Poland's Data-Driven Approach Has It Primed For More Growth

This story originally appeared in UDisc's 2025 Disc Golf Growth Report.

For Bartosz Wiśniewski, data is how disc golf grows.

A high-level tournament director and owner of Discpoint.pl, Poland's biggest retailer, Wiśniewski encourages his fellow players to record their rounds on UDisc so they can use that information to supercharge the organic growth that's already underway.

• 🇵🇱 The Central European country of 37 million people gained seven new courses in 2024, bringing its total to 28.

• 🚀 The number of rounds played increased by 167% while the average number of rounds per player jumped from 6 to 10.

There's a little piece of information that appeals to everyone, as Wiśniewski tells it.

Local club and league members push each other to see who can log the most rounds each month; Wiśniewski said he played about 1,000 rounds of disc golf in 2024, for example, but only tracked about 30% of them – a habit he plans to change this year.

"It's caused big competition in my group," he said. "Players are trying to catch up to each other. 'Oh, I got 25 rounds in January. How many did you get?'"

Local governments, meanwhile, love knowing where players are coming from to visit their town's courses, or to see how disc golf measures up to other forms of recreation they are investing in.

"I showed [the course stats] PDF to our mayor, and he was surprised when comparing it to other sports in the town like archery or martial arts that are growing in popularity," Wiśniewski said. "'Oh my gosh, 300 individual players on one simple course? That's great.'"

These insights have even gained the attention of Lasy Państwowe, Poland's organization that oversees regional forest districts. Wiśniewski said that the entity is interested in activities that will draw people to parklands and encourage them to be outdoors and active, and that the low cost of a disc golf course makes the sport even more appealing.

"We're trying to cooperate with them to make sure they love disc golf," Wiśniewski said. "Build a local course in every neighborhood forest."

A breakthrough like that would put Poland on a fast track to catching up to neighboring Czechia and its 196 courses or, someday, meeting the lofty standards of a country like Finland. And while Wiśniewski indeed sees those places as aspirational, he hopes that, with time and care, Poland's dramatically larger population can help it exceed both.

• ☝️ To make his point, he noted that the number of people in Finland – roughly 5.6 million – is the same as the number of people who live within 100 kilometers of his home course in Gliwice.

"There's 1,000 courses in Finland," he said. "So I can imagine in my 100-kilometer radius also having 1,000 courses."