympus Disc Golf Course is ranked #80 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 picture of Olympus 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 Olympus Disc Golf Course
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Olympus Disc Golf Course: Basic Info
- How many times has Olympus Disc Golf Course made the annual World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100 since the rankings were first released in 2020?
Year 202020212022202320242025 Top 100? Years when the course wasn't eligible to make the top 100 rankings are crossed out.
This marks the first year the course was included in the top 100 because it was previously a temporary course that didn't meet our minimum thresholds for availability. It first became available year-round with regular opening times in early 2024. - When did Olympus Disc Golf Course open?
Disc golf first came to the property in 1998. McBeth and Cease officially opened the permanent Olympus course in early 2024. - Who designed Olympus Disc Golf Course?
There have been many iterations of this course, all of which have influenced its current layout. Gregg Hosfeld designed the original course, Mike Barnett made significant redesigns between 2013 and early 2023, and Paul McBeth has been involved with all major course alterations since early 2023. - Is Olympus Disc Golf Course free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. Book your spot on the course's website. - When is Olympus Disc Golf Course available for public play?
Year-round with the exception of tournament dates and Mondays, which are reserved for members only.
History of Olympus Disc Golf Course
There have been many distinct phases in the history of Olympus Disc Golf Course – AKA, Gran Canyon, AKA, the Throw Down the Mountain course. So we've broken this up into sections. Read it all for a complete overview of the beloved property's background as a disc golf course or click/tap whichever era interests you most:
- The Beginnings: Finding & Losing Gran Canyon
- Throw Down the Mountain: The Temporary Course Years
- The Purchase: How & Why Paul McBeth & Dylan Cease Bought a Disc Golf Course Together
- The Lawsuit: Why McBeth & Cease Were Sued Shortly After Buying Olympus Disc Golf Course
- Olympus Disc Golf Course Today
The Beginnings: Finding & Losing Gran Canyon
Olympus Disc Golf Course sits on the site of a former limestone quarry, and that history is precisely why the property is such a standout in its region. The excavation work left behind dramatic elevation changes that don't occur naturally in Florida's typically flat landscape, and those ups and downs make for memorable disc golf holes.
They also make for good mountain biking, which is something a former owner of the property, John Benefield, allowed there back in the 1990s. A mountain biker who lived in the area, Brad Augsburger, was also a disc golfer, and he thought the land, which cyclists knew as "Gran Canyon," could be turned into a great course. Since Benefield was open to hosting one outdoor sport on his land, it seemed worth pitching him on another one.
Augsburger mentioned the idea to his friend Gregg Hosfeld, a disc golf course designer and former disc golf world champion in the pro open division who lived in Florida. Intrigued, Hosfeld put in a lot of time researching the site and its owner from afar before somewhat nervously picking up the phone to call Benefield for what he expected to be a delicate conversation.
It turned out that both his worries and throrough preparation hadn't been necessary. He recalled the chat going like this:
BENEFIELD: Yes?
HOSFELD: Hi, I'm trying to reach John Benefield. Is this John?
BENEFIELD: Yes.
HOSFELD: John, I have a friend who rides mountain bikes out on your land and he plays a game called disc golf. Have you heard of it?
BENEFIELD: Yes.
HOSFELD: Well, he thought it'd be an amazing place to play the game. Would you have any interest in doing that?
BENEFIELD: Yes.
Just like that, Hosfeld had permission to visit Gran Canyon and plan a course.
"Initially, I wasn't all that impressed, but after I started walking around the property, I was like, 'This is amazing' – the cliffs and valleys and whatnot," Hosfeld said.
It took Hosfeld at least a dozen trips to the site over a two-month span to formulate a layout as the property was large, arduous to traverse, and full of sawgrass – a plant that, though not actually a grass, lives up to the "saw" part of its common name.
"I learned quickly that I couldn't go out there in shorts," Hosfeld said.
