How do fans partake in the game themselves?
February 14, 2025 by Josiah Zoodsma and Jesse Weisz in Analysis
Unlike many other sports, there is significant overlap between people who follow the professional side of disc golf and actively play. Almost all survey respondents who watch professional disc golf also play themselves. This article dives into the playing habitats of disc golf fans — how do you compare to the rest of the disc golf community as a player?
How often do you play disc golf?
- Over half of all respondents indicated that they play disc golf multiple times a week, with an incredible 6.2% of respondents playing daily.
- Only about 1 in 25 survey respondents indicated that they no longer, or never, played disc golf.
Roughly what year did you start playing disc golf?
- Our survey had an incredible range of responses for when respondents began playing disc golf. This included people who started playing in early 2024 (94 respondents) and respondents who started playing before 1980 (75 respondents).
- Nearly one-quarter of all respondents started playing disc golf in the two years following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021)
- The chart above overlays PDGA membership onto when respondents started playing. As you move backward from 2024, there is a growing proportion of respondents being PDGA members. This may be driven by the fact that, for many, it may take multiple years playing disc golf before joining the PDGA and competing in PDGA-sanctioned events. It is also important to remember that respondents of the Fandom Survey are generally more involved in disc golf than the average player, and are therefore more likely to join the PDGA.
- Who do you play disc golf with? We asked respondents what percentage of the time they spent disc golfing alone, casually with friends/family, with a local disc golf club, and at PDGA-sanctioned events . Averaged across all respondents, nearly half of disc golf rounds are played casually with friends or family.
- Respondents identified that they choose to play disc golf alone for approximately one third of all their rounds.
- We separated these responses by when players began disc golfing. While the distributions look similar, the newest players were more likely to play rounds alone than any other group. Additionally, playing with a local league or in PDGA-sanctioned events was more common the longer respondents have been in the sport.
Which type of events do you compete in?
- Next, we asked what types of events players compete in. More than 25% of all respondents who play disc golf indicated that they only do it casually and do not play in organized events.
- Over half of the respondents compete in PDGA-sanctioned events as amateurs, while 11.8% indicated they play in professional divisions.
Roughly how many different courses have you played in the past year?
- How many courses did respondents play in the last year? 43.7% of respondents played somewhere between 5 and 14 different courses.
- A small group of respondents (1.8%) are what we consider “traveling course collectors,” having played over 50 different courses in the past year.
How far of a commute is the closest disc golf course to you?
- Over half of survey respondents have a course within 10 minutes of where they live!
- Only 1% of respondents didn’t have a course within an hour’s drive from home.
- Unsurprisingly, how often you play disc golf has a direct connection to how close the closest course is to you. Two-thirds of all respondents who play disc golf daily have a course within 10 minutes of where they live, and this percentage consistently declines with frequency of play.
We also looked into which US states saw the greatest percentage of respondents living within 10 minutes of a course.
Percent of respondents who were within 10 minutes of a disc golf course, by state.
- A recent UDisc Release Point Article, titled “Disc Golf Courses Per Capita: All U.S. States Ranked In 2024” listed the states that had the highest number of courses per capita. The Top 3 from this list (Kansas, Wyoming, and Iowa) were also the Top 3 (albeit, in a different order) highest states for proportion of respondents living within 10 minutes of a course!
- Outside of the United States, Finland saw an incredibly high percentage, with 75% of all respondents living within 10 minutes of a course. Iceland, Sweden, and Norway also had a greater proportion of respondents living within 10 minutes from a disc golf course than the United States. The United Kingdom (16%) and Germany (18%) were two notable countries on the other end of the spectrum. This data largely aligns again with the courses per capita that was reported in another UDisc Release Point article.
Next, we are going to move out onto the course. What equipment do you use? What types of throws do you have? How far can you throw (or rather, how far do you say you can throw when nobody is there to watch!)?
What do you use to carry your discs during a typical round?
- 71.6% of respondents indicated they only utilize a disc golf bag to carry their discs out on the course, with another 13.2% using a bag in some cases and a cart in others
- What brands of bags do respondents use the most? Here are the top 3 responses:
- 1) Grip (23% of respondents)
- 2) Dynamic Discs (17%)
- 3) Squatch (11%)
- What brands of cart do respondents use the most?
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- 1) Zuca (72% of respondents)
- 2) Rovic (7%)
- 3) Ridge Roller (6%)
- While we’re talking brands – what were the three most popular brands of shoes to wear while disc golfing? (For more on the shoes touring pros wear, see this past Ultiworld article.)
- 1) Adidas (19% of respondents)
- 2) Merrell (11%)
- 3) Nike (10%)
How far can you throw on a flat-surface on a windless day?
- How does your distance compare to the nearly 5,000 responses we received? Over half of respondents (54.2%) indicated they can throw somewhere between 300 and 399 ft (92-121m).
Which of these types of throws do you typically use more than once a round?
- What types of throws do you use when taking on the disc golf course? Roughly 10% of people worldwide are left-handed, with our data showing a similar breakdown of handedness.
- 74.5% of respondents indicated they both backhand and forehand at least once per round.
- To our surprise, 3.7% of respondents indicated that they throw both right-handed AND left-handed at least once per round.
When not in a tournament, how often do you keep score when you play?
- Over half of respondents keep score during every single round of disc golf they play.
How often do you consume alcohol or cannabis products while you play?
- Let’s talk about drugs and alcohol. We all know that disc golfers have a reputation for being linked with recreational drug use. However, two-thirds of all respondents never consume alcohol while playing, and over three-quarters of respondents never consume cannabis products while playing.
- More respondents identified that they frequently use cannabis products (i.e., >75% of rounds; 5.9% of respondents) compared to frequently consuming alcohol (1.6% of respondents).
- Indeed, if you average the percentage of rounds from just respondents who consume these drugs at all, cannabis products (46.5% of rounds) are consumed more than alcohol (21.7% of rounds).
In this past survey iteration, we also asked questions about the discs that you carry on the course. To wrap up this article, here are a few fun stats we wanted to highlight:
- On average, respondents carry 20 discs with them on the course.
- In the last year, respondents lost an average of 7.3 discs while out playing.
- Discs were most often lost by respondents from the southeastern United States (8.7 discs/respondent) and European respondents, on average, lost fewer discs than US respondents.
- On average, 36% of lost discs were returned to their owners. Shout-out to all of the people that spend countless hours helping return lost discs!
- The northeastern United States had the highest reported return rate (45%) among US regions.
- On average, Europeans were more likely to have their discs returned than Americans, with Estonia’s return rate exceeding 50%. Canada and Australia/New Zealand also had extremely high lost disc return rates.
What other questions about disc golfers out on the course are you interested in? Let us know using the feedback links below! In the next article in the series we will dig into our mailbox to answer your questions.
- If you are interested in learning more about the team and research goals at First Available Research, click here!
- If you want to be notified of the publication of future articles in this series and/or want to take future disc golf surveys from our group, click here!
- If you have any questions, comments or mailbag topics for future articles, submit them here!
Special thanks to Lauren Campbell, who was instrumental in developing our research plan and assisting with survey design. Also, thanks go out to the Fandom Survey’s editor, Karl Lamothe.
Please see the full series of 2024 articles by following these links:
Links for the 2023 and 2022 Fandom Series articles can be found here.
