Originally published at: https://discgolf.ultiworld.com/2023/02/20/a-look-inside-the-disc-golf-industry-conference/
Late last week, dozens of disc golf industry professionals gathered in Tucson, Arizona, for the Disc Golf Pro Tour’s first-ever Disc Golf Industry Conference. The event, which started Wednesday evening, offered networking opportunities for industry insiders and the chance for the Tour to bring many of the sport’s influential business people to one place at the same location as the All-Star Weekend that began Friday.
I was invited to speak on a media panel at the event alongside Terry Miller (The Disc Golf Guy, Smashboxx, DGN) and Jonathan Gomez (JomezPro founder). Full disclosure: my two-night hotel stay, conference ticket, and some meals were comped by the DGPT — and I received a stipend for speaking — but I paid for my own travel from New York.
Below are some reactions to the conference as a whole as well as some insight into the sessions that I was able to attend.
Big Picture Takeaways
This Conference Will Only Get Bigger
Overall, the DGPT’s first conference was a successful endeavor. The event’s organization was good, sessions mostly ran on time, and the Tucson El Conquistador resort is beautiful (even if it was unseasonably cold), tucked up against the mountains with a desert landscape surrounding the property. The chance to sit in on sessions on course design with experts like Steve Brinster, Leonard Muise, and John and Dee Houck is a real treat, even if you, like me, have never even considered designing a course.
I expect that the DGPT will host this conference every year moving forward, assuming they were able to make the finances work, and I think it has the potential to grow, even if it remains largely focused on industry professionals and not the broader disc golf fanbase. The opportunity to get into a room together and connect — especially after the pandemic — is powerful, and it only helps that many of the best players in the world are sitting in on sessions and playing in the pro-am scramble.
Some things can be improved — most sessions I attended felt like they needed a little more time blocked out, as speakers tended to run long and Q&A time got eaten up by presentations, and the conference could benefit from a keynote or two from experts outside the disc golf orbit — but this was a solid start.
Broad Themes: Optimism, Growth, Professionalization
When DGPT founder and MVP Open TD Steve Dodge gave his keynote speech on Thursday morning, he talked of a world where disc golf fully surpasses golf within 20 years. That kind of optimism about the growth of the sport was infused into everything. It’s easy to understand why: even before the pandemic, the sport was growing at a fast clip, and 2022 growth was in the double digits.
Dodge suggested that the number of disc golf rounds played could surpass golf rounds in 10 years, and the number of disc golfers could overtake golfers in 20, assuming a 15% growth rate (which is a bold assumption, though not one that is unfounded based on trends over the last 10 years).
In DGPT CEO Jeff Spring’s opening keynote, he drove home the tagline of the conference: “growing together.” Seemingly everyone is doing well right now, and the cold wars between manufacturers feel less present now than in the past. A rising tide is lifting all boats, but, to keep the cliches coming, everyone is a genius in a bull market. As growth continues to normalize or perhaps recedes in 2023, will this same sense of togetherness start to loosen?
After talking with lots of folks and going to the sessions, I actually think things are in really good shape. In every panel I went to — course design, national retail, law, and media — everyone, in one way or another, was talking about professionalization. How do we build great courses that are future-proofed for growing crowds? What is the next phase of online retail sales? How do players and manufacturers protect themselves in contractual agreements, and how does the industry stop playing fast and loose with intellectual property? How does media continue to evolve and improve?
Women’s Disc Golf Is Becoming a Focus
No matter the metrics you look at, men’s disc golf is more popular than women’s. Vastly more men play the sport, the PDGA membership is more than 90% male, and, unsurprisingly, the makeup of the conference was heavily skewed towards men.
What I find interesting, though, is that we are in a world where Kristin Tattar is the most well-liked player on the planet right now, and fandom of women’s disc golf is not 10% of the men’s game, it’s more like 30-40%.
Jeff Spring talked about trying to develop like tennis, where there are equal payouts for men and women at majors — and there are huge tennis superstars in both gender divisions.
Sara Nicholson (Throw Pink) and Sarah Hokom spoke in the Wednesday evening keynote about the business opportunity for marketing to women: there is so much room to grow on the women’s side of the game that there is a big opportunity, they said.
