How To Get A Disc Golf Course In Your Area

Get measurable, data-driven results for your community

When your city puts in a new amenity, how are you gauging its use?

Trail counters and cameras are accurate, but pricey. Headcounts and programming play a role, but they don't always scale.

When you install a disc golf course and add it to UDisc, you'll get consistent, up-to-date insights on how much your new infrastructure is being put to use, where players are coming from, and much more. All for free.

UDisc's informational offerings go beyond just your course, too:

• Stay up on industry-wide stats and trends with our annual Disc Golf Growth Report.
• Identify the best place to install your next disc golf course by consulting the Disc Golf Health Index.
• Subscribe to the Release Point newsletter for inspiration around programming, course design best practices, best of lists, and more.

Serve twice as many people per hour as pickleball

Pickleball is still having a moment, and rightfully so. Its smaller footprint and lower cost compared to tennis make it a boon for parks and recreation departments looking to cater to an ever-growing audience.

Wait, smaller footprint and lower cost than its traditional predecessor? Sounds like disc golf, too.

Let's look at the two on a players per hour basis to generate their daily throughput:

9-hole disc golf course
4 players per hole x 9 holes x 12 hours = 432 players served daily

4-court pickleball facility
4 players per court x 4 courts x 12 hours = 192 players served daily

Disc golf courses serve more than twice as many people as your typical pickleball facility, for a fraction of the cost to install.

"It's a common thing you should have on your menu," said Bill Maertz, the director of community services for the city of Santee, California. "It's not anything weird or avant-garde anymore. It's like a playground: You should have one in your city."

Repurpose and revitalize park spaces

Bill Maertz, the director of community services for the city of Santee, California, noted how important disc golf has been to Mast Park. While the venue hosted a playground and drew some traffic, its open spaces used to attract vagrancy and vandalism.

Those problems have drastically improved since the San Diego Aces Disc Golf Club helped to install a 9-hole course there in 2015. More than 20,000 rounds were recorded at the park with UDisc in 2025 – a number that has more than doubled since 2020 – and the constant churn of players helps keep unsavory behavior to a minimum.

"We wanted to activate the space and make it more friendly to people and get more people in there," Maertz said. "It became very popular and it drove a lot of people to this area of the park that weren't there before."

Aces Club President Allen Risley, who has installed several courses in San Diego County, made the pitch more succinctly.

"I tout disc golf as the rotating neighborhood watch," he said.

And a disc golf course doesn't need to be installed at a typical park to thrive. One of the world's best disc golf courses, DeLaveaga Park in Santa Cruz, California, was originally infested with poison oak and used as a dumping ground for garbage and broken down vehicles. Now, it is one of the most played courses in California and hosts an active, thriving community.

Provide recreational value to your residents

Disc golfers receive up to $70 in recreational benefits per round.

That's according to a study conducted by three environmental economists – Kevin Meyer of Saginaw Valley State University, Jimena González-Ramírez of Manhattan University, and Kenneth Liao of Farmingdale State College – in the New York City area during fall 2022 and summer 2023. By combining a series of in-person surveys with participation records from UDisc, they determined that disc golfers who played FDR State Park and Heckscher Forest Championship incurred travel costs but derived even greater value from their visits.

That recreational benefit is known as a "consumer surplus." Essentially, it's the amount of extra value someone receives from an activity on top of how much they paid for it. All told, disc golfers at FDR State Park and Heckscher realized a combined annual recreational value of $6.4 million.

Applying the study's findings, it would take 429 rounds for disc golfers to realize $30,000 in recreational value – a figure that also serves as a reasonable starting estimate for the cost of installing a new 18-hole course.

That means you need just over one round per day on a course to get the bang for your community's buck.

"Disc golf is more than just a casual pastime; it's a high-value recreational resource," Liao said. "When you see numbers like these, it's clear that disc golf courses deliver a return on investment that few other public amenities can match."

Add an extra revenue stream via a trending sport

According to the National Golf Foundation, 90 golf courses in the United States closed in 2024.

Disc golf can help save them.

There are nearly 550 disc golf courses in UDisc's online course directory that share space with traditional golf. That number has more than doubled in the last five years as disc golf has continued to explode in popularity and scale.

One of those – Reidy Creek Golf Course, a bucolic muni in Escondido, California, that also has a footgolf course – saw a $2,000 increase in revenue from a single disc golf tournament on a temporary set-up in January 2019, head golf pro Steve Lyons said. The course then invested $9,000 in 18 disc golf baskets and associated equipment and made the layout permanent in May.

By June, they had paid off their investment, and now disc golf accounts for an additional 10-30% in revenue.

"To me now, it's every golf course that's a par-3 course – unless they are absolutely ripping busy – it doesn't make sense why you wouldn't have disc golf," Lyons said.

Here's one more stat, just as a bonus: Lyons said that disc golf brings in four times more revenue than footgolf.

9 holes are plenty – and the norm

While disc golf takes inspiration from the traditional version of the game played with clubs and balls, there is one area where flexibility is key: the number of holes that make up a course.

In fact, the running trend for disc golf over the past five years is that 60% of new installs are courses with 9 holes or fewer.

Prove it with a pop-up

From Chicago to Calgary to the UK and Germany, the concept of the "pop-up" course is a tried and true method to show that there is demand for disc golf in your community.

