In last week’s State of Disc Golf Survey, I talked about how we are in tournament season. I wrote about the questions in the survey that asked about tournaments and how many of us participate in them. This week, I’ll look at another aspect of tournament season: watching the pros as they play tournaments.

With the rise of the Internet and social media, we now have opportunities to watch our favorite player compete in most major tournaments. We can also follow, and sometimes interact, with them from their own personal posts and videos. It’s never been easier to be a fan of disc golf pros!

Following the Pros

Even though following and watching pros is not difficult, we first have to ask whether or not people want to follow the pros. That brings us to our first survey question: Do you follow professional disc golf?

An overwhelming number of us follow professional disc golf to some degree. That might be watching them play tournaments, watching them play casual rounds, following them on social media, or checking out their tournament results. That might also mean we buy their tour discs. Manufacturers know that, and that has translated into some large contracts for the top players, and better contracts for other players.

Our History of Following Pros

If we look at past survey results, we see that we stay fairly consistent with how many people follow the prose. There are minor variations, but overall we like to watch the best people in the sport compete.

How are we watching tournaments

For the people in the survey who indicated that they do follow professional disc golfers, we asked follow-up questions to learn more about how they followed their favorites. The first question we asked was, “In which of the following ways did you follow professional disc golf in 2022?” Here are the results:

According to the survey results, 26% of us got to watch professional disc golfers in person at a tournament. There are enough tournaments around the country, and the world, the even if there isn’t a big tournament in our home town, we likely don’t have to travel far to attend one. Apparently, quite a few of us made the effort to do that.

Watching Tournaments

If we weren’t attending a tournament, odds are that we were watching one. Between the live broadcasts and post-produced content, we had lots of choices. Over 90% of us watched at least one tournament.

One out of every five of us watched the Pro Tour Championship on ESPN. That is a pretty big number, considering the tournament aired a while after the tournament was played.

When it comes to watching disc golf live, over 56% of us indicated that we watched a tournament live. I’m sure the Disc Golf Network will be happy to see that survey result. In fact, more people said they watched live than watched post-produced videos on YouTube. There were 42.6% of us that said we watched a tournament on YouTube.

Given that the live broadcasts are several hours long, that is a big commitment of time. On the other hand, it is exciting to watch the results slowly unfold, while checking in with other cards that are playing. Plus, it is something that you can have on in the background, then listen for highlights and scores updates. That is usually what I do when I watch live. The quality has improved a lot, too. Live broadcasts have improved quite a bit since the first attempts, even though there will still be challenges doing things in real time.

Live Scoring

Another option to watch professionals is to watch the live scoring. That is another thing you can do while you are doing other things. Surprisingly, it can be kind of exciting to see the scores change and see ‘battles’ unfolding. Nearly half of us indicated that we watch tournaments via live scoring.

The final question of how we watch the pros is watching them in online in disc golf tutorials. A whopping 70% of us watch online tutorials. Although watching a professional tutorial isn’t the same as getting coached, it’s nice to watch the best in our sport give tips to make our game better.

Live Tournaments and DGN

Speaking of the Disc Golf Network, we wanted to see how many of us subscribe to the network. As you can see from the chart below, it was pretty much and even split between those who subscribe and those who don’t. Since the stat above said that 56% of us watched live tournaments, which means about 6% of us are just buying the individual tournaments that we want to watch.

Live and Post

Since a majority of us watch live tournaments we asked those people if they still like to watch post-produced rounds of the same tournament. Here is a graph of the results.

Only a small percentage of those of us who watch live events rarely or never also watch post produced. And over a third of us always or almost always watch post-produced rounds that we’ve already seen. Perhaps if we have a live event on in the background, we want to watch it later to actually watch what happened. Another reason is that there are different commentators for post-produced, which might drive people to watch both.

Favorite FPO

No discussion about professional disc golfers would be complete without looking at which of the top pros we like to follow. We asked who our first- and second-most favorite player was, in both FPO and MPO.  Starting with FPO, here are the top 20 results.

Head and shoulders above everyone else in FPO is the current World Champion, Kristan Tattar. When you consider how many picked her first or second, over 60% of us had her on one list or the other, she is an amazingly popular person! Paige Pierce took second on both lists. Catrina Allen got one podium finish, and Valerie Mandujano got the other. Now let’s look at MPO.

Favorite MPO

Once again we saw one player, in this case it’s Simon Lizotte, way ahead of the rest. The ahead of the reigning and six-time world champ, Paul McBeth. With his trick shots and likable personality, Simon is on one or the other list for over half of us. He is definitely the people’s player.

