2018 Las Vegas Challenge PDGA NT

[Royalhghnss]

I strongly disagree. I love watching FPO, and will sometimes watch it over the MPO lead card. Those guys are so good, that it's not relevant to me. FPO is closer to my skill level, and I can learn by watching them. Plus Paige crushes and she's awesome!

I wish more people strongly disagreed

MPO chase card gets 2-4x views compared to FPO lead card. Go look at our GBO views from last year.

Maybe you should have filmed round 1 so you would have a basis for the comparison you're attempting to make? Also, did the td use your metrics to request a waiver?

If only I'd done that before... like the year before or something

Courses like Moraine are so much better than the open ball golf courses. To me, it's so obvious, it's not even a discussion.

Preach. Moraine is one of my favorite courses to film (never got to play it). Such a variety of holes, and shot types needed to play well. A++ course.

Deer lakes was sweet too.

 

[TimSyl]

I wish more people strongly disagreed

MPO chase card gets 2-4x views compared to FPO lead card. Go look at our GBO views from last year.



If only I'd done that before... like the year before or something



Preach. Moraine is one of my favorite courses to film (never got to play it). Such a variety of holes, and shot types needed to play well. A++ course.

Deer lakes was sweet too.

Yep. I've never personally played Moraine, but seeing the videos makes me want to...several other courses as well, like Milo. The Dela golf course, the Las Vegas courses, the Memorial (realize not a golf course), Utah, etc. I have almost zero interest in playing.

 

[Muddyboots]

I wish more people strongly disagreed

MPO chase card gets 2-4x views compared to FPO lead card. Go look at our GBO views from last year.



If only I'd done that before... like the year before or something



Preach. Moraine is one of my favorite courses to film (never got to play it). Such a variety of holes, and shot types needed to play well. A++ course.

Deer lakes was sweet too.

Keep doing what you're doing homie. I appreciate ALL the coverage, and the hard work you put into it for us to watch it. I do hope that we are moving towards live coverage, but that is not a reflection on what is available now in terms of quality. Post production with commentary is a great product, and it fits the amount of time I have to watch better than a 4 hour round, most of the time. Congrats to Eagle and Paige, and thanks to all the video peeps out there who feed our addiction.

 

[Nubes]

Keep doing what you're doing homie. I appreciate ALL the coverage, and the hard work you put into it for us to watch it. I do hope that we are moving towards live coverage, but that is not a reflection on what is available now in terms of quality. Post production with commentary is a great product, and it fits the amount of time I have to watch better than a 4 hour round, most of the time. Congrats to Eagle and Paige, and thanks to all the video peeps out there who feed our addiction.

Yes! What he said!:thmbup:

 

[brutalbrutus]

MPO r4 vids are up...

https://www.youtube.com/user/JomezProductions/videos

 

[SD86]

Yep. I've never personally played Moraine, but seeing the videos makes me want to...several other courses as well, like Milo. The Dela golf course, the Las Vegas courses, the Memorial (realize not a golf course), Utah, etc. I have almost zero interest in playing.

Agree, except I'd like to play Delaveaga. Because it's there.

 

[brutalbrutus]

Great job Eagle!... Man that kid is throwing really far right now. 500ft hyzers that looked smoother than a putter upshot and he is throwing 400+ FH with pretty good accuracy...









Paul needs to get his putter working...

 

[AHagglund]

Gotta think with the way Eagle is throwing hyzers that he'll have a great shot at the memorial...

 

[Halcón]

I can finally talk about Eagle! You owe it to me buddy for not jinxing you and costing you the win.

No but seriously, we ALL knew this was coming. That you'd get that freakin monkey off your back and you'd win big. And this is only the first of many many more to come. Congratulations, man. :clap::clap:

 

[JTacoma03]

This game has been growing at relatively the same pace for the 25 years I have been involved in it. Baskets in the ground is what has driven pretty much all of that growth. The increase in views/demand for media is a by product of that- not a cause of it.