Other sessions mentioned women’s disc golf as well. It was a topic in the course design session; Leonard Muise, in particular, discussed how he was looking at data from last year’s OTB Open to make changes to the FPO layout. It was a topic in our media session — Terry Miller has been covering women’s disc golf for years, and Ultiworld Disc Golf treats the divisions as close to equally as possible. It’s a big step for Jomez to take over FPO coverage this year, and Gomez said that they are planning to devote absolutely equal coverage, with the same approach as they take to covering MPO.
It was a bit ironic, then, that there were five holes on the All-Star Weekend course that went unbirdied in FPO singles play. (Every hole was birdied in MPO.) There’s a lot of work left to do.
Notes on the Sessions I Attended
Course Design: Steve Brinster, Leonard Muise, John & Dee Houck
This was more or less three separate presentations, part of a problem with the conference. There was little interaction between panelists and, in this particular session, no time for Q&A.
However, each of the three presentations were excellent.
Brinster (who built Warwick, a personal favorite that’s widely considered the best course in New York) discussed the nuts and bolts of good course design. Topics included:
– Varying distances
– Varying shot shapes
– Putting pins in different locations (near danger, wide open, etc.)
– Allow players to control their own destiny
– Make holes that are easy and ones that are hard
– Let people experience nature on the course
– Make fair lines (“You should be able to turn your back on the shot and know if it’s good,” he said)
– Don’t just tack on distance or raise the basket to add difficulty
– Require skill, not luck — if a player misses, they should be punished; if they hit the line, they should be rewarded
– Make players use their whole bag
– Think about how players and spectators will flow around the course
– “Create an experience”
Leanord Muise, the OTB Open course designer, talked more about developing a pro tour course. He discussed his philosophy of allowing players to throw multiple lines on a tee shot to enhance creativity. He also talked about creating the “mental game stair climb,” the slowly ramping up of difficulty and pressure as a player plays their 18 holes.
His best discussion was “separating good from great.” He talked about the challenge of making birdies attainable but meaningful, and used the concept of the “tipping point,” the shot-making required to deviate from par, to illustrate it. He said he designs holes with “contenders” in mind — those players rated 1020+ in MPO and 930+ in FPO. He said if a hole feels like a “bonus birdie,” that’s a good hole.
He acknowledged that last year’s OTB Open FPO layout was too hard. “In 2022,” he said, “I underestimated the effective distance of several FPO par 3s” by not accounting for wind conditions and low ceiling shots. Although Paige Pierce shot a sparkling 10-under in round 2, there were few under par scores on the weekend and not many birdies on the par 3s. He said that he thinks he should err on the side of more birdies rather than fewer.
Finally, John and Dee Houck shared the stage for a presentation that was mostly about developing the disc golf courses of the future. It was obvious that they have spent a great deal of time developing courses. John shared slides of a mockup of a course they are working on on an old golf course in Florida. Hole 1 is being put on a mostly featureless slab of flat land, but their rendering showed significant changes to the landscape, with numerous added trees, mounds, and beautification.
John said that today’s course design is becoming more about adding than subtracting. Rather than just cutting down trees to form fairways, budgets for course design have gone up enough that it’s about looking where to plant trees, build ponds and lakes, and creating elevation change by moving dirt.
Dee talked about her concept for a teepad area that includes not just the tee but also a “skirt” around the tee to allow space for players to run onto — and off — the teepad. There was also an emphasis on thinking about spectator areas and developing elevated platforms for viewing and media. She said her focus lately has been on the architecture of a disc golf course, and it was a fascinating view into what the future of professional courses could look like.
John also discussed his personal design philosophy, which is about avoiding OB areas as much as possible and instead expecting that players are going to get into trouble off the fairway and making it possible for them to save par. He said that PGA players miss the fairway 40% of the time and that golf is often about scrambling to save par in interesting ways. In disc golf, he said, far too many courses force players to simply pitch out of bad spots instead of enabling far more interesting scramble shots.
By heavily clearing out rough and designing off-the-fairway areas the same way we focus on fairways, he said, we can make disc golf significantly more interesting.
National Retail: OTB’s Danny Corbett, Infinite’s Alan Barker, Powergrip USA’s Zach Parcell
I sat through the first section of the national retail panel and got to hear the origin story for two of the biggest online retailers, OTB and Infinite, as well as the US expansion of Powergrip, a popular European company.
What I found striking was how both OTB and Infinite grew from tiny beginnings; Danny Corbett said he was selling discs at tournaments and for years didn’t even have a website. Then they started doing some bigger events and decided to add a website, began sponsoring some pro players, and have grown extensively, expanding their warehouse capacity twice since 2019.
