biscoe
* Ace Member *
Whamo got out of it.
-
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On the edge of professional Disc Golf
- Thread starter smyith
- Start date
Whamo got out of it.
Keyword: Wham-O
Username: Three Putt
^
Use the advanced search on here with those and you will find a plethora of threads on just what you're asking. Although Three Putt might just give you the answer here if he sees this.
disc qualified
Banned
not only did wham-o remove themselves from the equation but the large corporate sponsors disappeared
Cgkdisc
.:Hall of Fame Member:.
I don't believe disc golf at that time specifically had a spectator following other than the people that happened to be at some of those overall events. Most were likely there for the other disc events like freestyle, MTA, accuracy and distance which could be seen from elevated positions in a stadium. Now, golf distance can't even be done in a stadium like it was with lids at that time. I think the reason the other sports didn't maintain their spectator base despite losing Wham-O sponsorship was not fueling the future spectator pool by trying to institutionalize these disc sports within the school system for HS and collegiate competitions.
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Pagosa Springs, CO has a sports shop near the Reservoir Hill DGC that has a booming disc rental business. This is a tourist town with lots of families visiting. They can go to the shop, rent discs cheaply enough for the whole family to play, and get an introduction on a beautiful (but challenging) course.
This is kind of a good news, bad news deal for more serious discers as when these herds of newbies show up the course can become practically unplayable.
Take the bad with the good...
Well a smart business owner would never rent a disc for only $1 unless there are no trees and no water anywhere near the course, but you make good points regardless. You have to factor into your rental cost things such as risk of loss and wear and tear on the course.
Like most other rentals, I would imagine that there is a deposit on the discs. If they come back busted up or not at all, the renter pays for the disc.
The discs that are rented in Pagosa Springs are very well seasoned, but certainly usable.
A deposit for rental = charity, not business. You'd also alienate a consumer base by nitpicking scratches and dents.
Discs are more likely to be lost than abused by newbies. Renting premium plastic just piles up your losses.
A smarter business model is to rent cheap plastic (wholesale DX is what....$4/disc?) and advertise a "complete bag rental" as a putter, mid, and driver along with course fee bundle. You want a turnkey "select from the menu and go" type business.
biscoe
* Ace Member *
I see disc rentals as less of a for profit item and more of a loss leader to get the customers in the door and hooked
Rentals are 100% profit for us because we don't invest in rentals, at least not anymore. Our rentals are primarily lost and found discs that have gone unclaimed for over two years or had no identifying marks on them to begin with. The rest are discs employees tested out and didn't want to keep. We don't really care if customers lose them (we don't even charge them again if they need a replacement), we've got a near infinite supply at this point and it's not like we don't get as many rentals turned in found as other players' discs.
Wear and tear is a good thing for rentals. Beat discs tend to fly better, particularly for newbs. Plus, if people don't want to play with dinged up rentals, we've got plenty of shiny new discs to buy.
We did try deposits on rentals the one time we bought discs (floaters) specifically to rent. It was such a pain in the ass to keep track of how many rentals were out, how many deposits needed to be paid back, etc that we gave up on it quickly. Even with purchasing the discs...figure $5 a piece for a DX grade disc. It only needs to be rented five times to be paid for. We easily average 10+ plays out of each rental disc before it disappears. It's still a net profit venture, and like biscoe says, it's much more an investment to get players in the door and playing than it is a moneymaker.
It's a long story...
Wham-O was a toy company, and toys are notoriously boom/bust. They had retailers screaming for hula hoops that they couldn't make fast enough one month, then had a warehouse full of them they couldn't sell the next.
Ed Headrick had the idea that if they could move the Frisbee from the toy market to the sporting goods market, they could create a more stable future for the company. Problem was, there was no such thing as Frisbee sports.
So Ed made them up.
