The soft-spoken world champion honed his game with his family.
March 11, 2025 by Guest Author in Profile
This article was written by Eric Wilhelm, who recently published a profile of Isaac Robinson and disc golf’s rise in Atlanta Magazine.
It’s a sweltering Georgia July in 2012. Just south of the city, Matt Orum is pulling away to a comfortable five-stroke victory at the Hotlanta A-tier against a hodgepodge of regional pros. At the same time, another player’s taking first in his division with less fanfare. He’s just a kid. His event rating ekes barely above 800, but there’s nobody else in the 13-and-under field. That day, Isaac Robinson got his first win.
Years ago, disc golf was an inexpensive way of getting the Robinson family outside, to get the big set of siblings (eventually eight) out of mom’s hair for a while and to the park, usually Lenora or Redan. Under their dad’s supervision, they had to push strollers and take quick turns with the three or four discs they had. When you watch Isaac putting now, two pumps and then a send, you can see it. The quick routine needed to give everybody a chance, the whole crew racing to play all eighteen holes in the hour they had before sunset.
When Felix Vega formed Atlanta-based disc golf media outfit Ace Run Pro with Conrad Norwood in 2017, he’d already heard the stories. People would talk “about this family that played disc golf. They’d all show up in this big family van, jump out of the van and into the park and start throwing it further than every adult out there. I’d always heard the stories. And, sure enough, the first time I saw them was at Lenora Park. It was probably Mike [the Robinson father] and maybe five or six of them. I saw Isaac and Ezra and, like they said, they were getting up there and just throwing shots and lacing lines.”
“My family is very competitive,” Isaac said. “I’ve been competing with Ezra since we were five or six. I love competing. I love the pressure and the excitement of winning, or even losing. You hate it in the moment, but it’s just such a deep feeling.” But while competition was the initial draw for Isaac, “it’s kind of morphed into the love of the community on the road, of all the people I’ve met there, the friends I’ve made, different people from all over the world now. That’s kind of what keeps me going in the game.”
Isaac went directly from graduating college to joining the Pro Tour in 2022. He notched his first elite win at Idlewild. Then he came back in 2023 to take down the Champion’s Cup on his beloved W.R. Jackson course, before following that up with his surprise world championship win.
Fast forward to the first day of 2024 Worlds in Virginia and he’s not sneaking up on anybody. As the defending champ, Isaac gets the right to tee off first on the last card, with Simon Lizotte, Ricky Wysocki, and Paul McBeth all twirling their discs as they wait their turns and watch him throw. He’s staring down the narrow tunnel of London Tech trees. Defending has a weight. You can feel it.
“It was crazy,” he said. “I was a little shaky. I had played several practice rounds out there, but I just wasn’t prepared for the nerves. I had thought about myself in that situation many days in advance, but it’s not quite the same. Having all those people around and having those people who think you can’t do it? There’s a little bit of doubt in my mind, too.”
Isaac fired a green midrange. “My thoughts were: I’m just gonna throw the shot. I don’t care what the pressure is. I don’t care which people are watching. I don’t care what people are thinking. I’m just going to throw the shot.”
After all four players have thrown, Isaac’s is the best of the bunch, just 20 feet from the basket. He canned the putt and was on his way to a second world title.
But back to that midrange he threw. Vega’s been watching Isaac throw that same shot for almost 10 years. He believes Isaac’s best talent is “his ability to throw slower speeds when everyone else is trying to execute with a driver.”
This isn’t a matter of having more distance than other people; it’s about technique. “I think Isaac growing up and playing the Georgia courses where you have higher ceilings, he worked on his ability to throw it higher,” said Vega. He’s describing East Roswell Park, Parker’s Pasture, and Heritage Pines, courses full of defined wooded corridors and those high ceilings. When others are throwing fairway drivers low, Isaac’s going high, hoping the midrange or putter settles easily while his competition has to deal with the way faster discs can fade and skip.
“You’d think other people would figure it out, but I hope they don’t,” said Isaac.
But don’t call him a woods golfer. For Isaac, it’s about accuracy no matter what kind of course he’s on. “My game is precision, and I think you can see it easier in the woods, because you can kind of visualize the shots that I’m throwing,” he said. “You can see, okay, he’s aiming for that gap; he hits the gap. That’s harder to see on a golf course because it’s just open space. I think Ivy Hill set up really well for that, where you could just throw a lot of placement shots with a lot of precision.”
The format of recent Worlds has fit his game well – one wooded course, one open course, with both requiring precision. That format continues this summer in Finland, and Isaac can’t wait. He admires the history and demanding landing zones of The Beast. And The Monster in Tampere may be his favorite course on Earth. “I am stoked that it’s there,” he grins.
While Felix has a keen eye for the disc golf skill Isaac brings to the tour, he’s most effusive about the kind of people he’s seen Isaac and his brother Ezra grow into. “They’re very respectful, they love the game, they’re willing to give you the shirts off their backs,” he said. “Everybody loves playing with them for good reason. They’re just generally two of the nicest people you’re ever going to know.”
Isaac says he tries to be positive because it was the way he was raised. He credits his parents and the Christian faith instilled in him for helping him have a perspective beyond competition.
He says what’s really important is “making people feel appreciated and wanted. Yeah, there’s plenty of times where I’ve forgotten that, and I’ve had to take a step back and be like, ‘Alright, what are you doing here?’ and really refocus my attention on what really matters. At the end of the day, you know, that’s not disc golf. That’s not how I’m playing. It’s everything else in life.”