Barker said that he was doing disc golf reviews and SEO focused content back in 2012, then realized he could start selling the discs themselves. For a while, he was doing fulfillment through Discs Unlimited, but capacity constraints eventually had him thinking about just getting discs and selling them directly to end buyers.
In 2014, they started taking pictures of every disc for sale, a big innovation at the time. In 2016, they started making custom stamped discs. By 2018, they had their own lineup of discs through a partnership with Innova and began doing their own hot stamping in 2019.
Then, when the pandemic hit, they started doing wholesaling and distribution out of necessity: domestic supply was so limited that they started reaching out to tiny brands around the world just to find discs to sell to a quickly growing market. Now, he said, they are the primary distributors in the US for many of those smaller brands.
Parcell, who was earlier involved with All Things Disc Golf, a news site that existed before Ultiworld Disc Golf, has re-emerged as the owner of Powergrip in the US. The Finnish company announced an expansion into the US market (80% of the world’s discs are sold in the US) in 2021. He is opening a retail shop in Peoria, Illinois, in the next few weeks.
Disc Golf Law: Steve Abreu (Sunstein LLP)
I left the national retail session after the initial presentations to check out the end of a session on law in disc golf. Steve Abreu, the guy behind Sunstein and all those DGN ads, talked about a wide array of disc golf legal topics, including trademarks, registration, other IP considerations, and endorsement contracts.
This all feels more important after the news about Prodigy’s lawsuit against Gannon Buhr, where the particulars of the contract language are likely to matter a great deal if it ends up getting adjudicated in court.
I found the discussion about intellectual property ownership particularly interesting — are players ensuring that they own their logos or other assets developed in partnership with their sponsor? Abreu said that he of course would advocate for his player clients to keep any IP associated with them, but that he would do the opposite if he was representing a manufacturer.
Getting professionals to draw up contracts — and both parties making sure they have strong legal representation — is going to be extremely important moving forward. The Prodigy-Buhr story, regardless of the final outcome, will only highlight that for the rest of the industry.
Media: Me, Terry Miller (Smashboxx, DGN), Jonathan Gomez (Jomez Pro)
The media panel was, like the other sessions, less of a panel and more of a set of presentations. Terry spoke about his origins in the media world — he grinded it out for years without making a penny and spoke of his deep love for the game and its players.
Jonathan Gomez told a similar story — I was struck most about his tale of just going onto the course with a camera to film his first final 9 at Worlds and being the only person inside the ropes that wasn’t a player or caddie. Nobody ever said anything to him, they just let him be there. He said he was prepared to leave immediately if anyone had said something; we should all be happy they didn’t. Maybe Jomez would never have happened!
Both Terry and Jonathan were disc golfers from a young age and then found their way into media later on. I was sort of the opposite. I talked about starting Ultiworld and its ultimate coverage in 2012 (a vital year in disc sports development for a number of reasons) and then watching Smashboxx’s live coverage of USDGC in 2015 and thinking, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of people watching.’ I launched Ultiworld Disc Golf the next spring and started playing organized disc golf right around the same time.
My presentation was focused a bit more on independent media in disc golf and the importance of having it. One of my slides was titled, “Most Disc Golf Media is PR” — I’m not sure how much the industry audience appreciated that, but it’s true!
I tried to keep my presentation on the shorter side so that we could get to questions. There were some good ones, including how TDs and course designers should think about supporting media at events, and what we are doing to support FPO in media.
I think this session would have benefited from being more of a traditional panel, with questions directed by a moderator. Terry, Jonathan, and I did engage with each other a bit, but it could have been a lot more interactive with a different format.
***
In the afternoon on Thursday, I played in the pro-am scramble around the All-Star course. I hit a couple good putts and wasn’t a total zero, so I’ll take that. It was fun to be out on the course with Zoe Andyke, who I’ll be joining in the broadcast booth at a number of events this season.
Unfortunately, I missed the Thursday evening keynote from Andrew Zimmern because the hotel restaurant took more than an hour to send out our food.
I wasn’t able to attend the Friday morning sessions because my flight from Phoenix was too early in the day (flying two hours east makes flights tough). I’ll stay an extra day next year.
Overall, it was an enjoyable experience, one in which I would probably partake even if I wasn’t asked to be on a panel.