I joined the PDGA in 2010, #47201. Eight years later we are over #100000. How on earth does that signify linear growth?

Courses in the ground are absolutely part of the growth strategy, but to identify them as the majority cause of the non-linear, more rapid growth in the last 10 years? The evidence is not there. There is evidence however of media driving plenty of cultural shifts, sales patterns, fanbases for new players, etc. Courses in the ground did not earn Sexton 5-figure royalties on his signature firebirds man, it was him 1) playing on camera and 2) using social media to expose his personality which earned him a following.

SInce the TV was invented we have been studying the impact of media on culture, from micro to macro levels, and even in a meta sense. To assume that disc golf is a unicorn would be to assume that disc golfers somehow have radically different patterns of decision making from non disc golfers.

Please do not take this as disparagement of what you and the others do- I know you all work hard at it for relatively little tangible reward and produce product well beyond what your budgetary limits would dictate. I am a farmer so lord knows I know about that.

I definitely don't take it as offense or disparagement, I just think you may be mis-attributing some things. Again, increase in courses is a great thing, but that would counter the PDGA's own logic - which is that we are impacting the game (in a way that 5 pros dont agree with).

I think you guys are talking about two different kinds of growth. No one in a major national sport thinks, grow the base. They think, grow the market. You're talking about a direct emphasis on grow the base, Jamie is talking about grow the market.

I think it is premature to nix what Jamie is saying. Americans buy trillions of dollars of garbage, a lot of it on line or media garbage, every year. We do so because of "good" marketing, not cause someone put a great football field in. A lot of things drive sales and most of them are marketing based, not beating the ground.

Our grassroots growth is due to feet on the ground and the efforts on the part of the PDGA and local people, sort of. At some point that will switch over to media selling, if the sport grows into a "large" sport. Frankly, by what I'm seeing, the switch over is on the cusp. I'm seeing a huge growth in online participation of events. When 50,000 people watch a video, how may are active players? How many are active PDGA members? How many casual players watch that and think about elevating their game? The number of casual "observers" that ask me about the discs in my hand, or express an interest because they played once in college, is rather large. That online video thing, it's a huge resource that I direct them to. Even more, as a way to get players to invest at a higher level, it's huge. When I started playing 20 years ago, I had a cloth sack and ten discs. The number of guys with "real" bags was tournament players. Most locals made their own carts with baskets to hold discs. Lets call the whole thing a $200 investment. The number of guys I see with a $2,000 investment today is the majority of tournament players. Even the league players often have a $500 investment. I'm going to credit marketing with some of that.

Secondly, I'm gonna agree with Jamie's assessment that Innova has helped the PDGA grow the sport. They've done it in two ways. On the ground, events and event support, and via direct marketing of online content. They aren't the only ones, but they are certainly a leader. I don't know who started the notion of manufacturers backing events. It could have been Discraft, but I certainly wouldn't undersell the efforts of the manufacturers in growing the sport.

[joke on] biscoe is a farmer? I didn't know that growing pot made you a farmer...[joke off] Sorry biscoe, being a farmer these days is tough, I just couldn't resist.

One quick thing to point out - I meant "us" as in the collective media, not Innova...though Innova does invest altruistically in the sport on a regular basis.

And yes thank you for the clarification, I'm talking about growing a market, which is obviously correlated to raw numbers of participants in the sport, but not exactly the same.

Biscoe may not have been considering that I'm talking about all media, not exclusively tournament coverage when I'm addressing the impact we are having.

There are some OK converted ball golf courses out there, but they aren't in Henderson, Nevada. This tournament does not deserve to be an NT.

You could not be more wrong on this. The courses aren't amazing, but theyr'e far from bad from a design perspective, and the volunteers and staff do a phenomenal job.

This is easily on the level of GBO. Not the same experience, but quality par? Most definitely.

