11/16/2021
The current state of the proposal first published on DG Course Care and Nurturing:
1000 hours of commitment from 10 disc golfers (100 hours each). I will match 1000 hours at Littlejohn Lake County Park. There are two original disc golfers (ODG) committed to 10 hours each next year. These 2 participants do not need to write it out. Owners of two of the best cared for courses in our area, their experience, tools and help with the course will make an impact 10x more effective than our work by hand. They are both only able to commit to 10 total hours and the tools they bring with them will speed up our process.
What do we want for the course at Littlejohn?
A quality place to play disc golf with two sets of pads and two basket positions (extra collars) at each hole. The design being through the woods utilizing the natural layout the trees and shape of the land give us.
We will be using wood chips extensively throughout the course in places where the most foot traffic is anticipated. We will be creating paths and dressing up the fairways in such a manner that addresses the potential for erosion using old fallen logs, (more) wood chips, and landscape structures/design that includes terracing and switchback routing of foot paths. We will continue to be removing sticks, greenbrier and ALL STUMPS small enough to be tripping hazards. In other words, we will work to demonstrate how to build a course to be safe, sustainable and useful for decades to come.
Is this unreasonable?
I will not proceed with our proposal until commitment from many more disc golfers is made.
On organized volunteer days we will have clear objectives, a meal together, extra water and activities for learning more about our sport. Already a few professional players have verbally committed to helping by teaching. Yes, we want to reward volunteers with special ways to show appreciation. Teaching while we work, even if we had 5 volunteers total for a session, each could spend 30 minutes doing field work to develop their skills at driving or working on putting or their approach shots.
Still developing the ideas. Definitely could use a board of directors for planning, advising and creating a path for very long term growth at our course.
Our parks director wants us to form an organization for course care similar to FACETS in Allegan county which care for the extensive horse trails at Silver Creek County Park near Hamilton. The bicycle riders have a huge organization in SW Michigan as well. It’s not enough to just have a “team” of disc golfers who play together. Some teams are cool but they are not doing the maintenance on our FREE TO PLAY disc golf courses. We keep ignoring this issue as a group (disc golfers as a whole) and the consequences will be more and more disc golf courses pulled from public parks. If we can get the parks departments (and schools or other public places where courses are installed) to come along beside us because we did work that helped them (ie, picking up sticks in the fairways, cleaning up around the base of trees) we will have greater success.
Pay to play is on its way. Let us keep some PUBLIC courses open by making larger contributions of time and/or money so that we can play and enjoy the benefits of our labor.
