What is The Mobile Disc Golf Experience?

The Mobile Disc Golf Experience is one of many services we provide at Explore Disc Golf. Being a full-service disc golf design-build firm, we have focused a lot of our energies on helping bring disc golf to new locations through course design and site planning, equipment rentals and The Mobile Disc Golf Experience. After a successful summer tour which took The Mobile Disc Golf Experience to almost a dozen locations, we are currently contracting appearances up and down the East Coast in 2013.

The approach shot to a basket surrounded by specimen trees at The Mobile Disc Golf Experience in Virginia.

The Mobile Disc Golf Experience is a traveling disc golf course comprised of 3 to 9 baskets complete with hole and wayfinding signage, environmental education, and a vending booth that provides disc and apparel sales in addition to free disc rentals for any and all patrons that want to play the course. The goal of The Mobile Disc Golf Experience is quite simple: to make the sport of disc golf as accessible as possible to the general public, while taking advantage of underutilized space to provide a fun, environmentally-friendly form of passive recreation for users of all ages and skill levels.

The first summer of The Mobile Disc Golf Experience was an incredible success. In total, we attended 11 music festivals that took us up and down the East Coast, and had over 4,000 patrons play The Mobile Disc Golf Experience! Starting at Barnaby’s Bluegrass Blowout in Vermont on May 18^th and culminating at The Festy Experience in Virginia on October 7^th, our summer tour was a whirlwind of disc golf installations, clinics, giveaways and free disc rentals. We setup courses at ski resorts, breweries, summer camps, resorts, farms, race tracks, and privately owned land.

The 4th basket of The Mobile Disc Golf Experience in Maine was perched on a “turtle back” green where any errant shots would run away into the rough below.

While The Mobile Disc Golf Experience tends to focus on events like music festivals and camps, there is no limit to where it can be set up. It is always an exciting challenge to arrive at a location and conduct a full site analysis and site plan to determine where a course would be best suited. We want to provide the patrons with a beginner-friendly, yet technically challenging course that takes advantage of underutilized space and significant on-site features while remaining close enough to the activity that it receives the amount of usage that we and the festival promoters desire.

As disc golf continues to grow, we are doing our very best to promote the sport and its low environmental impact. We have taken the “build it and they will come” motto literally and have enjoyed a wonderful reception from patrons and festivals alike. Many festivals have disc golf courses on their grounds, but are seldom utilized due to the fact that they don’t promote this recreational opportunity, or better yet, provide any discs for patrons to use. We decided to bridge that gap by bringing a full arsenal of discs for patrons to use — free of charge — for as long as the course is in the ground. We have found that this is also a great way to help beginners get going in the sport, as they can “try it before they buy it” by playing rounds with multiple discs to see their different flight characteristics.

The 4th tee of The Mobile Disc Golf Experience at Umphrey’s McGee’s sUMmerschool in New York demanded a precision drive that lands short of the cross rough, enabling a straight approach shot to the basket 25′ below grade of the fairway.

If we had to narrow our 2012 summer tour down to three highlights, they would have to be: the wonderful use of underutilized space and over 2,500 course users at Life is Good Festival in Canton, MA; the technical design in addition to the band-centric course promotion we created at Umphrey’s McGee’s sUMmerschool in Big Indian, NY and; the incredibly unique use of underutilized space on a 2.2 acre piece of property cleared by Goat Busters over a period of 5 days at The Festy Experience in Roseland, VA. Each course received a wonderful reception, and we look forward to being at these three events next summer as well!

As winter sets in here in the Northeast, we are busy contracting appearances for The Mobile Disc Golf Experience at festivals up and down the East Coast in 2013. The response to providing this alternative activity really appealed to several festivals, enough so that we have been contacted by several of the biggest festivals the United States has to offer. We currently have multiple fleets of The Mobile Disc Golf Experience to help accommodate for the demand of this ever-popular service, so if you’d like to see us at any specific event, please contact the festival and tell them you want The Mobile Disc Golf Experience by Explore Disc Golf or e-mail us directly at info@explorediscgolf.com.