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…