He swung a bunch of Wham-O advertising dollars into an organization he created called the International Frisbee Association (IFA.) The IFA started running "competitions" but they were mostly events where people Ed recruited competed for Wham-O's money so they could be promoted as athletic events. A lot of the competitors were on the Wham-O payroll or got vehicles or other support from Wham-O so they could travel around and do Frisbee demonstrations to promote these new Frisbee sports. From afar it looked very grass roots, but when you dug deeper it was all a mirage propped up on Wham-O's advertising budget.
Being a corporation, Wham-O had the kind of pull to get other corporations to advertise at IFA events. It was a gravy train and must have been really cool for the guys who got to enjoy it. They had big events at the Rose Bowl, Wham-O pulled strings to get people on Good Morning America...it looked and felt like a big deal.
It was a house of cards, though.
Wham-O was sold around 1982-83ish to Kransco. Kransco made those Power Wheels toy cars. At Wham-O the Frisbee was king; it was their top seller. At Kransco, Power Wheels were king. Kransco had no interest in paying hippies to play Frisbee. The gravy train was no more.
Once Kransco turned off the corporate money, the whole thing collapsed. It was all propped up on that money. The WFDF showed up a few years later so people could still compete, but all the money was gone.
After the fall of the IFA, disc golf has tried to re-write it's history as this game separate from the IFA, but that doesn't follow reality. Ed Headrick started the PDGA as the disc golf counterpart to the IFA and ran it like he had run the IFA. It was totally under his control and his major corporate partner was Wham-O. Wham-O made the Midnight Flyer. Wham-O sponsored the big events. The famous 1979 $50,000 Huntington Beach tournament? Find a picture of the guy signing the winners check; it was one of the Wham-O partners. Ed Headrick at DGA and Stork Roddick at the IFA worked together to push disc golf; it was very much part of the Wham-O corporate advertising of the Frisbee as sporting good plan.
The modern player-run PDGA dates back to 1983. The PDGA version is that Ed "graciously turned over control of the organization." The reality is that Ed jumped off a sinking ship. With the IFA money gone, he knew the PDGA as it had been created was as dead as the IFA. He let the players have it; the only difference between what happened to the player-run PDGA and the WFDF at that time is that we didn't have to change the organization's name.
Of course the players wanted to keep making a living playing Frisbee, so they took over the PDGA and went about looking for somebody to replace Wham-O's money. They probably thought they could. I mean, how hard could it be? The problem was that once Ed let go of the iron fist and stopped protecting Wham-O's interests, somebody could actually make that beveled golf disc that Wham-O never made. A little start-up in California got the patent for that, and a little start-up didn't have the resources to prop up professional disc golf. Once they started pitching disc golf to advertisers that didn't have a financial stake in disc golf, they found out how small and unattractive a group we were to advertisers.
So that past with the big events at the Rose Bowl? It was a mirage. Ever since 1983 we have been hoping for a cash cow to replace Wham-O. We are still waiting...
disc qualified
Banned
re: rentals
first it depends on the course in question
a beginner friendly/family friendly course would probably be a smallish pitch and putt type course and as such there wouldn't be much need for drivers, probably could get by with some mids
that said, working out a deal with innova or discraft for some premium plastic factory seconds purchased in bulk would be a relatively cheap investment
you charge a modest rental fee of maybe $3 a disc per round or $5 for the disc plus the round with a lost disc fee of whatever the disc cost (maybe $7-10)
premium plastic is key because that allows you to rent out the disc potentially more times than baseline plastic rentals
say you rent out a z buzzz 25 times at $3, that would be $75 for one week of rentals or possibly just one weekend, depending on the course and the season
trust me when i say that rentals can definitely be a money maker for a p2p family friendly course
first it depends on the course in question
a beginner friendly/family friendly course would probably be a smallish pitch and putt type course and as such there wouldn't be much need for drivers, probably could get by with some mids
that said, working out a deal with innova or discraft for some premium plastic factory seconds purchased in bulk would be a relatively cheap investment
you charge a modest rental fee of maybe $3 a disc per round or $5 for the disc plus the round with a lost disc fee of whatever the disc cost (maybe $7-10)
premium plastic is key because that allows you to rent out the disc potentially more times than baseline plastic rentals
say you rent out a z buzzz 25 times at $3, that would be $75 for one week of rentals or possibly just one weekend, depending on the course and the season
trust me when i say that rentals can definitely be a money maker for a p2p family friendly course
Three rivers rental policy: Rental Discs are available to rent for $2/hour at the entrance gate. A photo ID is required.
disc qualified
Banned
yeah, a photo id should be required so you have a way of getting the disc back or receiving the lost disc fee
That's just the Cliff's Notes version. It's actually more complicated than that.
