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December 23, 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.

In our survey, we asked respondents several questions about their relationship with disc golf and how they view the sport. We cross-referenced these answers with fandom scores in search of noteworthy patterns or deviations.

We asked respondents “Roughly what year did you start following professional disc golf?”

• This is what one would expect to see – a graph that captures the strong year-to-year growth starting around 2015 catalyzed by Youtube and the emergence of the pro tour, followed by explosive growth from the pandemic, and then back to great, but normal growth once the world opened back up.
• There is a good chance that the 2022 numbers are not representative of the relative following of professional disc golf as the survey was administered three-quarters of the way through the year and many fans who found disc golf in 2022 may not yet follow the outlets we used to promote the survey, such as Ultiworld Disc Golf and StatMando.

I was also interested in how the year a respondent started following professional disc golf would affect who they root for. These seven players had the widest range of fandom score averages between the different start-year groupings:

• In order to have a reasonable sample size (100+ respondents), I grouped the respondents by era with respect to when people started following the sport.
• Seven of the eight athletes with the widest range have been competing for at least a decade or more. On average, the earlier you started following professional disc golf, the more you like these veteran competitors. This makes a lot of sense – older fans will have more familiarity with the more veteran players and perhaps experienced their peak abilities.
• Korver has the widest range, with nearly a 2-point swing between respondents who started following disc golf in the 80s, 90s, and 00s and fans who just started following pro disc golf. This aligns with one’s…