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Bob Foos
Webb City has a golf course again – disc golf course that is.
It’s been over 50 years since the 9-hole sand-green golf course on west Broadway was replaced with housing.
Now, there are tee boxes for an 18-“hole” disc golf course in the southwest corner of King Jack Park, in a shaded area behind the softball fields.
The tee for the first hole is located at the south entrance to the park, where Brewster Lane dead-ends.
Installing the course has been a longterm goal of Bryan Waggoner, parks and recreation director. He started playing disc golf while in college at Pittsburg State University. In fact, he lived so close to the course at Lincoln Park that he could tee off from his porch.
Later, as assistant parks and recreation director at his hometown, Chanute, Kan., he helped design the city’s disc golf course.
The baskets for the course in King Jack Park were installed last year, but only recently have signs been placed at each tee. They let golfers know which basket to aim for, how far they are and the number of throws for par.
Amateurs will probably shoot for the white baskets because they’re not as far. The yellow ones are for better players.
Joplin Disc Golf Club members have provided input regarding the course design and made the tee signs.
Waggoner says he chose to paint the tee boxes on the existing paved trail instead of building concrete boxes to speed the course completion and keep from having to mow around them.
Like the baskets, tee boxes painted white are for amaters, and the yellow ones are for those with a more powerful drive.
Tee signs show which baskets are on a hole, along with the distance to each target basket. Players just starting should tee off from the white tee boxes and aim for the white baskets.
Micah Colburn, an experienced player, puts into a basket. Look at how many discs he carries in his golf pack.
According to Wikipedia, groups started playing frisbee golf in the 1960s. And in the 1970s, after leaving toy manufacturer Wham-O, Ed Headrick, the father of the Frisbee, also developed the disc golf sport and trademarked Disc Golf.
You can play disc golf with a Frisbee, of course, but there are four types of discs made specifically for disc golf:
The distance drivers are thinner and more pointed, while mid-range drivers and putters are thicker and more rounded on the edge.
Micah Colburn, an Ozark Christian College student, regularly plays the course in King Jack Park.
“When there’s not a lot of people, it’s one of my favorite courses,” he says. The problem with a lot of people is that most of them are walking the paved trail – in the way of the target baskets.
The holes are designed with all 18 holes in the space of 9. Micah, from Oregon, where he started playing, says he likes the design because “you can play 18 but only have to walk 9. You can play it kind of fast.”
Brett Dorrance, of Carterville, is a pro disc golfer, who also sells discs at tournaments and online.
Inside the converted school bus, Brett Dorrance has about a thousand discs, disc packs, shirts and hats.
Some people, like Brett Dorrance, of Carterville, fall in love with the sport of disc golf.
During the pandemic, Brett began to play disc golf because it was outdoors – as opposed to basketball. He’s been playing four years and has been playing at the pro level for a year.
“I don’t know, I just fell in love with it,” Brett says. “I fell in love with it, and now it’s become a business.”
Most of the time beside his house, you’ll see a converted small school bus with a vinyl wrap featuring the name of his business, Route 66 Discs, Mobile Disc Golf Store, and the Route 66 sign.
Somebody else who had the idea of selling discs at tournaments first converted the bus with a couple of racks for discs where seats had been. Selling discs got old for the guy, so he put it up for sale.
Brett bought the bus, wrapped it and added a rack for disc golf shirts.
The racks probably hold at least 1,000 discs from the brand-name suppliers. One brand, Full Turn Discs, is made by Brett’s friends in Joplin.
Brett takes the bus to about 10 events each year. Last week, he was at Ozark, where he not only played and sold discs, he ran and won the tournament.
“I showed up and won my own tournament,” he says.
Brett also has an online store. And he has a YouTube channel, BD Golf. Here’s one of his videos, in which he does a practice round prior to a tournament at the Branchwood Disk Golf Course at Bella Vista, Ark.
Winning tournaments and selling discs doesn’t make a career. For that, he’s into marketing from a computer in his house.
He used some of those skills to design the tee signs for the Webb City course and the course at Landreth Park in Joplin.
The Webb City Sentinel isn’t a newspaper – but it used to be, serving Webb City, Missouri, in print from 1879-2020. This “newspaper” seeks to carry on that tradition as a nonprofit corporation.
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