Disc golf was late on the IFA radar. It takes too much space and time. IFA events were styled after track and field events, and a round of disc golf in the middle messed up the schedule. It was the Rochester guys who put on the disc golf event in '74? I think it was '74, anyway. That event got Ed's attention and made him think about disc golf. So disc golf did kinda sorta grow up from a grass roots movement of eastern players, but the idea of "Professional" disc golf as the article described it comes from Ed's PDGA. Ed's PDGA was an offshoot of the IFA idea and was pure Wham-O marketing.
The thing that the IFA/PDGA organizations did in the 1970's was artificially push the movement "pro" and trying to make it look like it was something that was about to break big when there was no recreational/amateur base to it. There was "Professional" Frisbee and disc golf with no amateur Frisbee and disc golf. Once the money evaporated, we had to develop an amateur scene.
That upside-down development is probably why the PDGA seems Hell-bent on pushing Professional disc golf; the reason the organization existed after 1983 was to create the demand for what they wanted to do, which was to play disc golf for money.
In the end the "story" of disc golf is never "you guys were mass marketed a product by a corporation." It always comes off more warm and fuzzy than that. There was some warm and fuzzy in our development, but if you ignore that we were being mass marketed to by a corporation (and that our "Founding Father" was the V.P. of Marketing for that corporation) you are missing a big piece of the puzzle.
madmax88
Eagle Member
I hear you and biscoe, and if it works that's fine I wasn't trying to be critical, was more just speaking how I would theoretically run things. I definitely understand the logic, however I would personally approach it from a perspective of creating an experience. Unless you're a storefront that's part of a shopping center or other way in which foot traffic is generated my thought is a loss leader isn't an effective sales tool (places like Spinners on the Green excepted), but hey I'm just theory talking and that's what the internet's for right? :thmbup:
Royal Hill
Eagle Member
I would add this to the rental disc/ p2 play (family or otherwise) discussion.
The asking of a use fee of an activity does something well aside from the fee level itself. (the amount of the fee is in many ways inconsequential) It, for many potential users, legitimizes the activity. I saw this hinted at during the great post earlier questioning how bowling or mini golf would work if in a city park and you brought your own equip.
Family activities need that service angle to work. Thats the real product... The service part of it. Making it possible, clean, assumed to be safe, something they can do without "already knowing how it works".
Intimidation of the unknown is a bigger barrier than cost by far. I invite people to play quite often. I know for sure they are never going on their own. They are intimidated by the fact that it's free and in a public park. I think if I told them it was located (x) and "you go, pay the guy at the booth and they will get you going... " They'd actually go and play. They distrust this thing called disc golf in part because it's free. ...there is a questioning when something does not seem to play by the rules of everything else in the world....
The asking of a use fee of an activity does something well aside from the fee level itself. (the amount of the fee is in many ways inconsequential) It, for many potential users, legitimizes the activity. I saw this hinted at during the great post earlier questioning how bowling or mini golf would work if in a city park and you brought your own equip.
Family activities need that service angle to work. Thats the real product... The service part of it. Making it possible, clean, assumed to be safe, something they can do without "already knowing how it works".
Intimidation of the unknown is a bigger barrier than cost by far. I invite people to play quite often. I know for sure they are never going on their own. They are intimidated by the fact that it's free and in a public park. I think if I told them it was located (x) and "you go, pay the guy at the booth and they will get you going... " They'd actually go and play. They distrust this thing called disc golf in part because it's free. ...there is a questioning when something does not seem to play by the rules of everything else in the world....
