At 1 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you’ll find a group of Albion College students throwing discs around in Victory Park –- and they’re doing it for college credit. 

Disc golf is a sport gaining rapid popularity. According to the Professional Disc Golf Association, there are over 200,000 members of their organization alone and more than 9,800 courses around the world. 

Alex Dowley, assistant tennis coach at Albion and avid disc golfer, is the instructor for the Disc Golf class, which offers a quarter of a wellness credit. Dowley said that 17 students are registered for the class, but some days as many as 25 kids will show up. 

“I’ve had a couple people, this is their third time taking the class, just because it’s the only option available for disc golf,” Dowley said. 

Dowley hopes to take the local interest in disc golf and use it to start an official club team, so that students could play outside of the class and compete with other colleges. 

“We could have up to 25 to 40 people that would want to be in the club and we could have as many as 10 playing in tournaments,” Dowley said. 

Albion College is not the first school to join the disc golf craze; Adrian College already has a team, and Trine University recently built a disc golf course on their campus Dowley said. Not to mention, every NCAA Division 1 school in Michigan has a disc golf club team. The best teams in the state are the University of Michigan, ranked 42 nationally,  and Ferris State University, which is currently ranked 23 nationally. 

Albion itself already has a disc golf course. Victory Park, less than a mile from campus, has a course that, according to Dowley, is one of the top ten courses in the state of Michigan. Spring Arbor, Jackson and other surrounding areas have courses as well. 

The Victory Park course has a total of 18 holes, with the front nine being easier than the back nine, he said. One of the things that makes the Victory Park course challenging is the amount of water holes. Specifically, six of the nine holes in the back are water holes.

Luckily, Albion has talented disc golfers that can manage the difficulties of the course. One of them is Josh Doyle, a first-year from…