Equipment

When Nic Maloukis first started playing disc golf 20 years ago, Mary Moore Searight Metropolitan Park near his home in South Austin proved a natural destination.

The 18-hole course has a nice mix of challenging shots and short holes that appeal to seasoned players as well as the occasional thrower, and the wooded and rolling course gave the Akins High School graduate a good reason to get outside.

“I grew up playing Searight, and I still love to play there,” said Maloukis, who now lives with his family in San Antonio, where he works as the superintendent at Government Canyon State Natural Area. “Whenever I come visit Austin, I try and get over there and get a round or two in.”

Maloukis will join hundreds of other elite amateur disc golfers competing in this weekend’s National Amateur Disc Golf Tour’s national championship across courses throughout the Austin area. Approximately 1,300 players will compete, making it the largest amateur disc tournament ever to take place in the country.

Those numbers don’t surprise Maloukis, who has played courses throughout the San Antonio area and Central Texas.

“The growth of the sport has just been phenomenal,” he said. “You go to Searight now, especially on the weekend, and you’ll be waiting hours. It’s just amazing how the sport has grown, especially in Austin.”

That growth has helped make Austin one of the sport’s regional epicenters in Texas, and it’s one reason that NADGT Director David Feldberg selected the area for this season’s finals. After qualifying rounds wrap up Saturday, the Met Center course in Southeast Austin will host Sunday’s final round.

Feldberg, one of the most decorated players ever to compete on the Professional Disc Golf Association tour, now runs the NADGT with his wife, Synthya. After the tour had to cancel last season’s scheduled event in Austin because of the pandemic, Feldberg said he wanted to make this year’s event historic. Austin’s ever-growing status as a destination city — as well as its fondness for disc golf — makes it a natural host for such an event, Feldberg said.

If you’ve gone to a local city park lately, you might have noticed strange metal baskets on poles with chains dangling free. These baskets are spread out throughout the park seemingly at random. For the uninitiated, Frisbee golf (sometimes known as disc golf) is a confusing concept. You might not think it, but Frisbee golf can be a very big deal to some people. [Stuff Made Here] is back with a disc launcher that he hopes will put all the disc golfers to shame.

It’s no secret that we here at Hackaday are big fans of [Stuff Made Here], or [Shane] (he has his own tag after all), and for obvious reasons — the CAD design process, the careful machining and testing, and the extremely high bar that [Shane] sets for his projects. This one is no different, and it is a tale of iteration and scaling. He started out with a simple goal: break the speed record for a thrown Frisbee.

An initial design was decided upon based on high-pressure air pushing a piston to throw the Frisbee off of an arm. Initially, the arm was way too slow as the airflow was severely restricted due to air solenoids and pressure regulators. After fixing all those problems by fabricating his own solenoid and adding a secondary tank with no regulator, the arm started really moving. However, [Shane] wanted it to be able to be arm-mounted, so making sure the torque wouldn’t melt his arm bones was an important priority.

A counterbalance was added to cancel it out, but that ended up causing additional problems down the road, so the throwing arm had to be made as light as possible. The gripper mechanism had to be redesigned again and again as each time the speed was increased, a new problem arose. Turns out that small plastic discs being accelerated at many G’s tend to deform and slip out of their holders, no matter how well engineered. So [Shane] switched to a clever new design to pull the Frisbee along rather than push. It was too dangerous to really be handheld, and the only tests while he was wearing it were at very low amounts of pressure and power.

Testing it in a wide-open field at full power showed promise and while he had plenty of speed, he wasn’t able to beat the distance record. Breaking the distance record is much harder as Frisbees aren’t really designed with the sheer acceleration that [Shane] is subjecting them to, and they want to flip. Additionally, the Frisbees are lacking the spin that would keep them more stable, and what we do as humans is quite difficult to reproduce. Maybe a larger-scale version of this disc launcher could be made that accepts Frisbees?

It’s incredible to watch this contraption come together as each part needs to be designed and machined first by [Shane]. Video after the break.

Pulling his arm back to take his second shot at a par-3 hole on the disc golf course at Hoover Reservoir Park, 10-year-old Luke Bowman almost slipped on the ice-covered grass. 

Still, his disc ended up less than 6 feet from the cage — an easy putt to claim par.  

His older brother Charlie, 13, complained the cold was affecting his grip on the colorful discs he swapped in and out from the more than a dozen in his large backpack. But he, too, was able to make a nice putt to salvage par.  

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For the Bowman brothers of Reynoldsburg, the chilly temperatures Saturday morning — which were in the teens when they began their round of disc golf — mattered little. Same with the ice and snow on the ground.

