Equipment

FARMINGTON — A cleanup project designed to make the confluence of the Animas and San Juan rivers safer for rafters during this spring’s annual runoff season will take place this week.

The City of Farmington is partnering with the River Reach Foundation — the Farmington-based nonprofit organization that organizes the annual Riverfest celebration, and protects, promotes and enhances the area’s riverine corridors — on a project taking place on Monday, March 13. Local contractors recruited by the River Reach Foundation will gather that morning at the Among the Waters Trail on the west side of the city south of the Bisti Highway to remove concrete and other debris from the river that poses a hazard to rafters, according to a news release issued by the city.

Team Innova has Seven Top Ten Finishes

The Disc Golf Pro Tour was in Waco, Texas last weekend for the 2023 Waco Annual Charity Open. Team Innova had players on the podium in both FPO and MPO. We had seven top ten finishes between the two divisions, as well as a host of impressive statistics and Team highlights. 

Back-to-Back Elite Series Podiums for Heimburg

Coming off a win at the Las Vegas Challenge, Calvin Heimburg returned to the pro tour last weekend looking ready to win back to back Elite Series events. Calvin was in the conversation up until the last few holes of the final round. He finished the event in 3rd place, moving himself into 1st position in DGPT Points Standings for 2023. Calvin led the field in Parked Percentage, hitting the bullseye for birdie on one third of his shots. He also led the field in C2 Hits and was 2nd in Birdie Percentage.

Calvin started his tournament off with one of the best rounds for the weekend at -11. His 72-foot putt to save birdie on hole 4 in that round made a big statement early that Calvin was pressing for the win. 

Nate Sexton took 9th place at the 2022 Waco Annual Charity Open. He led the field in Scramble Percentage. As you would expect, Sexton played smart, well-executed disc golf, only taking two bogies for the entire event. 

Joel Freeman got his final round off to a truly unbelievable start, shooting 9 down through the first 8 holes. He went on to have a 1076 rated, -12 round, with 14 under par strokes. With that round, Joel jumped 23 spots up the leaderboard into a tie for 10th place. On back to back days, Joel Freeman managed to Eagle the difficult hole 7 with massive drives that landed in Circle One. 

Bradley Williams finished in a tie for 10th as well. In the second round, Bradley had one of the biggest highlights of the event, a 111 foot throw-in for birdie on hole 10.

Paul Oman took 13th place, his best Elite Series finish since 2021. He started his tournament off with a -10. In that first round, Paul’s C2 putt to save par on hole 14 was one of the best moments of the weekend. 

Scoggins Can Do More Than Just Putt

Ohn Scoggins finished in 3rd place at the Waco Annual Charity Open, this time fighting her way onto the podium with her impressive driving, more than the world-class putting she has become known for. She was 3rd in the field in…

Taupō is turning into a hotspot for disc golf and this week will host the North Island championships, bringing about 240 players to the district to show off their skills.

The sport was gaining popularity as a low-barrier alternative to golf, Taupō Disc Golf Club president Ken Harris said. They’d had help from a Taupō District Council community grant and the town was a popular destination for players.

From Thursday, the 2023 Taupo-nui-a-Tia Disc Golf Classic/New Zealand Disc Golf North Island Championships will be held at Spa Park, and on courses set up at the Taupō Golf Club.

Some of the country’s top players will be at the competition, which will run until Sunday afternoon.

READ MORE:
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* Disc golf course granted for Taupō’s Spa Park

He encouraged locals to catch some of the action – entry for spectators is free.

“The tournament is a crucial moment for us,” Harris said.

“We’ll see somewhere around 230 to 240 players – it’s one of the largest in the country.

“With some updates to the course, and after Cyclone Gabrielle, we’ve had a huge job of getting it all ready.

“All of our members represent us well, even if they don’t compete, just because of how much work they’ve put in.”

Harris said the Taupō Disc Golf Club had about 70 members, was growing steadily, and all a person needed to take part were walking shoes, a few inexpensive discs, and transport to the public course at Spa Park.

He said the club was now working with young people in Taupō teaching them the skills and techniques to help them play the game and a community grant had helped take the sport to schools and community groups, with the backing of the Lake Taupō District Sports Advisory Council.

“In two weeks, we got into almost every school in Taupō – that was about 880 kids between years 5 and 8 having a go,” Harris said.

“We’ve now got nine portable baskets across two successful rounds of funding, so we can set up a nine-hole course anywhere.

“Schools don’t have that barrier…

In their first season together, Canada’s Lia Pereira and Trennt Michaud are rapidly climbing the pairs rankings. After teaming up in the summer of 2023, they won bronze in December at their first international competition—Golden Spin of Zagreb—a Challenger series event. They followed up with another bronze-medal win in their debut together at the 2023 Canadian National Championships in January.