His own standards were another reason for the relatively slow design process. Hosfeld was the first truly prolific disc golf course collector, and while playing through more courses than literally anyone else alive at the time, he'd made some promises to himself as a designer.
"A lot of those courses were just grossly below standard, and I always worked really hard to design something people would enjoy and have fun [on], be kind of challenging but fair," Hosfeld said.
Once finally satisfied with the design, Hosfeld organized an event at the course with his friend Rick McCafferty that was part of a tournament series initially called "DiscHovering Central Florida" and later dubbed "Have Course – Will Travel." Interestingly, McCafferty had a set of 18 baskets he'd bought after winning the lottery in Delaware. He and Hosfeld, utilizing a method that still works today, used them to set up temporary tournament courses throughout the Sunshine State in hopes of convincing community leaders or landowners that permanent courses would be both viable and beneficial.
That first competition took place in late January 1998. Hosfeld narrowly defeated Ken Climo, who had just won his seventh straight world title (on the road to 12 total) the year before. At a second event there later the same year, Climo bested Hosfeld by 10 strokes.
Regardless of who came out on top at the competitions, they produced a big victory for Hosfeld and McCafferty's strategy.
"We ran a couple of more events and eventually John [Benefield] gave us permission to put the course in permanently," Hosfeld said. "We had a lot of help from a lot of people. Those who had come to our events realized what a special opportunity this was."
People – including Florida native Climo – donated or loaned baskets to the project, which started out as an 18-hole course but was expanded to 27 thanks to a nine-hole configuration first developed by Augsburger and later tweaked by Hosfeld.
Though the course was permanent, its availability wasn't. Benefield didn't want disc golfers on his property when he wasn't fully aware of their presence. To play at Gran Canyon during this era before cell phones were ubiquitous, you had to call Benefield's home number and hope not only that he would pick up but also have the time and interest in meeting up with you at the course so you could pay him to play it.
These and others of the owner's particularities made it so that Gran Canyon could never turn into a truly profitable pay-to-play destination.
"John was a very cool and interesting gentleman, but, you know, he walked around with a .38 tucked into his belt," Hosfeld said. "I brought that up, and he said, 'Yep, I ain't arguing with anybody on my property.'"
Still, those who did get to play the track were almost always enchanted. As the years went on, tournament spots became ever hotter commodities and the property gained a reputation as one of the world's top disc golf destinations during the early aughts. You can get a look at Gran Canyon during that time period (along with your fill of metal music) in this clip from The Ultimate Disc Golf Show:
That footage was filmed not long before Benefield would abruptly give Hosfeld some heartbreaking news. The course designer was out at the Brooksville site for what he thought would be a normal meeting when Benefield said Hosfeld should go play a bit while he finished some business with another man.
"I went and played a few holes, and when I got back, the property had sold," Hosfeld said. "And I was just so crestfallen. We'd worked so hard to turn that thing into something special."
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Throw Down the Mountain: The Temporary Course Years
The new owners had no interested in retaining a permanent disc golf course on the land, and the local and wider disc golf community mourned the loss of Gran Canyon when the property sold in 2006. But the purchase happened at the height of the housing bubble of the late aughts, and when that bubble burst spectacularly, the new landowners' plans to develop the site burst with it.
As the property continued to go untouched, Mike Barnett started contacting the owners regularly about allowing him to set up a temporary course for competitive play. Barnett is the founder of the disc golf store Sun King Discs. It's not far outside of Tampa, Florida, and a little under an hour's drive from modern-day Olympus.
"I'd call them once or twice a year, just upping the amount of money that I'd pay them to use the property for a weekend, and finally I got them to commit to two weekends," Barnett said. "We made it happen, and it kind of launched the new era of the course and the property."
Barnett called that 2013 event Throw Down the Mountain (TDTM), a name now as synonymous with the Brooksville locale as Gran Canyon.
