Disc Golf

from Ojai Magazine Summer 2021

Mindfulness & Healing

It’s a warm late spring day at Lake Casitas. As a Frisbee is thrown, it makes a whooshing sound as it whizzes toward the basket. This is the scene at Coyote Point Disc Golf Course, a beautiful, challenging course overlooking Lake Casitas.

by AUSTIN WIDGER

A disc golfer attempts to putt into the basket at Coyote Point Disc Golf Course overlooking Lake Casitas. Disc golf has soared in popularity in recent years, but grew even more exponentially during the past year. The local disc golf club in the Ojai and Ventura area is called Ventura Disc Golf. The club’s main purpose is to upkeep and maintain Coyote Point, as well as look to install other disc golf courses around the area.

According to Ventura Disc Golf President Wayne Kuntz, who was elected in late 2019, club membership nearly doubled during the pandemic. The club had 50 members before and is now close to 100.

“Even before this latest exponential growth of the sport, it’s been one of the fastest-growing sports in the country, if not the world, for several years,” said Ventura Disc Golf co-founder and Coyote Point co-designer Kory Thomas. “But once COVID hit, it was the one thing people could do to not go crazy.”

Thomas first took an interest in disc golf in the early 1990s playing down in Ventura. He started playing object golf with a few friends, shooting at random objects and trash cans at San Buenaventura State Beach. Through playing object golf he met Chip “Chipper Bro” Bell, a several-time world champion freestyle Frisbee player who had a few disc golf baskets he gave Thomas on permanent loan.

“Every Friday after work I’d unload all of my construction tools, load up these big heavy metal baskets and drive them over to the park and set up a little three-hole loop,” Thomas said. “We made different tee boxes for each basket that made up an 18-hole disc golf course, even though we only played in three baskets. So that was my tradition for many years when I still lived in Ventura.”

During that time, Thomas made more friends who had a mutual interest in disc golf and putting in a permanent course. That was when he helped found the club. After presenting a proposal for a course to the powers-that-be at Lake Casitas and promising to raise all the money, they were approved.

“One weekend we got all of our stuff together, and myself and another crew of guys, went out there … and we built all the forms to pour the concrete tee boxes,” Thomas recalled. “We poured nine concrete tee boxes in one day. So we did half of the course in one day. Getting the concrete truck out on the rolling hills of Lake Casitas is no easy task. So that weekend we concreted in some basket locations, we got nine tee boxes poured, and that’s kind of where it started. That was March 6, 2005 when the first baskets and the first nine tee boxes actually went in the ground at the lake.”

After installing half of the course in one day, the first thing Thomas and the rest of the club did to celebrate was to have a beer and play what is now Coyote Point Disc Golf Course for the first time. The other nine holes were installed one or two at a time over the rest of that month, and the course was complete. Soon after, the course was open to the public. “For disc golf, you can go up hills and down hills, pretty steep angles uphill or down hills for a shot, too,” Kuntz said. “So the terrain plays into it, especially up here. The course terrain up here is pretty radical, pretty up and down.” The club is looking forward to bringing back its annual Coyote Classic tournament in October after a year hiatus. This is a Professional Disc Golf Association tournament where 40 to 50 professional players come out to the course at Lake Casitas.

“It draws people from all over the state and even out of state,” Thomas said. “In 2019, we had people from as far as Finland. It’s one of the most sought-after tournaments to play, because it’s a three-day campout that’s super fun.” Today, the club’s main goal is to fi nd a place to build another course in the area. There are courses in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, and Santa Barbara. However, Coyote Point is the only course for the Ojai Valley and Ventura. According to Kuntz, there are a few challenges with locating a spot for a course in this area. A good course requires a location with trees and various elevation changes. “It takes up space, so you really need about 10 acres per nine holes,” Kuntz explained. “The ball golf ranges per yards kind of equate to disc golf feet. So we average out around 300 to 350 feet per hole. We’ve got some holes that are 450, close to 500 feet. We also have some holes that are 120-150 feet, but they’re up and down a hill or something. It’s the terrain. It’s willingness for somebody to let us get in there. It’s having enough space.” Kuntz emphasized his desire for seeking the community’s help in getting another course built. With the popularity of the sport expanding so rapidly, space and terrain are the only real limitations to achieving this goal. “We’ve been pushing the club and we’ve got a pretty good organization going again,” Thomas said. “There’s a lot of enthusiasm. Once COVID hit, disc golf became a sport not just in Ojai or Ventura, but across the world that has just experienced a giant boom.”