 

[@iDiscGolf]

Not comparable to GBO.

 

[Nubes]

MPO r4 vids are up...

https://www.youtube.com/user/JomezProductions/videos

I know what I'll be doing for the next hour or two!

 

[GoldeyeGolf]

You could not be more wrong on this. The courses aren't amazing, but theyr'e far from bad from a design perspective, and the volunteers and staff do a phenomenal job.

This is easily on the level of GBO. Not the same experience, but quality par? Most definitely.

My criticism was of the courses, not the people who run the tournament or how it was run. Not worthy of NT status, IMO.

 

[roadtripstuff]

I joined the PDGA in 2010, #47201. Eight years later we are over #100000. How on earth does that signify linear growth?

Courses in the ground are absolutely part of the growth strategy, but to identify them as the majority cause of the non-linear, more rapid growth in the last 10 years? The evidence is not there. There is evidence however of media driving plenty of cultural shifts, sales patterns, fanbases for new players, etc. Courses in the ground did not earn Sexton 5-figure royalties on his signature firebirds man, it was him 1) playing on camera and 2) using social media to expose his personality which earned him a following.

SInce the TV was invented we have been studying the impact of media on culture, from micro to macro levels, and even in a meta sense. To assume that disc golf is a unicorn would be to assume that disc golfers somehow have radically different patterns of decision making from non disc golfers.

I definitely don't take it as offense or disparagement, I just think you may be mis-attributing some things. Again, increase in courses is a great thing, but that would counter the PDGA's own logic - which is that we are impacting the game (in a way that 5 pros dont agree with).

One quick thing to point out - I meant "us" as in the collective media, not Innova...though Innova does invest altruistically in the sport on a regular basis.

And yes thank you for the clarification, I'm talking about growing a market, which is obviously correlated to raw numbers of participants in the sport, but not exactly the same.

Biscoe may not have been considering that I'm talking about all media, not exclusively tournament coverage when I'm addressing the impact we are having.


You could not be more wrong on this. The courses aren't amazing, but theyr'e far from bad from a design perspective, and the volunteers and staff do a phenomenal job.

This is easily on the level of GBO. Not the same experience, but quality par? Most definitely.

So are you contributing the growth of the pdga memberships to media?

In the case of the DGWT I thought the precise problem was that Jussi was not getting the outside exposure that he thought he would through media exposure?

As far as the growth in PDGA memberships I would like to see precisely when that boom of 60,000ish members really started? I'm sure it wasn't exactly in 2010 when you started, I would like to see what other factors, other than media, could have contributed to this growth. For instance between 2009 and 2012 we had several new manufacturers pop onto the scene. Late 64, Dynamic Discs (transitioned into making their own discs), Legacy, Prodigy, not sure when Westside came onto the scene. For instance could we contribute it to a company like a DD turning the small town of Emporia into a disc golf mecca? I bet you would be hard pressed to find a disc golfer in Emporia who isn't a member of the PDGA.

On top of that, around the same time we started seeing multiple companies start hosting, ace race, birdie bash, two disc challenge type events across the country. I would say these are a huge factor into growing the tournament base. I know tons of people who started playing competitively by playing such events.

Now to that point, I do think the Media is what is helping our pro players with better contracts, sales of their tour discs, etc, but I feel like it is still only reaching people that are already pretty heavily involved in the game. I know quite a few regular tournament players that don't even watch and don't care to watch other people play disc golf. I do not believe that media is the driving force in getting new players into the game.

 

[JTacoma03]

So are you contributing the growth of the pdga memberships to media?

Not necessarily. I was using membership as a metric to show how growth has not been linear (aka "growing at the same pace").

Biscoe posited that the sport has had linear growth for the past 25 years, and that "pretty much" all of that linear growth was due to installing more courses. He was saying this as a rebuttal to my stance that media is driving growth in other adjacent sectors of the industry.

In the case of the DGWT I thought the precise problem was that Jussi was not getting the outside exposure that he thought he would through media exposure?