For over a decade, it became tradition for Barnett to lease the land for a short span early each year as winter faded and spring began. The limited availability of its host course added to TDTM's mystique and appeal, and its hundreds of spots for amateur and pro players would often fill within minutes after registration opened.
"It became a shrine of sorts," Barnett said. "It was something that people just literally were waiting all year round to come up and play and be part of."
And with holes like this from the 2019 TDTM, you can understand why:
Of course, it wasn't easy to annually resurrect a course that hadn't been touched in nearly a year. Barnett and his team always had just a few weeks to tame a year's worth of Florida's quick-growing, prickly, and sharp flora – including plenty of that saw grass – to make a viable disc golf course ready to host hundreds of competitors, some of whom were among the world's best and most influential disc golfers. The dramatic drop-offs and other rugged terrain that make the spot such a dreamy disc golf locale were nightmares for transporting maintenance tools and course equipment efficiently.
Along with those concerns, Barnett was constantly tweaking the layout. The 27-hole design had included many fun shots, but it wasn't created for the huge numbers of tournament-goers Barnett's event attracted. It caused some grumbling from players who'd known and loved the course in the early 2000s, but over years of running TDTM, Barnett trimmed the layout down to 18 holes that prioritized safety and pace of play as much as fun and competitive drama.
"I was simply designing it from a tournament director's standpoint – I didn't care what people thought of it in a lot of ways," Barnett said. "I didn't want backups like there used to be on the old layout, criss-crossing fairways, interference. Not that no one enjoyed the original course design or playing on the property, but when you start ramping up – we went from two weekends to four weekends – I started looking at the bigger picture and said, 'We can't get that many people through here.'"
Barnett's redesigns required him to explore parts of the property that hadn't been used for disc golf before. He was particularly keen to find places that allowed players to throw down the extreme drops the property was famous for without any chance for players' discs or travel to and from their shots to interfere with other holes. Given the short time Barnett had each year to prepare the course, perfecting it took many iterations of TDTM.
"We went through a lot of changes the first, probably, seven, eight, nine years, and then the last four or five years, we've been using kind of the same flow pattern," Barnett said.
Today, Olympus Disc Golf Course largely follows the most recent versions of Barnett's TDTM design.
But just as Barnett was satisfied with his layout and his yearly preparations for TDTM were falling into a more predictable rhythm, he got a phone call informing him that it all was in jeopardy. It was early 2023, and the start of the TDTM was close. The call was from the current landowner, the widow of the man who'd bought the land from Benefield.
She had an offer for the property, but – as Barnett had gotten her to promise some years before – she wanted to give him a chance to find a buyer in the disc golf community who could match it before selling to other interests. She wouldn't wait long, though, so Barnett had to move fast.
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The Purchase: How & Why Paul McBeth & Dylan Cease Bought a Disc Golf Course Together
When he heard the ultimatum, Barnett felt like the property's future as a disc golf course likely rested on the decision of one person: A six-time pro disc golf world champion who'd already expressed interest in buying the land to Barnett. The same player had also famously signed the first-ever disc golf sponsorship deal worth over $1 million and, in 2021, had signed a 10-year contract extension worth $10 million.
The person was, of course, Paul McBeth. And when Barnett got in touch, the disc golf superstar was immediately intrigued. He and his wife had just sold one of their houses and were considering reinvesting the profits into another home, but when McBeth heard about Gran Canyon, he was open to using those funds to buy it. He didn't have the capital to go all in on his own, though, so he got in touch with his pal Dylan Cease, a Major League Baseball pitcher who loves disc golf.
The friendship between McBeth and Cease had started at a private event hosted by former MMA fighter Ben Askren at his own disc golf course, Funky Farms. McBeth, who considered pursuing baseball before going all in on disc golf, found that he and Cease had plenty to chat about.
"He's playing my first passion professionally, and I'm playing his current passion professionally, so we had a lot of questions and talks about that," McBeth said.