For the MPO, the top five players are the same on both lists, with Paul and Calvin swapping places. In fact, there are only a couple names on the top 25 list that are only on one list or the other.

That wraps up this week’s blog. Check back next week for more survey results.

Despite the constant storms that are bringing rain and snow to much of the country, it’s tournament time! The southern part of the country has seen several top-tier tournaments already, with some exciting finishes. And announcements for local tournaments are starting to roll out. B- and C-tiers around the world are filling up fast as we plan out what tournaments we will be playing this year. There is no doubt about it, many of us like to compete in tournaments.

For this week’s State of Disc Golf blog, we will be looking at survey results surrounding tournament play. It’s a question that we regularly ask on the survey, so we have lots of data about our views on tournaments in past years, too. Let get to the numbers!

Did You Play A Tournament in 2022?

As long as I’ve been playing, one of the things I’ve seen consistently is that a majority of us like to compete in tournaments. There are some who aren’t into the formal sanctioned tournaments, but who will gladly show up for more casual competitions, like an Ace Race or Match Play competitions. Others of us really like the sanctioned events, with their more serious vibes. The first tournament-related question we asked was simply, ‘Did you play in at least one disc golf tournament or event in 2022?’ Here is the chart:

While most of us played in at least one tournament, that still leaves a lot of people who are content to just play casual rounds with their buddies (or solo). They are the ones you see regularly on the course or at league events, and that’s as competitive as they want to get. That also includes newer players who don’t feel like they are ‘good enough’ to play in a tournament.

Sanctioned Tournaments

For the people who indicated in the survey that they did attend at least one tournament, let’s look at how many and which kinds of tournaments we attended. First, let’s look at how many sanctioned tournaments we attended.

Just under half of us attended at least one sanctioned event. Nearly a third of us played five or less. Ten percent of us played 10 or more. I played 14 sanctioned tournaments, putting me in the top 5%. Nearly 3% of us played in 20+ sanctioned tournaments! Impressive. Let’s see how that compares to unsanctioned events.

Unsanctioned

Slightly fewer of us played in at least one unsanctioned event. Unlike the chart showing sanctioned tournament, the unsanctioned numbers drop off sharply for people who play more than 5 unsanctioned tournament. It is interesting that there is 1% of us who attended 20+ unsanctioned tournaments. I wonder what kind of tournaments those were.

$10 Fee

When someone plays in a PDGA sanctioned tournament, they need to either be a current PDGA member, or pay a $10 fee for a ‘temporary’ membership. Since PDGA membership is $50 per year for amateurs ($75 for pros, $30 for Juniors), as an amateur you need to play in at least 5 tournaments to ‘break even’ financially. We wanted to find out how people felt about the $10 fee for non-PDGA members. Unfortunately, this question was only asked to those people that indicated they played in a tournament in 2022. The numbers on the chart are the percentage of the 61% of us who played in at least one tournament. That’s too bad, because there might be people who didn’t play in a tournament in part because of the fee.

Here is the chart:

It looks like most of us are okay with the fee, while a fifth of us don’t like it. Hopefully the fee, or PDGA membership, isn’t keeping people from playing in sanctioned tournaments.

More or Less in 2022/2023?

The next survey result we would like to look at is whether we played more or less tournaments than in 2021. We also asked everyone to predict if they would play more in 2023. Here are the survey results:

A significant number of us got to play more tournaments in 2022 than we did in 2021. About a fifth of us played about the same number. Projecting into this year, only about 10% of us think that we played more last year than we will this year. That means 90% of us will play the same or more this year. 58% of us plan on playing more tournaments this year than last. That may mean tournaments will be filling faster, and wait lists will be longer. I recommend setting a reminder for when registrations open, to increase your chances of getting to play the tournaments you want.

A Look Back

The final chart we will look at is a look back at how our tournament attendance has changed over the past few years. It looks like our percentage was holding fairly steady until Covid.

After the pandemic dip, the last couple of years have seen a steady increase in the number of people attending tournaments. And as we just saw, most of us are planning on increasing the number of tournaments we attend this year. That might put us at or above where we had been prior to the pandemic.

PDGA Event Numbers

As I mentioned, locally at least, we are seeing tournaments fill up fast and long wait lists to get in tournaments. With the steady growth of the sport, and the turbo boost caused by Covid, even though the percentage of us attending tournaments might have dipped recently, it is a percentage of a higher number. Meaning, higher numbers of us are playing tournaments. I wanted to see how the numbers of tournaments available has changed over the same time period as the last chart, so I got the data from the PDGA.