I don't want to go down a DGWT rabbit hole, but in short - I think that's a bit of an oversimplification. Jussi put the tour on hiatus because he wasn't able to ink a large deal with a sponsor within the timeframe he set for himself. This 2-year timeframe was determined before he ever launched the concept.

ETA: this is one of the major differences in the DGWT vs DGPT. Despite them being VERY similar overall - one of the big differences in the two tours is the sponsorship model. DGPT is going for quantity - many small investors. DGWT is going for 'quality' - fewer investors who are more deeply ingrained in the partnership (aka more $$$ and more exclusivity).

As far as the growth in PDGA memberships I would like to see precisely when that boom of 60,000ish members really started? I'm sure it wasn't exactly in 2010 when you started, I would like to see what other factors, other than media, could have contributed to this growth. For instance between 2009 and 2012 we had several new manufacturers pop onto the scene. Late 64, Dynamic Discs (transitioned into making their own discs), Legacy, Prodigy, not sure when Westside came onto the scene. For instance could we contribute it to a company like a DD turning the small town of Emporia into a disc golf mecca? I bet you would be hard pressed to find a disc golfer in Emporia who isn't a member of the PDGA.

On top of that, around the same time we started seeing multiple companies start hosting, ace race, birdie bash, two disc challenge type events across the country. I would say these are a huge factor into growing the tournament base. I know tons of people who started playing competitively by playing such events.

Now to that point, I do think the Media is what is helping our pro players with better contracts, sales of their tour discs, etc, but I feel like it is still only reaching people that are already pretty heavily involved in the game. I know quite a few regular tournament players that don't even watch and don't care to watch other people play disc golf. I do not believe that media is the driving force in getting new players into the game.

We've been over this, please re-read the last couple of pages, rather than me repeating my answers.

What I will add to this is that I said there is a direct correlation, not causation, between growth of the sport and media efforts. I probably should have defined "growth" more clearly.

And (to EVERYONE reading, PLEASE pay attention):

Tournament Coverage is not the sole definition of media in the sport. I have never said this, I have never thought this, I have never put forth this argument.

In fact I've publicly said the opposite - that tournament coverage is the LEAST effective type of content for evangelizing the sport.

 

[SD86]

Congrats to Paige Pierce, especially after spotting the field a bad first round. And congrats to Catrina, who appears to have her game back and seems to be having more fun out there. It was also nice to see Kona Paris on a lead card. Madison Walker and Lisa Fajkus (hope I spelled that right) had pretty good commentary on the Jomez videos. And thanks Jomez, for bringing us coverage of the ladies.

 

[brutalbrutus]

Anybody know what happened to Anthon?

 

[CreemCheese]

I'm not sure it's always because they're playing the course the way it was designed. I think it's more they're playing it the way most of us ordinary players would have to approach it.

I've heard a few times in commentary for the men saying that the hazards didn't come into play, but then the women saying they had to make the choice of trying to get there in 1 or layup afraid of penalty strokes.

 

[air show]

Just finished watching round 4 and thought it was real entertaining. I don't believe I have seen a course with that much trouble on most every green. Congrats to Eagle on the big win and Joel Freeman on a solid second. Three of the longest players on the tour and a new comer with a wicked sidearm. Only hope Joel can make a showing at the Memorial... he was fun to watch.

PS. Wish I could of watched Ricky's hot 4th round.

 

[DiscFifty]

yah...Jomez Coverage was incredible to say the least. MPO/FPO.. just awesome. REALLY loved the way they integrated the commercials into the video so the "feel of the coverage" never stopped and just flowed well, resulting in a bit shorter video as well. Nice!

My only negative comments about the otherwise stellar commentary, is when either of them say something like "I did that, I could have done that, why didn't they do this or that, etc, etc". No offense guys...but when you're not on the lead or chase cards, it comes off a bit pompous.