When Barnett contacted McBeth about buying Gran Canyon, Cease had just purchased property to build a championship-level course in Alabama that McBeth was designing called Cactus Rock. Still, McBeth believed Cease might be open to the opportunity Gran Canyon presented.
"I reached out to Dylan and said, 'Hey, I know you just bought this course, but would you be interested in buying another one? This one, I can tell you, is going to be one of the top ones in the world, and it's pretty much already designed. We just need to make a move on it,'" McBeth said. "And it just happened really quickly."
Cease confirmed he was in to McBeth, and McBeth told Barnett that he and Cease were prepared to match the offer from the real estate developers for Gran Canyon. From there, Barnett became a liaison for all parties as they finalized the property's sale at $1.2 million – all while he was preparing to run multiple weekends of Florida's largest disc golf event (including, weirdly, dealing with deep tire tracks left all over the course by someone illegally shooting an SUV commercial while the land was under his lease).
"We were just trying get the deal done, and it was just chaos there for about three weeks," Barnett said. "But we finally came to a deal."
Though Barnett tried to keep the sale under wraps until it was finished, rumors swirled. Finally, McBeth made the big announcement on Instagram in a post on March 23, 2023, a week before the pro weekend of that year's TDTM: He and Cease had bought the land, and they planned to open a year-round pay-to-play course there as soon as possible.
"I think there was a huge sigh of relief when the news finally broke that the course was going to remain a course," Barnett said.
You can watch a small ceremony filmed by The Disc Golf Guy that Barnett prepared for the end of the 2023 TDTM pro weekend – which McBeth won – commemorating the property's transition to a place dedicated to disc golf. It includes a brief recap of the history you've read up to this point and gives you a look at most of the major players in our story: McBeth, Barnett (shirt with Cease and #84 on it), Hosfeld (green shirt, shorts, and broad-rimmed hat), and the previous landowner (red tank-top).
This touching moment of hope for the local disc golf community was quickly followed by less exciting news: Someone was suing McBeth and Cease.
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The Lawsuit: Why McBeth & Cease Were Sued Shortly After Buying Olympus Disc Golf Course
Because it seems that nothing at this storied site can happen without a twist, McBeth and Cease – who formed McCease LLC to purchase and run Olympus Disc Golf Course – weren't able to open their new course in 2023 as they hoped because a participant at the 2023 TDTM sued them. The player, Trevor Toenjes, also a local disc golf store owner, said he was hit by a disc while playing one of the tournament weekends. He claimed a variety of serious negative physical and mental effects from the incident and that the property owners – McCease LLC – should be held financially responsible.
The suit was widely regarded as frivolous in the disc golf world, and that point of view was only strengthened when Toenjes competed in two tournaments just a few months after the allegedly devastating injury, even winning one of them. For more complete details, you can check out this video from Disc Golf dot Law:
Still, while the suit made its way through the legal system, progress on the course – and its opening date – were in limbo. It took eight months for the case to be dismissed by a Florida judge in December 2023, who, as reported by Ultiworld Disc Golf, "dismissed the lawsuit after Toenjes failed to comply with a court order to provide responses to the defense during discovery."
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Olympus Disc Golf: The Course Today
In February 2024, the property locals often called "the Canyon" or "the Mountain" officially opened as Olympus Disc Golf Course. McBeth said they arrived at that name because it was "strong and powerful" like what the course demands of players and fit with the Throw Down the Mountain tournament, which is how most modern disc golfers know about the property.
"If you go back to one of the most famous mountains from all the old mythical stories: Mount Olympus," McBeth said. "That's where we got the name, and Dylan and I are both really into history, so it just fit so well."
It didn't hurt that Mount Olympus is the mythical home of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses, the same pantheon where McBeth draws every name for his personal line of discs made by his sponsor Discraft (e.g., the Hades distance driver or Athena fairway driver).
Shortly after purchasing the course, McBeth spent a week there working on a few major hole redesign projects. Now the property can usually be maintained by a single person who covers day-to-day essentials.