Keep in mind the preceding chart is just showing the tournaments offered by the PDGA. There are many unsanctioned tournaments that appear on Disc Golf Scene and other sites. As you can see, the number of sanctioned tournament opportunities have more than doubled since 2014! If you consider the number of tournaments that fill up, and the number of tournaments offered, it’s easy to see that we love competing in tournaments!

Check back next week for more survey results.

2023 State of Disc Golf Survey

The greater disc golf community has a large variation in the level of participation in our sport. There are those among who currently are (or are working toward) making disc golf a career, and who play or practice daily.  At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who may only play once or twice per year. They may not even own their own discs. This week’s State of Disc Golf blog will discuss a few survey results that will help us see where we lie on that participation scale.

One of the ways we might express our participation level in disc golf is how many tournaments we play. Typically, if you like to play tournaments, you probably play more disc golf than the average person. And you might spend a bit of time practicing for tournaments. In the survey, we wanted to find out how often people practice putting and doing field work. We’ll look at those responses and get a snapshot of the current level of participation in disc golf.

Putting Practice in Winter

To dissect the data a little more, we asked about how our practice habits change from summer to winter. We’ll start with putting practice in the winter. Here are the survey results

An impressive number of us, 29%, practice at least twice per week in the winter. If you live in a climate that allows for comfortable outside play, or if you can putt indoors, you are more likely to keep putting when the temperatures drop and the snow flies. Putting leagues are another way to be competitive and keep practicing in the winter. Now let’s see how warmer weather affects putting practice.

Putting Practice in Summer

Almost half of us are committed to practicing putting in the summer at least two times per week. Nearly 16% don’t do any extra putting practice, but the rest of us will break out the putters at least once per month.

Since missed putts can add so many strokes to our scores, we would all benefit from practicing. Unfortunately, putting practice isn’t the most fun activity in disc golf.  We can improve our chances of putting regularly by playing putting games. There are solo games that you can play, where you keep track of either points or consecutive makes. And there are games you can play with others. Playing putting games makes the time and the reps fly by.

Fieldwork in Winter

A cousin to putting practice is field work. Throwing discs in a field is a great way to work on our form and our distance. Regular practice will improve our consistency and conditioning. Field work is a little more fun than putting, to me, because you get to watch the flight of the disc and feel the satisfaction when you get a great rip. It is tougher to do in the winter in much of the country, because of snow. Let’s see what the numbers say about field work

Just over half of us don’t do any field work in the winter. Cold and snowy conditions are probable responsible for keeping most of us indoors instead of out practicing in the winter. Another reason could be that the days are shorter and we might not get off work in time to practice.  About 10% of us still manage to get out at least twice a week in the ‘off-season’.

Fieldwork in Summer

Now we’ll take a look at how much change there is from winter to summer. Below is the chart for summer field work and we can see that over 75% of us do field work at least once per month. One in five of us practice two or more times per week. Those numbers are a little higher than what I see locally, but maybe people are practicing at non-disc golf fields.

Data From 2017

We’ve asked similar questions in the past, so let’s look at the numbers from 2017.

The data from 2017 shows that a lot more people indicated that they practice putting regularly. A third of us practiced at least twice per week. And a lot fewer people indicated that they either never practice putting, or only practice a few times each year. Let’s see how the fieldwork numbers compare to the recent survey.  Here are the results from 2017:

The number for the 2017 fieldwork results is similar to the results for this year’s results about fieldwork in the summer. There are slightly more people today who never do fieldwork, but most of the numbers from 2017 are similar to this year’s numbers.

Rounds Per Month

Another survey question that shows how active we are in disc golf is how many rounds per month we played last year. That question was only for those who started playing in 2021 or before. The results are pretty close to what I would guess. Let’s take a look at the chart.

A small percentage of us only averaged less than a round per month. However, at the other end of the scale, over 5% of us got to play nearly a round per day! Playing in leagues and tournaments regularly will bump your average up a bit. Add a few casual rounds with your buddies and it’s not too hard to get up to double-digits per month. However, over half of us stayed in single-digits.

More or Less Golf Last Year

In addition to seeing how many rounds we averaged last year, we also wanted to see if the number of rounds we played were more or less than in 2021, or if it stayed the same. Here is the data:

Prediction For 2023

It’s good to see that a significant majority of us played either the same or more disc golf in 2022. Regionally here in northern Utah there is a tournament or league happening every week, so it isn’t difficult to get your golf fix, if you have the time. Although we can predict how much free time we’ll have in the future, we did ask how much golf that people thought they would play this year compared to last. Here are the results:

I like people’s optimism about this year. Most of us will be playing as much or more disc golf this year. Let’s hope that works out for all of us!

Tune in next week for more State of Disc Golf survey results.