Disc Golf Course Analysis

[ElementZ]

Hi all,

It's been awhile since I've done an analysis on DG Courses so I thought I'd do it again.

I had a brilliant coworker pull all of the DG Course data from this site using Powershell and I did a very quick analysis. Below are some fun insights I found.

Year Established: We all know that the number of courses installed each year is growing, but does Year Established have an impact on course rating? It turns out that courses truly have been getting better! Courses designed in recent years on average have a better rating than courses designed in the early years of disc golf. The best year for DG courses was 2013 and 1989 comes in at #2.

Tee Type: It turns out that not having concrete tees on your course does damage to your course rating. In fact, having concrete tees boosts the course rating by a whole .5 over grass tees! Interestingly, carpet tees boost ratings significantly as well (+.5), but there are only 60 of them.

Hole Type: No major surprises here. DISCatchers make up the biggest chunk of baskets and people don't like home made baskets.

I wanted to keep this first post short, but if there are follow up questions, feel free to post!!

 

[ElementZ]

It's also interesting that the 2nd best year (1989) is directly followed by the 2nd worst year (1990). It's a bizarre coincidence.

 

[ElementZ]

# of Baskets: On average, each additional basket contributes .068 to the course rating. 9s (42.4%) and 18s (43.7%) make up 86.1% of DG courses. These are followed by 12, 6, 27, 24, and 10 (in that order). There are currently no courses with 31 or 34 baskets. Every other basket count under 36 is used at least once.

 

[esdubya]

Fascinating. Thanks

Got any plans to make a pdf version of this available?

 

[ThrowBot]

Interesting stats; thanks for sharing.

If you're looking for more stuff to analyze, I'd be interested to see how certain course characteristics correlate with others. For example, I'd expect that courses with home made targets are more likely to have dirt/natural teepads, and possibly non-standard numbers of holes. On the other side of the coin, I'd expect courses with concrete tees to also have commercially available targets.

 

[KniceZ]

It also would be interesting to see if there's general relationship between SSE (not par since that's so controversial) and rating. i.e. does higher SSE result in higher rating?

 

[CreemCheese]

Surprised there weren't more 27 holes, I think I've played as many of those as I have 9 holes. Thanks for the info and time spent on this.

 

[Peterb]

looks like course building peaked in 2012. Nowhere to go but down from here

 

[Mr. Butlertron]

Sweet charts. I'm not sure there is the difference between natural/dirt or natural/grass tee pads. Is forming topsoil or sod into tee pads a thing?

 

[Martin Dewgarita]

looks like course building peaked in 2012. Nowhere to go but down from here

Time to start focusing on quality over quantity.

 

[Martin Dewgarita]

Sweet charts. I'm not sure there is the difference between natural/dirt or natural/grass tee pads. Is forming topsoil or sod into tee pads a thing?

I don't think so... I would think it would require a serious cycling of teeing areas, similar to how ball golf moves the tee markers on the tee, could be a cool concept, but not very practical to our sport...

 

[teemkey]

Does your data set include multiple pin positions and/or multiple tees per hole?

 

[Steve West]

I don't think so... I would think it would require a serious cycling of teeing areas, similar to how ball golf moves the tee markers on the tee, could be a cool concept, but not very practical to our sport...

I've put in courses with both. I check "grass" if the grass is still growing. This can happen if the tees are rotated, or if the traffic is light enough. And the tees are in the sun and watered.

 

[DavidSauls]

I'd question whether concrete tees boost the ratings, or just come part-and-parcel with better courses. Someone making the effort to build a better course layout, might also insist on the top quality tees.

The comment about carpet tees makes me think this even more, as I would think they're overwhelmingly on private courses, and private courses have certain advantages when it comes to ratings.

Thanks for the interesting charts and statistics.

 

[KniceZ]

I don't think so... I would think it would require a serious cycling of teeing areas, similar to how ball golf moves the tee markers on the tee, could be a cool concept, but not very practical to our sport...

I know of a course being built by a guy that runs a commercial nursery and he's planning to use giant grass pads and move the tee spot around with markers just like golf.

 

[jjtwinnova]

I know of a course being built by a guy that runs a commercial nursery and he's planning to use giant grass pads and move the tee spot around with markers just like golf.

In ball golf There's less stress applied to the tee pad because most are just standing in one place to shoot. (Unless your Happy Gilmore)
The natural teepads are more susceptible to erosion meaning he must change these teepads pretty often, or the grass will turn to dirt.

 

[ElementZ]

I'll just keep sporadically adding short insights throughout the day.

More on HoleType below.

We saw earlier that DISCatchers were the most common type of basket, but where do they rank on basket quality? It turns out, they're directly in the middle!

Of the 34 basket types listed on DGCR, there are 16 that had better coefficients and 17 that had worse coefficients (the coefficient being the isolated impact of the basket on the course rating). # represents the number of occurrences each basket type has in the DGCR database.

It's no surprise that DG players clearly prefer chained baskets over object and tone baskets. There's nothing like hearing the sound of chains!

 

[ThrowBot]

I'd question whether concrete tees boost the ratings, or just come part-and-parcel with better courses. Someone making the effort to build a better course layout, might also insist on the top quality tees.

I had questions about that as well...it's not necessarily direct causality.

I'm not surprised that discatchers found their way to the middle of the course rating vs. target type comparison. With such a convincing plurality of courses having discatchers installed, there's a decent enough sample to come out to a pretty average course rating.

 

[ElementZ]

Interesting stats; thanks for sharing.

If you're looking for more stuff to analyze, I'd be interested to see how certain course characteristics correlate with others. For example, I'd expect that courses with home made targets are more likely to have dirt/natural teepads, and possibly non-standard numbers of holes. On the other side of the coin, I'd expect courses with concrete tees to also have commercially available targets.

Looking at the subset of the 152 courses with Home Made Baskets...

9-holers make up 66% of home made basket courses. This is followed by 18s (19%), 7s (3%), 6s (3%), and then 10/12 (2%).

As for courses with Home Made baskets vs. Total US in terms of tees, your hypothesis was spot on. Courses with Home Made baskets have Grass/Dirt/Natural tees 70% of the time. They only have concrete tees 16% of the time (vs. 40% of total US courses).

 

[Steve West]

As for baskets, I'd speculate that some of the effect is due to two factors:

Certain basket types are less likely to be used by inexperienced designers, and

The newly introduced basket types have only been placed on recently installed courses.
​

Have you isolated the effect of having a designer named vs. none? I would be interested in not just the average, but whether having a designer might polarize ratings.