The age stats behind the World titles.
August 25, 2026 by Jesse Weisz in News
A version of this article was initially published in 2021 and has been updated and expanded for 2026.
As we prepare for the 44th PDGA Professional Disc Golf World Championship, many storylines revolve around who will win. Has the age of Finnish dominance arrived in FPO? Will Gannon Buhr repeat? Can Paul McBeth become 7x or Paige Pierce 6x and tie Ken Climo as an 18x Major winner? Can Ricky Wysocki win his first major since 2017?
This article will examine the ages at which past champions took down the most prestigious Major in our sport. Before reading any further, try to guess the average age of a world champion. How about their age when they first won a world championship?
Player ages in these graphs represent the age they turned at some point in the calendar year they won Worlds, before or after the tournament.
This graph shows the age of the MPO winner each year:
This graph shows the age of the FPO winner each year:
This violin plot shows the distribution of the winners by age:
This graph shows only first-time MPO winners:
This graph shows only first-time FPO winners:
A few statistics:
- The oldest MPO winner was Ken Climo (38) in 2006.
- Last year Ohn Scoggins became the oldest FPO winner of all time at the age of 44. She also won her fifth Masters Worlds title in the same year!
- The youngest MPO winner was Sam Ferrans (16) in 1984, but he turned 17 that same year, which is how age is tracked in this article due to not having exact birth dates for most of the pros.
- The youngest FPO winner was Paige Pierce (20) in 2011. Marie Jackson Elsner was also 20 when she won her first Worlds, but she was two months older than Pierce at the time of her victory.
- The average age for an MPO winner is 27.1 years.1
- The average age for an FPO winner is 28.3 years.2
- The average age for a first-time MPO winner is 26.9 years.3
- The average age for a first-time FPO winner is 27.8 years.4
The average age for winners in both divisions — along with first-time MPO and FPO winners — is around 27 and 28. Players that will turn 27 in 2026 include Adam Hammes, Linus Carlsson, Gavin Babcock, Jakub Semerád, Chandler Kramer, Valerie Mandujano, Eveliina Salonen (1x), Macie Velediaz, and Sintija Klezberga. Players that turn 28 include include Eagle McMahon, Emerson Keith, Väinö Mäkelä, Jesse Nieminen, Albert Tamm, Parker Welck, Austin Turner, and Kona Montgomery.
Despite this age being the average, it has actually been a while since a player of exactly 27 or 28 has won. The last time a 27 year-old won Worlds in MPO was Cam Todd in 2001, the last 28 year-old winner was Ken Climo in 1996, the last 27 year-old FPO winner was Juliana Korver in 1998, and the last 28 year-old winner was Paige Pierce in 2019.
The median first-time winner for MPO players is 27, and the median first-time FPO player is 27.5. This shows that you are just as likely to win before the ages of 27 as after them.
Another way to think about it: one-time winners tended to win their Worlds later than multi-time winners captured their first title. That makes sense if you figure that multi-time winners like Ken Climo, Nate Doss, Paul McBeth, Ricky Wysocki, Val Jenkins, and Paige Pierce may have more natural talent, so they don’t have to wait until their peak (late 20s – early 30s) to win, whereas a one-time winner might. Other players would have likely won earlier in their careers had they started playing earlier, such as Barry Schultz, Juliana Korver, Des Reading, Catrina Allen, and Kristin Tattar.
There have been 43 MPO PDGA World Championships, and Ken Climo has won 12 of them. That could have distorted the average age, but even if we remove Climo from the data set, the average age from MPO World Champions is 26.7.
For a broader look at age in professional disc golf, here is a chart showing the average age of Elite/Major event winners by season:
What is the prime age in other sports? I asked Claude Opus 5 to look into the ages of Major winners between 1982 and 2025 for men’s and women’s golf and tennis, as well as regular-season MVPs in basketball and men’s baseball.
We are comparing different types of awards and titles across these sports, but this does give us a sense of when athletes are at their peaks. Please note that the disc golfers’ ages are all rounded up, as I don’t have exact ages for the players when they won their World Championships; for the other sports listed, I calculated ages to the month because Claude found exact birthdates and event dates.
- Tennis was the only sport with a younger average age than disc golf. Earlier, I had analyzed just the past 25 years instead of the past 44 years, and both tennis categories were older in that time frame (men 25.9 → 27.1, women 24.5 → 25.2). The Graf/Seles/Becker/Chang era pulls the age younger.
- Women’s ball (28.2) and disc golf (28.3) are very close in average age.
- Men’s ball golf is an outlier, with the average age of Major champions being 32.4.
- Sam Ferrans is the youngest male and Ohn Scoggins is the oldest female winner of any of these sports!
If you would like to learn more about the age trajectories of the top players in the history of disc golf, please check out this article I wrote a few years ago.