Gaining momentum, the young team made their debut at 2023 Four Continents in Colorado Springs, Colo., where they finished fourth with three new personal best scores. They are now scheduled to compete at the 2023 World Figure Skating Championships in Saitama, Japan, later this month.

Michaud is an experienced pairs competitor, having made three previous trips to Four Continents and Worlds with his previous partner, Evelyn Walsh. Their best placement was a bronze medal at the 2022 Four Continents. Walsh and Michaud were initially planning to continue for the 2022-23 season, however, in August, Walsh announced on Instagram that she would be retiring to pursue her studies.

Michaud knew immediately that he wasn’t done with his competitive career.

“It was the first thing Alison [Purkiss, his coach] asked me after we’d had a conversation with Evelyn,” he recalled. “I said there was no question about it. I wanted to find a new partner and keep going. I love skating, I love competing, and I feel like I haven’t done enough with it yet.”

At the time, Pereira was training as a singles skater, though she wasn’t new to the idea of pairs.

“I did do pairs about five or six years ago, as a little baby novice, and I worked with Alison as my coach,” she said. “I’ve kind of kept the relationship with her throughout these past five years, and my singles coach Nancy [Lemaire], is also very good friends with her. So, when Evelyn decided to move on, Trennt and Ali had messaged Nancy, and Nancy had messaged me, and we had a little meeting and started a little trial. We skated together for a couple of days and then we just kept saying, ‘Oh, well see you…

If you love golf and have had many golf vacations or courses, you’ll love disc golf. Disc golf, sometimes called frisbee golf, is a sport that is almost identical to golf in terms of rules and objective. However, instead of shooting a ball with a club toward a hole on a grass course, you throw a plastic disc toward a metal basket target through the air. Courses usually have nine or 18 holes with trees as obstacles. And as in golf, the lowest score wins.

Disc golf entails various techniques and specialty shots, such as the “hyzer,” a throw in which you curve the disc to the left if you are right-handed or right if you are left-handed. It’s useful on many approach shots or to get around a hazard. Disc golfers also use different discs as putters, drivers, and irons. And most importantly, disc golfers also have to avoid pesky water hazards.

The sport even has a professional disc golf association, like golf’s PGA, but most people play at local courses found in parks. We recommend you start there. To help you get going, we’ve rounded up some of the top discs. Consider the discs’ price, size, ratings, and durability claims before you buy.

On Jan. 1, 2018, Jennifer Trombley trudged through 2 feet of snow during a raging blizzard.

Wind whipped across her face as snow swirled through the air. For six hours, she struggled to keep moving forward. But there was only one thought on her mind: finish the game.

An avid disc golf player and founder of her own league, Trombley was playing in a tournament to kick off the new year when that blizzard struck.

“It’s not always fun playing that type of weather, but it makes you stronger as a player. To be so determined and try to keep your mind focused, it can test your limit at times,” said Trombley, an orthotic assistant in Michigan Medicine’s orthotics and prosthetics department.

Trombley’s brothers introduced her to disc golf in 2003 when she was a high school student, and she immediately took to the sport. Similar to traditional golf, disc golf involves throwing flying discs into baskets.

She said she enjoyed being out in nature and having a free way to spend time with friends.

But after playing disc golf for 10 years, Trombley started to grow frustrated.

“I wasn’t getting any better at the sport. I just thought I was bad. I was embarrassed to be throwing not as far (as the other players) all the time, but I was playing with men. And then I met some women who played and realized, ‘Oh, no, I’m pretty good,’” she said.

Even on a professional level, Trombley said, the strength difference between men and women is visible in how far they can throw a disc. After playing with other women, her confidence grew as she learned the methods behind controlling a disc and the physics of throwing at different angles.

Five years ago, Trombley decided to create her own league. She started advertising her group through word-of-mouth, and eventually printed business cards promoting the weekly practices.

“It’s just a nice environment for women to not be embarrassed, and to feel comfortable learning to play casually or to compete against each other,” she said. “It’s gained a lot of traction over the years, and my league is now getting around 20 to 30 women a week.”

During the practices, female players — ranging from children to retirees —…

Competitiveness, sister sports, and more.

December 27, 2022 by Jesse Weisz in Analysis with comments

This article is part of a series intended to provide insights into disc golf fandom. These insights will come through analyzing a rich data set produced by the first-ever Ultiworld/StatMando fandom survey. If you wish to learn more about the survey and the demographics of the survey respondents, please read this accompanying article. To see which pros we root for and against, please read this article.

This article will continue from where we left off in our previous article, analyzing data related to our respondents’ relationship with disc golf and how they see the sport.

We were curious to find out how often the respondents play disc golf.

