Evaluating pro player popularity in disc golf.
December 9, 2025 by Josiah Zoodsma and Jesse Weisz in Analysis, News
Note: If possible, please use Google Chrome to view this article. Some browsers, like Firefox, do not display the charts correctly.
What is it about some competitors that leads us to cheer for them while other players we actively root against? For the past four years, the FAR/Ultiworld Fandom Survey has sought to answer that question. In this article, we present data from over 10,000 surveys filled out by disc golf fans. To learn more about the survey and the demographics of the survey respondents, please read the accompanying article.
This article is focused on results from the first section of our survey – “Player Perceptions: What does the disc golf community think of professional players?”
How did we select which players to include in the 2025 Fandom Survey?
Just as was done in the 2024 Fandom Survey, this year’s survey included 100 players (60 MPO and 40 FPO):
- The Top 40 MPO and Top 25 FPO players from the StatMando Official Rankings prior to survey launch were automatically included in the survey.
- An additional 20 MPO and 15 FPO players were selected to be included based on a variety of factors, including media presence (e.g., Jeremy Koling, Chantel Budinsky, Madison Walker), rising stars (e.g., Paul Krans, Taylor Chocek, Sofia Donnecke), or long-time disc golf favorites who still compete on tour (e.g., Gregg Barsby, Paige Shue).
For these 100 players, we asked survey respondents: “On a scale from 0 to 10, are you rooting against or for the players below?” We also gave the following instructions to guide responses: “A player that you dislike would get a number less than 5, with your least favorite player/s getting a 0. A player you like would get a number above 5. Your favorite player/s would get a 9 or a 10.” We use the term ‘Fandom Score’ to describe the value that survey respondents gave to a player for this question.
2025 Fandom Scores
Below are the average Fandom Scores for the professionals we included in the 2025 survey:
Note: Most of the charts in this series of articles have additional data you can view if you place your cursor over (or touch on mobile) any of the lines or bars. For example, this chart shows where players ranked in previous years and the number of survey respondents who rated players this year.
- Simon Lizotte‘s reign continues! For the third straight year, Simon Lizotte finishes atop the charts in average Fandom Score. 46% of respondents gave him a “10” in this year’s survey.
- At 22 years old and in only her third year on tour, Silva Saarinen had the highest average Fandom Score in FPO, and number two overall! She dethrones Kristin Lätt, who finished as the top FPO player in average Fandom Score for the past three years.
- For the third straight year, Calvin Heimburg finishes third in average Fandom Score.
- Two master’s eligible players, Ohn Scoggins and Nate Sexton, both finished inside the top 6 in average Fandom Score for the third straight year.
- Cadence Burge, in her first year appearing in the Fandom Survey, cracked the Top 20.
- Six of the Top 10 players were not born in the United States.
- The four players with the lowest average Fandom Scores in 2025 also had the four lowest scores in 2023 and 2024. With some of these players not fully touring in 2025, they may not be included in the 2026 Fandom Survey.
As we did last year, we asked survey respondents to indicate whether they were familiar with individual players. If they were not familiar with a player, respondents were not asked to provide a score. In this way, we aimed to avoid the scores being changed by ratings from survey respondents who did not know a player.
Average Fandom Score only reveals part of the story. Below are the distributions of responses from survey respondents for two players with average Fandom Scores of 6.64, DGPT MPO Player of the Year Gannon Buhr and DGPT MPO Most Improved Player Paul Krans.
Fandom Score Distributions Gannon Buhr and Paul Krans
Despite having nearly identical average Fandom Scores, Paul Krans and Gannon Buhr had very different distributions of responses. Buhr has more fans who root for him strongly (i.e., a higher percentage of responses of 8, 9, or 10) than Krans but also more respondents who strongly root against him (i.e., a higher percentage of responses of 0, 1, or 2). In this way, average Fandom Score does not directly correlate to popularity, and these distinctions are hidden if you only look at the average scores.
In the next graph, you can look at each player’s Fandom Score distribution. Toggle between different players or select multiple players to compare. Players are arranged in alphabetical order.
Another way to look at these distributions is to group the scores based on whether respondents root strongly against (0, 1, or 2), moderately against (3 or 4), no strong opinion (5), moderately for (6, 7, or 8) or strongly for (9 or 10) a player. You can view these distributions by clicking this link.