That work ethic has paid off, as Burridge, a junior kinesiology major at the University of Michigan, recently became a professional disc golfer.

Burridge is a 2019 Clear Lake High School grad and lives in Pasadena’s Brookwood subdivision.

Both of his parents were avid Ultimate Frisbee players, and they urged their son to follow suit. Around 2017, Burridge started working on his disc golf game, hitting multiple courses in the area, including the Kirby Park course in Taylor Lake Village, the former links at 1776 Park in Friendswood and at Jack Brooks Park in Hitchcock.

Prize money and sponsors

After competing at the amateur level for a while, Burridge found himself at a National Amateur Disc Golf Tour (NADGT) event held in Austin Oct. 28-31. His dad, also a Robert, was competing, too.

“I’m the third Robert Burridge in a row, but we all have different middle names,” the younnger Burridge said.

His dad played in the intermediate division. When his run was over, he helped his son.

“For me, having him there was great,” Burridge said. “During the last two rounds I was able to have him caddy for me, and being able to talk the entire time was great. It was a nice experience to have him there with me.”

The younger Burridge’s overall play during the tourney was also a nice experience.

“At the finals, the top amateurs who have not accepted more than $1,000 in cash are still true amateurs, and they can go and play for a large amount of money to get started in the professional division,” he said. “I tied for eighth out of (about 317) people.”

After that, a decision had to be made.

“You got the choice of taking the cash and going pro or taking 75 percent of it in (merchandise) that they were selling and stay amateur for however long you wanted,” Burridge said.

He took the $1,150 prize money; so now he is a professional. Burridge also has picked up some sponsors in Innova Champion Discs and Gorilla Disc Golf.

There is money to be made on the professional tour. Taking first place in a tournament can garner the winner several thousand dollars in prize money. Usually, those placing in the top third will also get some green.

Still focused on college

Although he has joined the professional ranks, Burridge said he has no plans to become a disc golfing road warrior.

“My plan right now is to finish undergrad,” he said. “During summers, I plan on traveling to a few larger tournaments, but I don’t plan on flying to too many places. I plan on playing in big (Michigan area) tournaments instead of flying to California or Portland (Ore.).”

Burridge takes a somewhat low-key approach to competition.

“One of the things that I try to focus on in a tournament is not taking it too seriously, because if you mess up a shot, you are in that ‘I messed up’ mind space for an extra two holes, which can mess you up even more. So, I really try to get into the ‘whatever happens, happens, just do your best shot’ mind space,” he said.

Burridge can make a disc travel a long way.

“I can usually throw further than the people I am playing against,” he said. “My strength is my driving distance. For a drive I am comfortable throwing 475 (feet) accurately.”

Although that is a long, long way, some players chuck it even further.

“There are pros that can throw 550 (feet),” Burridge said. “I can throw that far in a field, but I don’t know how accurately. I can throw 550 with my backhand. About 450 or 475 accurately. With my forehand, it’s about 350 accurately, with a distance up to about 400.”

Although Burridge tries to keep his emotions in check on the course, the ability to be a long driver can be a release.

“I enjoy it because I’ll step up and go, ‘Hmm, I have enough space to just really throw one here,’” he said. “At the NADGT finals, I was coming off of a bad hole, and a few holes later there was a hole where I could just throw as hard as I want as long as I didn’t do anything too stupid, and I think I got 540 off it.

“I was glad that I could release some anger.”

A game of timing and form

At 5-foot-11, Burridge is not a hulking specimen; so his ability to fling a disc comes from other talents.

“It’s a lot of timing as well as form,” he said. “The first thing I tried to learn was form and I’m still working on form (because) if you get into a bad habit it can be really hard to break.

“It’s very important to see it when it first happens and be able to say, ‘I need to fix this, now.’”

His kinesiology studies have helped him work through a problem.

“Recently I was having elbow pains throwing forehands; so I said, ‘what am I doing that generates pain?’” Burridge said. “I was putting a lot of stress on my elbow throwing it more like a baseball.

“When you see pitchers throwing with their side release, they are throwing straight arm with their elbow facing backward. That’s how my forehand looked, and I have to say it was painful.

“So, I’m trying not to focus on power. I’m sacrificing power for health and it may hurt me on limited holes, but if I can stay healthy, that’s all I really care about.”

Burridge has helped other disc golfers.

“When people ask me for advice on how they are throwing something, I almost always say, ‘It should feel like this.’ Not ‘do this,’ but ‘this is what it feels like when I do this.’ Such as when you have torque on your arm and where you should feel that.”

John DeLapp is a freelance writer. He can be contacted at [email protected].