Infinite Discs Blog

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.

Once again it is time to check out the results of the Infinite Discs State of Disc Golf survey. We had fewer surveys taken this year versus last year, but we still had 6536 people take the survey. I always look forward to seeing some of the results, which are a snapshot of the current state of disc golf. It’s also fun and interesting to compare this year’s results with prior years. Let’s check out the results.

Demographics

Every year we ask people about their basic demographics. We asked where people live, their age, and their gender. We’ll start with where we live. In the survey we gave people the option to select any of the 50 US states plus the District of Columbia, Canadian Providences, Australia, New Zealand, many countries in Europe, and several regions around the world. Hopefully, through the work of the McBeth foundation, in the future we will need to include all countries in Africa, Central and South America.

Where We Live

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that the states with the most survey participants are also the most populated. However, after the top two, the survey doesn’t match the list of the most populated states. Here is a chart of survey respondents according to where you indicated that you live:

Historically, the states with the highest number of respondents will vary slightly from year to year. As mentioned above, the most populated states are typically in the top of the results. But, that doesn’t tell us the per capita results. So, I took the survey results and compared them to the state population to see which state had the highest participation rate. Again, the state in the number one spot won’t be much of a surprise. In the chart the number by the state indicates how many people are in the state for every person who took the survey. Here is the chart:

The home state for Infinite Discs is Utah, so it’s easy to see why we had the most participation per capita. Third place Idaho is right next door to Utah, and even has an Infinite store. Sandwiched between those two states is Vermont. With its sparse population, it doesn’t take a lot of people who took the survey to make them move up the chart. Oregon and Kansas have much bigger populations, and also good survey participation.

At the other end of the spectrum, Rhode Island and Washington, DC had the least participation per capita. Out of curiosity, I looked up both of those states’ PDGA membership. DC has 128 members (current and expired), while Rhode Island has 300. Utah, at the top of the per capita chart, has 2210 PDGA members.

Our Age

We did something with this survey that we should have done a long time ago: we cleaned up the age ranges that you could select. For example, instead of indicating whether you are 18-21, 22-25, 26-29, etc., we asked in 5-year increments. So, 20-24, 25-29, 30-34, Etc. While I like the 5-year blocks, it makes it tougher to compare this year’s results to previous years. But, we’ll do what we can. Here are the results of this year’s survey:

The resulting graph looks generally similar to results we’ve seen in the past. The numbers slowly climb as we approach 30, then slowly decline as we age past 35. Nearly a fifth of us fall in that 30-34 group that is the largest. That is close to the same number of all players 50+.

Let’s look at a couple of previous years’ results so we can see where the numbers might have changed.

It looks like the age group that is consistently the highest is the 30-35 ish range. This year, however, that age group gave up some numbers to those of us who are younger and older. Let’s look at the under-30 group, the 30-39 group, and the 40+ group.

The survey results for the 40+ age group reflect what I see in tournaments in the area. The age-protected divisions are growing rapidly. As someone who plays in that group, that news is very encouraging. Hopefully that trend doesn’t stop, which will allow current young players to have a lengthy disc golf career.

It’s also encouraging to see younger players in the area, and see their numbers continue to grow. Despite the stats in the survey, we are doing pretty well as a sport. The future looks great and disc golf should continue to grow and expand. It really helps to have some of the young pros that the youth in disc golf can look up to and aspire to be.

Gender

When it comes to gender in the sport of disc golf, the numbers are probably always going to lean massively toward the guys. That’s what we see with the pros, and at most tournaments. Even so, FPO players are seeing the same relative increase in the number of competitors who are considered top tier. That is exciting for those of us who are fans of the pros and watching competitions. And beneficial to disc golf. We’ve already seen some great FPO tournament finishes this year, and with the number of top players increasing, we’re sure to see more. Let’s look at the results for this year.

While the number of women taking the survey remains significantly lower than men, the actual percentage bounces around from year to year. When I pulled up a couple other years’ results, percentage of women who were taking the survey stayed within a fairly narrow range. The men’s numbers were in an even more narrow range. Here are some previous results:

Prior to last year, we only had two options for gender: male or female. There were some who didn’t want to answer, so we added the NA option. Last year we has .05% who chose NA or didn’t answer. This year is was nearly double that.

Since open answers are difficult to process, we want to have set answers to choose from. Next year we will reevaluate the best options to be the most inclusive. And we will still give people the option to not answer

Tune in next week for more survey results.