What other storylines are hidden in the distributions? We looked across all players in our survey for those who had the most divided fanbase. These players scored above average for both very high (8-10) and very low (0-2) Fandom Scores. The five players with the greatest division in fandom were:
- Gannon Buhr
- Paige Pierce
- Kat Mertsch
- Holyn Handley
- Ella Hansen
Paul McBeth and Ricky Wysocki (who were both on this list last year) fall to 7th and 10th in 2025, both seeing decreases in the number of respondents strongly rooting against them.
How has the fandom of players changed in the past year? The next chart shows the change in average Fandom Score from 2024 to 2025. Note: this chart only shows players who were included in both 2024 and 2025.
- Benjamin Callaway had the largest year-over-year increase in average Fandom Score. Callaway, alongside Ezra Aderhold and Ezra Robinson, all secured their first Elite Series victories in 2025 and are all in the Top 5 of this chart.
- Silva Saarinen recorded the largest increase among FPO players.
- Matt Orum, Kyle Klein, and Joey Buckets posted the three largest decreases in average Fandom Score. Each had won at least one event in the two previous seasons, but failed to win in 2025.
- Kristin Lätt experienced a notable drop in average Fandom Score compared to last year. For context, the Fandom Survey opened for responses just after the European Disc Golf Festival, where she suffered a stunning final-round collapse. She later withdrew from the World Championship during the final round after struggling throughout the event and did not compete in any further events. The survey closed on August 25th, and a few weeks later, Lätt announced she had no plans to return to the tour in 2026.
As always, we would like to note that changes in Fandom Score between 2024 and 2025 are likely a combination of (1) real changes in the fandom of disc golf fans and (2) differences in the survey population between the two years.
Favorite Players
In addition to Fandom Score, the 2025 Fandom Survey also asked respondents who their favorite players were. The Top 25 most selected MPO players are shown here:
- Just as in 2024, Simon Lizotte, Calvin Heimburg, and Paul McBeth make up the Top 3 selected players.
- Anthony Barela (8th in 2024) and Niklas Anttila (6th in 2024) moved into the Top 5.
How do these percentages compare to last year?
- Anthony Barela recorded the largest year-over-year increase in percentage of respondents who named him their favorite.
- For the second consecutive year, Simon Lizotte posted the largest decline in the percentage of respondents who named him their favorite player, yet he still holds the top spot overall.
- Meanwhile, Aaron Gossage stands out as the only MPO player to see a gain of more than 1% in favorite player selections without earning an Elite Series win in 2025.
- Similar to the last few years, Kristin Lätt remains the most favorited FPO player, with nearly one-quarter of respondents selecting her.
- Silva Saarinen and Ohn Scoggins were the only two other FPO competitors selected by more than 10% of respondents.
How do these percentages compare to last year?
- Silva Saarinen posted the largest increase, jumping more than 13% since last year! This is pretty dramatic considering that the largest increase last year was under 4%.
- Cadence Burge, Anniken Steen, and Kat Mertsch were the only three other FPO players to see an increase of more than 1% in favorite-player selections over the past year.
- Mirroring what we saw in MPO with Lizotte, Kristin Lätt experienced the largest decrease in percentage of respondents who indicated she was their favorite player for the second straight year, yet still remains the most favorited player.
- Surprisingly, Ohn Scoggins had the second largest decrease despite winning Open and Masters Worlds. Like Lizotte and Lätt, very popular players have more popularity to lose than other players, so it is understandable that they normally have the largest year-to-year decreases.
The next article in the series will dive a little deeper into the fandom of players. What drives us to root for the players that we root for? How does our individual answer to that question affect who our favorite players are?
We are excited to share our analysis of all of this great content in the upcoming articles – stay tuned!
- If you are interested in learning more about the team and research goals at First Available Research, click here!
- If you want to read articles from last year’s Fandom Survey, 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 the Fandom Survey’s editor, Karl Lamothe.
Throughout the offseason, we will be publishing more articles showcasing the results of the 2025 Fandom Survey. Here are the articles that have been published so far:
- The Survey Itself & Who Took It
- Which Pros Do We Root For and Against
- What Drives Fans to Root for Certain Players?
- How Fans Feel about Disc Manufacturers
- How Fans Feel about Disc Golf Media (Part 1)
- How Fans Feel about Disc Golf Media (Part 2)
- The Most Popular Discs
- Disc Golf Purchasing Trends
- Last Questions and Final Thoughts
Links for the 2024, 2023, and 2022 Fandom Series articles can be found here.
