Here you can learn all about Flip City Disc Golf Park in Shelby, Michigan. Founded in 1980, this course is often the oldest track in the World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100. It has kept disc golfers excited to play both by updating its baskets, tees, and more to keep up with expectations while maintaining the super fun shots that made it a destination to begin with.
Flip City is ranked #21 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 Flip City 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 Flip City Disc Golf Park
- How hard is it?
- What's it like to play?
- Three real five-star reviews
Flip City Disc Golf Park: Basic Info
- When did Flip City Disc Golf Park open?
1980 - How many times has Flip City Disc Golf 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 Flip City Disc Golf Park?
Bill McKenzie - Is Flip City Disc Golf Park free or pay-to-play?
Pay-to-play. See its UDisc Courses entry for pricing. - When is Flip City Disc Golf Park available for public play?
Seasonal, April through October.
History of Flip City Disc Golf
Bill McKenzie is the founder, owner, and – until getting a helping hand from his son a fw years ago – the one-man maintenance crew of Flip City. He has played disc golf for over 40 years, first learning about the sport from neighbors coming home from college in 1978.
"We made an object course in our small town," McKenzie recalled. "At one point on that course, you had to throw to the goal post on the football field that had fence all around it, so you had to climb the fence and climb back out.
Two years later, McKenzie bought 80 acres of farmland not far from Michigan's Gold Coast from his grandparents, and one of the first things that McKenzie and his friends did was create an object course on the property.
"My friend Nick Elliot brought out some paint, and we laid out an 18-hole object course that the layout still pretty much follows today," McKenzie said. "Simple, short holes, and we played quite a bit."
For about 10 years, only McKenzie's group of friends knew about or played the course regularly. However, as disc golf's popularity began to grow in the 90s, word-of-mouth started bringing more interested people to McKenzie's private disc golf paradise of rolling hills with the perfect mix of open fields and woodland.
Some of those visitors helped convince McKenzie that his course and property were special enough to deserve an upgrade.
"I had a few guys come from Grand Rapids – a big city, they had baskets early – and they said, 'Man, you gotta get baskets; this place is unreal,'" Mackenzie said.
In 1998, he did just that and bought and installed 18 Mach V baskets to replace the object targets that he'd used for nearly two decades. He paid for them in part by charging players $1 to play (a fee that's now $5). That low fee says something about the spirit behind Flip City. As if the course was more of a public service than a business, McKenzie only seems to charge the minimum needed to keep the course maintained and improving.
As the years went on, more and more people visited and loved Flip City despite McKenzie never doing anything to advertise it. These extra visitors allowed McKenzie to improve the course further, adding six more holes to the original 18 and also putting in a permanent set of long tees.
Today, Flip City is a staple of Michigan disc golf, believed by many to be the best course in the state and a constant in the World's Best Disc Golf Courses top 100.
How Hard Is Flip City Disc Golf Park?
Flip City has a 24-hole and 18-hole layout, both of which are best for fairly experienced disc golfers. This is how those layouts stack up in terms of distance, difficulty, and more:
| Layout Name | Distance |
Technicality | Overall Difficulty | Par Rating* | Scoring Average* |
| 24 Holes | Long | Technical | Challenging | 208 | +12 |
| Original 18 | Long | Technical | Challenging | 204 | +8 |
*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 learn more about these layouts, visit Flip City'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 Disc Golf at Flip City?
Built on a former farm, Flip City has plenty of open areas, but it's still a mostly wooded plot of land. The course features a blend of these two characteristics on almost every hole. In fact, a common theme at Flip City is starting in one landscape and ending in the other – a tee pad in the open and a basket in a wooded area or vice versa.
When through the woods, the fairways are well-defined and generally relatively wide as compared with those on typical wooded courses. Many of the open fairways either utilize a few well-placed trees to keep things interesting or force players to deal with another hallmark of Flip City: elevation change.
McKenzie's land is made up of rolling hills, and his design often has players throwing up or down them or even across a small valley from one hilltop to another. Almost all disc golfers love launching a shot from up high and watching it glide, and Flip City offers plenty of opportunities to do just that.
As for difficulty, McKenzie specifically wants the course to be challenging enough to entertain experienced players but still accessible to everyone.
"I'd say it's for general play, not championship or pro level," McKenzie said. "You bring your family, and you have a good time."
This means that though you can expect to throw a wide variety of interesting lines and shot shapes, you won't be needing a big arm to score well at Flip City.
Three Real Five Star Reviews of Flip City Disc Golf Park
Three real reviews of Flip City from disc golfers on UDisc:
Note that the publication date of this post reflects the last time we made minor updates to it. Some information has not changed since a major update in 2022.
