General musings on distance expectations
My advice to anyone is to pick a clear goal, set
reasonable expectations, and get the best input to your form development you can. Not all teaching and learning styles are the same, and remember that adults have more significant and different learning issues relative to children.
Regarding distance expectations, I continue to be interested in this topic and how dramatically skewed folks' expectations are by watching top throwers on tour (i.e., those most frequently in video coverage).
First, Infinite discs
did an informal survey a few years ago. As far as I know this was all self-report methodology, and you can expect the usual biases in memory and estimate inflation can influence these distributions. Even so, you can immediately see that even when people are just reporting whatever these numbers mean, distance claims of 400' and higher are a minority and diminish with age.
It is also meaningful to compare completely freewheeling, unprincipled throws for absolute distance with those for golf lines (I would argue this is a continuum/blurry distinction). For example, iIn a personal correspondence from SocraDeez musing about whether anyone
can throw 500', (I hope he doesn't mind me sharing), he provided a distance exorcism to me:
"Distance lines are distance lines. Trajectory and nose angle take serious practice. What's the ratio of golf distance to max distance? Definitely not 1:1. But it could be in the neighborhood of 0.8, or 400 to 500. Whatever the case may be, the golf distance is more significant and more skillful. 400' disc golf line ability is rare. There are a few thousand unique people that regularly play in Indianapolis, and I bet less than 1-2% (so ~ 30-50 people maybe) can throw 400' golf lines. Personally, I know maybe two dozen players that have this kind of golf distance in the City. Indiana does a big Club challenge tournament every year. Almost all of these players were picked for their Club teams for their respective counties/Clubs.
7 or 8 out of 10 players for the Indy team had this distance. We won for the second year in a row just last week. (I don't play on the team, just help administer). Of the neighboring counties/Clubs that sent teams from the Indy metro down to Southern IN to compete, Hendricks County had 1 or 2 out of 10 players with this golf distance. Hamilton County Disc Golf Union had about 5 out of 10 with this golf distance. Johnson County had 2 players with this golf distance.
Hamilton County took 2nd place last year, 3rd place this year. Fort Wayne is another strong team that finished 2nd this year, 3rd last year. I don't know their players personally to estimate distances for the whole team, but I witnessed one of them push 500' on a backhand golf line. Over winter, Payton Staman and I counted how many players in the entire state of Indiana could throw 500' golf distance: we estimated it at about a dozen total.
400' of golf distance would certainly be enough to consistently win league events and tournaments locally, almost anywhere you live.
Scott Stokely lived in Fort Collins a bit when Mike Randolph was living there and going to Colorado State. There might have been one other player in the area, but I forget. Anyway: it was much talked about at the time that there was not one, but two players in the area that could throw 500+ golf distance. In the Indianapolis metro. right now, it's two players. So -
less rare these days maybe, but still very rare. There's one other player who's young, tall, & lanky that can get there sometimes on distance lines, but he doesn't really even have 400' golf distance yet."