• More than half (53%) of the respondents play disc golf more than once per week! If you were to survey 1503 ardent fans of the professional league of any sport, how many of those sports will have a majority of fans play that sport more than once per week?
• 84% of the respondents play disc golf at least once per week!
• Most of my weekends are spent playing ultimate or recovering from an ultimate injury, so I don’t play disc golf often. I find myself in the tiny minority (2%) of respondents that play only a few times a year.
• We cross-referenced this data with player fandom scores and found no significant pattern based on how often a respondent plays.
• There were differences in how often respondents played based on birth year. The respondents that play a few times a year had an average birth year of 1983. The average birth year goes up for each measure of playing frequency, with an average of 1987.4 for respondents who play more than once per week. The older our respondents were, the less they played.
• Addtionally, the more a respondent played, the more competitive they considered themself. This leads to the following graph.

We asked respondents: “How important is being competitive in your disc golf game?”

We then cross-referenced the competitiveness data with the data produced from other questions and found a correlation with the political alignment of the respondents, graphed below.

• The graph has an interactive legend at the top to help visualize the distributions of competitiveness across political associations.
• The graph shows that right-wing respondents…

A new, high-tech, public restroom is coming to a Grand Rapids City Park.

Self-Cleaning Toilet Coming to Heartside Park

The City of Grand Rapids Parks and Recreation Department shared that a new all-season, self-cleaning bathroom arrived at Heartside Park this week.

Heartside Park is close to downtown Grand Rapids at 301 Ionia Ave SW. Heartside Park also features a basketball court, picnic shelter, playground, and splash pad.

The new accessible facility will be connected and opened this spring.

According to M-Live, in addition to detecting humans and cleaning itself, the bathroom talks too! Once a person enters the restroom ad locks the door, a voice message will notify the person that they have 15 minutes to use the restroom, after that, the door unlocks.

The restroom comes from a New Zeeland based company called Exeloo.

As for how the self-cleaning function works, MLive reports,

The autowash system sanitizes the toilet and floor with sprayer jets at certain times of the day, according to the company. During that cleaning period, the door is automatically locked to prevent entry and detection systems ensure people aren’t still within the toilet cubicle. The cleaning spray empties into a floor drain.

Artwork on Heartside Parks New Restroom Facility

The mural wrapping the building, named “Connections to Nature,” was created by local indigenous artist Jamie Shackleton.

The mural depicts The Grand River, or ‘Owashtanong,’ running through four bright circles and four river animals.

Here is what Jamie says about her piece,

The process included traditionally illustrating each animal and then transferring it to digital illustration. Once digitized, the process included a lot of logistics to work with the building dimensions. I often printed the illustration horizontally and folded it into a model with four walls to get each part to lay in the intended composition to be pleasingly viewed from each side.
The animals included were creatures that were great medicine for me to see daily while I was in the Grand Rapids Public Museum…

From Wednesday to Saturday, Jan. 18-21, 2023, I participated in an athlete camp hosted at CrossFit Mayhem in Cookeville, Tennessee. About two dozen athletes who have competed at the Semifinal level or higher in the past couple of seasons were in attendance. My purpose was twofold: survive the week and learn about the athletes and coaches at CrossFit Mayhem.

Below is a recap of my experience and the workouts I performed while in Cookeville under the tutelage of Mayhem coaches Jake Lockert and Facundo Etchecolatz, who said the following (paraphrased):

“If you need to modify or scale, please do so. This is a training camp; by nature, we’ll push each other, but we’re not competing. Each session has a specific purpose which we will explain. We encourage each of you to do your best to adhere to those intentions and not get caught up in a race. If you’re unsure or need affirmation on how to scale or what we’re looking for, do not hesitate to talk to one of the coaches; we are here for you.”

Needless to say, that message is important. It set the tone for the week and put some responsibility on each athlete to make the right decisions session by session and workout by workout.  With little else on my mind, I got a good night’s sleep and headed out for day one.

[Related: Reebok Nano X3 Training Shoes Available Worldwide on Feb. 10, 2023]

Editor’s Note: This article is an op-ed. The views expressed herein and in the video are the author’s and don’t necessarily reflect the views of BarBend. Claims, assertions, opinions, and quotes have been sourced exclusively by the author.

Day One — Morning Session

Takeaway: the coaches were complimentary of and impressed by my ability to choose and hold an appropriate pace for each directive given. All the years of writing, performing, and tinkering with aerobic-specific conditioning pieces seem to have paid off in this regard. A good start to the camp.

Takeaway: I received my first real coaching cue. What I noticed, and what I’d continue to notice, is amongst one of the most critical components of coaching, and one I am inspired to improve upon after this week) is finding the critical cue and communicating it to the athlete clearly and succinctly. Also, I PRed my hang squat snatch. 

Day One — Afternoon Session:

• Three sets — Toes-to-Bar and Deadlift; work:rest with a partner (lots of volume)
• Shoulder and Posterior Chain Accessory Work

Takeaway: The age-old saying of…