It’s no surprise that Michigan ranks third nationally in the number of disc golf courses. Compared to conventional courses, disc golf—where players toss Frisbees and other flying discs into basket-like goals—is easy on shrinking city budgets: the courses are smaller, follow the natural landscape, and need little maintenance. And it’s affordable to play since beginners only need to buy or borrow one disc.
The Ann Arbor area has a hard core of serious players, some of whom say they were hooked from the first disc toss. We tagged along with two of those enthusiasts for a game at the newly renovated Mary Beth Doyle Park to see how its course stacks up. The course has been open for a couple of years, but the two wet summers before this one wreaked mud on the course’s swampy southern section, and a lot of players are trying it out this year for the first time.
Some players are critical of the renovations, says William Gilbert, president of A3 Disc, the largest and oldest Disc Golf club in Ann Arbor with 189 members. The course still has 18 holes, but many of them have been greatly shortened.
Frequent players of the former Brown Park course, self-proclaimed “Brown Park Bombers,” often “remember the park the way it was and are semi-resistant to change,” says disc golfer Scott Sprow. But Sprow says that you could also make the argument that people prefer the renovated version, planned by Terry Calhoun, an influential Ann Arbor disc golfer and course designer. Although Sprow still misses some of the former shots, he understands that in exchange for the shortened course, the park gained a bigger pond.
The new course has a few shots that offer views of the new pond on the north side of the park, which Sprow says adds to the appeal of the course. Although the retention pond “isn’t the best example” of natural beauty, he says, it does make the course more enjoyable. Most of the course winds through the south side of the park toward I-94.
The most interesting feature of the Mary Beth Doyle course may be its frequent changes in elevation that require a challenging variety of shots. Designer Calhoun took advantage of the landscape to snake it over a series of hillocks and back into the southern swampy area. Our players liked the variety, although for sheer scope, they say, it’s hard to compete with the monster 24-hole courses at Hudson Mills Metropark, the first ones in the area.
The strategy disc golf demands drew him to the sport, says Sprow, who has played sports his whole life and disc golf since college. “Every time I go out to play it’s a challenge,” he says. “I try to do something different every time—you never stop learning.”
Sprow normally also looks for lots of shade in a course when he wants to bring along his 14-month-old son, Wyatt. Wyatt joined our trip to Mary Beth Doyle, and his dad quickly learned the park was on the sunny side for a toddler. Sprow says he prefers Bandemer Park when he’s with Wyatt, as it has plenty of natural shade and concrete sidewalks throughout the course for his stroller.
Sprow plans to give Wyatt the opportunity to play, too, once he’s older. In fact, though it’s the fanatics who may catch your eye, Gilbert sees disc golf as the perfect family bonding activity: his wife, Becky, and daughter, Nikki, join him at state tournaments. “We travel together and play tournaments [together]—that’s how we do family vacations,” Gilbert says. And with the reopened Mary Beth Doyle Park course on top of courses at Bandemer, Hudson Mills, Independence Lake County Park, and Rolling Hills County Park, that adds up to quite a variety of family vacations within a few minutes’ drive of home.