[Latitude] Is House of Discs just a Lat 64 rebranding of Trilogy and Co?

Churches own large swaths of land(tax free) and during covid, since disc golf courses are cheap as hell to install(relatively speaking) a lot of them installed small <18 hole courses. That way they could skirt covid restrictions while still doing church stuff.

Plus side: Lots of little courses popped up all over the country
Downside: Those that were here already instantly got outnumbered by nationalist conservative christians

So yeah, shrink the sport.
 
Churches own large swaths of land(tax free) and during covid, since disc golf courses are cheap as hell to install(relatively speaking) a lot of them installed small <18 hole courses. That way they could skirt covid restrictions while still doing church stuff.

Plus side: Lots of little courses popped up all over the country
Downside: Those that were here already instantly got outnumbered by nationalist conservative christians

So yeah, shrink the sport.

I'm kind of glad in some ways the boom is falling off. But mainly just so the annoying people go away and all the fly by night dealers go away.
 
After the first few years of playing most of us have more discs than we need. I buy at most five discs a year to replace discs I lose playing. I have given a couple of people enough discs and a bag to start playing and have a tub of discs in my garage with about 25 discs loose in my car trunk, not counting the discs in my bag I play with normally. They all got high on the Covid expansion. That is gone and there is going to be a severe reduction in companies and employees in the disc golf world. If the companies do not deliberately subsidize getting children into youth leagues or other training programs this will be a dead sport in a few decades.
 
Definitely won't be dead, but some areas might have to go back to playing 'tree golf' instead of an actual course. I had to do that where I live for a few years before the first course within 1.5hrs was installed.
Its more that due to a course's low capacity(can only have so many people playing a course at once) and/or leagues clogging up courses in populated areas, that area becomes 'saturated' where any more players just means it starts sucking more for everyone(backups/full courses). Then, since courses are hard/very expensive to install in highly populated areas, you end up with deadzones of no courses in cities/suburbs since that land is more valuable as houses/business.
That's the main thing that holds back real expansion. Look at how fast pickle ball took over, because its cheap/easy/fast to install the infrastructure for it, disc golf at a base level needs acres of land. That forces courses to be installed further and further away from where people live(where the land is cheap), so its harder and harder to get casuals interested in driving an hour away one way just to poorly throw plastic at trees.
So unless the hobby gets real money to put courses in where people actually live(not bumfuck arkansas) there will be a ceiling that DG hits no matter how popular it becomes(ignoring that if it does somehow become the next 'IT' thing, courses might, MIGHT, start going in at premiere areas(which you KNOW will be pay-to-play), but even that is literally 'pie in the sky' thinking).
In that regard, Discmania/Prodigy(maybe innova?) are/were killing it in Europe throwing in courses EVERYWHERE there. DG might be falling in the US, but globally I'd say its a wash popularity wise, rising in Europe(and a smidge in Central America), and falling in US(population comparisons aside).

It'll probably settle around where we were around '08~'12. If we're lucky.
 
It's interesting to see parallels in other hobbies from the marketing side of things. I think the spike in growth is definitely down, but now that companies see that huge profits can be made by selling limited edition discs, custom fun stamps, crazy colors, and tour series discs.

Thinking back to the '08-'12 era like fisty mentioned, swirly plastic was a rarity and really sought after, but now it's just a type of plastic. Any kind of halo effect would have been a gem, but now it's just out there. Even pearly plastic isn't considered as unique or sought after as it was in 2010.

I played Magic the Gathering for a long time and haven't played for 4-5 years but still loosely follow the market. With the introduction of collector booster in 2020– that are exclusively alternate arts, rares/mythic rares, full art cards, chances at some crazy extended art foil whatever card– the prices of foil cards and rares dropped like crazy. The player base has definitely declined because people are getting bored of all the flashy things and product fatigue despite Hasbro sharing record sales because of the huge prices of these fancy collector boosters. The boom of the 2020ish playerbase in MtG has gone down, but the product is still pushing pushing pushing.

I want to clarify that I'm not upset about all the tour series, collaboration, and fundraiser discs. It's incredible to have seen the huge shift in the game making it viable for pros to tour and the support for the game and for the players is incredible. However, I see a lot of pushing product that's flashy (Ledgestone, a lot of DD discs in general, OTB/Gyropolooza, etc) and the market is rejecting it, which I think is why we're seeing these big layoffs. The companies put so much money into product and making quick sells that they're hurting when that product doesn't sell.

I'm not business savvy, so of the last paragraph could be way off base, but it's been really interesting to watch these two markets do similar things around the same time. As a vet in the game (and that's relative, I know some of y'all have been playing for way longer than I have) I definitely have some grumpy old man nostalgia for when the game was a more relatively niche sport.

As an aside, I was watching some old CCDG coverage of the 2013 FPO Master's cup, and wow has the game evolved. Val Jenkins, Paige, Catrina, and Hokom, and nobody was in single digits over par. MPO scores were similarly a lot lower than they are now at comparable tournaments. Because of the enormous community support, the field has gotten better ten-fold, just to highlight the good that's come out of the rising popularity of the game.
 
I remember at GBO in 2016 DD/Rusco was talking about bringing some of the molding stateside. Not 100%, but some of the higher selling stuff to decrease lag in the supply chain. Obviously it never happened, but I always wonder what could have been.
 
The vandal is a good disc ignoring all the other shenanigans. It's basically the 1994 obd1 manual 4wd v6 ford ranger of discs. Not really as good at specific things as other trucks but predictably shitty enough in all situations to be reliable for daily driving.
 

Latest posts

Top