Affordable, social and outdoorsy: Why disc golf is thriving on P.E.I.

Evan Nobles positions his driver as best as he can, steps forward, and tees off. An object glides through the air toward the hole, and lands with grace about 200 feet away.

This may sound like your average golf game, but it's not. It's disc golf.

"It's just like ball golf," Nobles said, as he walked to collect his neon-green disc in the tall grass.

Just like it — except that drivers and putters are different types of flying discs rather than clubs used to hit a small dimpled ball in different situations.

The grass is calf-length right now on this nearly finished course on the Belfast Mini Mills property in eastern Prince Edward Island. But this time next year, it will likely be well-trodden by other golfers, all aiming for the double-chain-lined basket sitting behind some birch trees another 200 feet away.

"It's not ball golf. It's not this pristine field that has to be kept up all the time," Nobles said.

"You want to be shooting in trees. You want that difficulty. You want to feel like you're hiking in the woods."

Nobles is one of three people behind the Belfast Disc Golf Course, along with Andrew Clark and Tyler Spencer, which is set to open in 2025 after more than five years of work. They hope it will attract both newcomers and lovers of the sport.

"I know some skill levels are really high on P.E.I., so they'll find some of the holes easy, but there's some that are just going to be brutal if you make mistakes," he said. "So I think it is going to be a nice mixture for everybody."

He started planning the course back in 2019, quickly looping in brother Matt Nobles and childhood friend Alex McCosham, who has been the one most involved in physically transforming the woods in Belfast.

"I will spend five weeks or so on an area that is going to be a hole and I'll get Evan and Matt and whoever to come out… [to] throw on it and see what happens. And we'll do a couple throws, and then it becomes evident that, 'OK, this one needs some more work,' or 'There's still too many trees here,'" McCosham said.

"Or sometimes we throw on it and it feels great and we're like, 'All right, this one's done for now.'"

Because of the size of the Belfast Mini Mills property, which the Nobles family owns, the 18-hole course is spread out over more than 40 acres on the Garfield Road, much more than the average acre-per-hole ratio for disc golf.

A disc golfer himself, Nobles wanted to make the sport available in southeastern P.E.I.

"We played it all the time, and we were just annoyed that we had to drive an hour and a half one way to get to a disc golf course," he said.

So he started making his own: "We had the machines, we had the knowledge, we had the ambition."

Taking over the Island

A new disc golf course seems to pop up on P.E.I. nearly every summer now. Some are small five-hole courses at schools, or nine-hole courses at municipal parks.

But there are also five full 18-hole courses, soon to be six.  

"It's night and day now compared to what it was like in 2011," said Josh Coles, one of the operators of the Glenaladale Disc Golf Course, which opened in 2022.

Glenaladale is a historic estate property overlooking Tracadie Bay. Members of its non-profit board were looking for ways to attract younger visitors and called for ideas from the community. Enter disc golf.

"I think it's blown up into much bigger of a project than we probably would have ever imagined," Coles said.

That's true for a lot of disc golf courses since the pandemic brought a boom of interest. But disc golf on P.E.I. goes back even further than that.

"There was a course put in in Strathgartney in — I want to say 1977 or 1978 — that was actually still in place when I started playing. It was not very well maintained, but it was still around," Coles said.

Now, all manner of courses cover the Island, most charging a $10 daily fee with revenue used to maintain the course.

The Glenaladale course covers about 20 acres, from the edge of farmers' fields to old tree farms, from dense forests to areas that were clear cut. 

"We are trying to make it a really good tournament destination, a place that can host events where people come from off-Island," Coles said. "We do want to make it challenging."

But he is trying to keep the course beginner-accessible too, so that more people get hooked on the sport.

With all the courses that have opened on P.E.I. in the past decades, Coles said we're drawing a wide audience.

"I personally know people from Toronto and from the disc golf community there that would fly down for weekend and play courses here, or drive down for a week … We've also hosted these large tournaments with people flying in from across the country."

From beginner to the world stage

Earlier this month, Ellen Dixon proved it can go the other way too. She was the only person to represent the Maritimes among 400 athletes at the Amateur World Disc Golf Championships in Michigan.

"I've never played so much disc golf in a week in my life," Dixon told CBC P.E.I.'s Island Morning host Mitch Cormier

Island Morning9:37Only Maritimer at disc golf championships in U.S.

P.E.I.'s Ellen Dixon just returned from the Amateur Disc Golf World Championships in Michigan, where she just barely failed to make the cut into the final rounds. We hear from her how it went, and how easy it is to get started in the sport on P.E.I.

She qualified for Michigan by playing regional tournaments across New Brunswick and P.E.I.

"We play these really technical courses here," she said. "Most of our courses are in the woods, lots of trees for you to hit."

Most of the courses at the tournament were park-style, and very different from the five major ones on P.E.I.: Huck It in Middleton, Kings Pine in Mount Stewart, Hillcrest Farms in Bonshaw, Rose Valley in Breadalbane, and Glenaladale.

With the park-style courses, "you just have to be able to throw far and throw far repeatedly," Dixon said. "So that was a little bit more outside my comfort zone."

When it comes to Island disc golf, Dixon recommends starting at a free course, like the one at the Stratford Town Hall or the Terry Fox Complex in Cornwall. Public libraries also now have disc golf kits available to borrow.

"We are a mecca for disc golf here, and I preached that to everybody when I was down there," she said of her Michigan adventure. "And oddly enough, I met a girl in my card, her and her husband are coming up here this fall, and I said, 'call me, we'll go play.'"

Back in Belfast, Nobles hopes the new course will add to P.E.I.'s disc golf landscape.

"The Maritimes is killing it for disc golf courses," he said. "I actually don't know why there's so many on the Island. It doesn't really make sense, but I'm loving it."