How's it work? Find a park, create a layout, and get organized. Call on other local players to bring their own baskets, make it a regular occurrence, and spread the word.

It's paid off in the Windy City, where non-profit organization Disc Golf Chicago has moved from a one-hole exposition-style event in the city center to now working hand-in-glove with the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to identify parkland that will put the sport in front of the most people possible.

It's not uncommon for temporary courses on traditional golf courses to eventually become permanent fixtures in metro areas where open land may come at a premium, too. We've also seen disc golfers pioneer "bring your own basket" setups in England, Greece, Germany, and several other locales as they satisfy interest and prove there is demand for the sport.

Just be sure to play ball with local authorities – it's always best to get their sign-off before you go and commandeer a park without permission.

"My local officials were excited for someone to take initiative to offer a new activity for locals, but it was good to get clear permission to use a specific space for pop-up disc golf events," said Alex Williamson, who helped his town of Bad Sobernheim, Germany, design and install its first disc golf course. "The space I originally wanted to use turned out to be owned privately by local farmers – not the city. If I'd run events there without asking, it could have made disc golf a contentious issue from the get-go."

"By seeking approval, you make sure disc golf gets off on the right foot in your area, make contacts in the right places, and establish yourself as a thoughtful and trustworthy person to work with," Williamson said.

Plan an event as proof of concept

The seeds for the Diavolo Disc Golf Course at New Hope Park were planted a decade before the course even went in the ground. That's when Mike Sink and Jay Pontier first held the Downtown Urban Open, an unorthodox disc golf tournament in downtown Cary, North Carolina, where players get to use their not-so-natural surroundings, like parking garages and alleys, as the course.

After three years of the tournament and several thousand dollars raised for the city parks' "Pay It Forward" fund, Sink and Pontier had proven that the need for another disc golf course in Cary was real, and they were rewarded for their efforts with the permission needed to start the Diavolo project.

"That was the first step in me trying to prove disc golf is worthy – 'let's do a tournament,'" Sink said.

Sink also said linking the event to a charitable cause was an important component in validating disc golf's potential impact on a community.

"I'm tying it to, 'Disc golf is giving back to the community,'" Sink said. "And it has."

Fast forward a few years, and the Diavolo is the most popular course in North Carolina, with more than 19,000 rounds recorded annually.

Record your rounds with UDisc

No, this isn't a blatant ploy to get more people to use the app. For many clubs and municipalities, especially those in less populated areas with fewer economic resources, measuring disc golf activity on UDisc is the most reliable way to show that a course will be worth the investment.

Our team fields scores of requests for local play count data every year from organizers who are trying to pitch disc golf to their local stakeholders, with several yielding new projects. In a survey of volunteers who built new courses in 2022, over half of respondents said they used UDisc information in their pitch to local decision-makers.

UDisc also sends more than 10,000 monthly impact reports to Course Ambassadors that include statistics on how much time people spend at their course, where they travel from, and more. These dedicated volunteers use this information to lobby for course improvements, sponsorships from local businesses and, yes, more courses.

"UDisc has helped land us three new courses in two years, lots of funding, and recognition in communities with their stats," said Brett Hanna, the director of disc golf for the Highland Valley Outdoor Association in British Columbia, Canada. "The easy-to-consume and meaningful stats streamline reporting from a place of fact and not just a place of passion."

Show up – to play, but also to advocate

If we had a dollar for every time we read a story about pickleball players banding together to pack the room at a city council meeting, we'd have…at least enough money to buy some new discs. Point being, pickleball has absolutely exploded in large part due to its players' lobbying efforts, and that's something disc golfers can learn from.

"Go to park board meetings, local city council meetings – anything – and make your presence known," Tulsa Disc Golf Association Secretary Kyle Gibon said. "Know the numbers, provide them when asked – they are a huge bargaining chip. Go even when you're not directly asking for something. When they see you present, they'll listen to you. When they keep seeing you, they will start asking you."

Evan Dintaman, a parks planner for Montgomery County in Maryland, echoed those sentiments. He mentioned the importance of being a "friendly, smiley squeaky wheel," and noted that when he held the first community meeting in his area about the possibility of installing a disc golf course, about 60 players showed up to voice their support.

"We've used that number in many different formats to tell people, 'Hey, we had broad public support because we got a better-than-expected turnout at a public meeting,'" Dintaman said.

This also extends to other community events, like park cleanups and workdays. The more you can show that disc golfers are willing to work for the greater community, and not just for themselves, the more likely it is that community leaders will embrace you.

And once you have enough people in your camp, taking the next step to formally organize your group as a non-profit or other business entity can go a long way toward legitimacy. This particularly helps both before and after you have a course and as you're thinking about programming, like events or clinics.

"It needs to be something that a town can enter into, or a city can enter into, with a contract," said Mike Sink, Operations and Program Supervisor for Sports, Parks, Recreation & Cultural Resources in Cary, North Carolina. "Because the contract then has legal backing, it has certificates of insurance, and individuals that are running programs or clinics are background checked."

But don't worry: Just hitting the course to play is always a positive, too.

"I've had numerous parks people give me the same quote: 'It doesn't matter what time of day the parks are open, it doesn't matter what the weather conditions are – there's always a disc golfer out at the parks,'" Charlotte Disc Golf Club Treasurer Mark Huether said. "You can't say that about every other park user."