McBeth's expectations are for Olympus to continue to climb the ranks of the World's Best Disc Golf Courses as he and Cease become able to invest more in its development. McBeth called it "the ultimate dream" for the spot to grow from only a course and pro shop as it currently is into a local social hub, even for non-disc golfers.
"We want a clubhouse there one day, to where people can come, hang out, get food, get drinks, relax, and watch disc golf if they want," McBeth said. "But have it to where people in the community can just come even if they don't play disc golf. They can come for lunch, dinner, make friends, meet with friends...They don't even have to throw a disc, but we want to share disc golf in that clubhouse."
But for that to happen, plenty of disc golfers will need to heed the call McBeth made in our conversation with him.
"We're open to the public – go to Olympus!" McBeth said.
And though that's definitely a request to financially support this pay-to-play track, there's a certain sweetness to it. After being the site of disc golf joys and dramas for over a quarter-century, this land is finally home to a course that's "open to the public" day in and day out.
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How Hard Is Olympus Disc Golf Course?
Olympus Disc Golf Course offers multiple 18-hole layouts, all of which are likely to be most fun for experienced disc golfers rather than beginners. This is how its easiest and hardest layouts based on score relative to par stack up:
| Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* | |
| Easiest Layout | Green to Red | Long | Technical | Challenging | 169 | +3 |
| Hardest Layout | Turf to Blue | Very Long | Highly Technical | Very Challenging | 260 | +20 |
*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.
You can find this information on all of Olympus' layouts (with the exception of par rating) by checking out Olympus Disc Golf Course on UDisc Courses.
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 at Olympus Disc Golf Course?
Multi-time disc golf world champion and Olympus co-owner Paul McBeth said the property wowed him as soon as he laid eyes on it.
"When I played it the first time – there're no other course that I've played like it," McBeth said.
Mike Barnett, a long time tournament director at the site, said that reaction is what almost everyone feels, even those who've watched tournament coverage filmed there for years.
"There's a magic – there's an aura," Barnett explained. "It's peaceful, it's quiet, it's magnificent, it's beautiful, it's dangerous. There's just so many different little parts to it that you feel like you're in a dream or on a different planet."
Part of the otherworldly feeling comes from the juxtaposition of the location's elevation changes with the almost unbroken flatness of Florida. For example, the highest point in Tampa, which is just an hour from Olympus, is a whopping 48 feet/15 meters – or, in disc golf terms, just a mid-circle two putt – above sea level. Imagine coming from that landscape to the one Barnett described to us.
"We're not talking about the Carolinas with rolling, tight-wooded courses and big hills and even playing in the mountains in some cases – what we're talking about are literally drop-offs; it's a cliff!" Barnett said. "Sometimes it's three stories down, and sometimes it's 10 stories down."
The sheer and sudden drops mean players get lots of chances to see their discs fly down, down, down, though they're often asked to send them back up, up, up once they do. Along with elevation, Olympus' fairways tend to be lined with tight woods that punish any errant shot.
Though there is a short layout with a number of holes around and under 200 feet/61 meters, the course is most likely to be fun for experienced, fairly fit disc golfers. Rounds on the shortest layout take around two hours and forty minutes per UDisc averages whereas rounds on the hardest layout go up to nearly three and a half hours.
When planning a trip to Olympus, it's also advisable to think about temperature norms in Florida, where fall, winter, and spring typically feel perfect (the average high in January at Olympus, for example, is around 70° F/21° C), and summer is usually sweltering. McBeth said winter and spring tend to be the course's busiest seasons.
With all that said, as much as we'd like to prepare you for what Olympus will be like, Barnett told us it's a lost cause.
"You really won't get it until the first time you're there and you walk over to hole 1 and hole 18 and look over the cliffs – not even the biggest drops on the course – and you just go, 'Whoa, this is real,'" Barnett said.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Olympus Disc Golf Course
Three real reviews of Olympus from disc golfers on UDisc:
