With traditional golf courses like Mountain Brook and the Stanly County Country Club no longer in operation, the popularity of disc golf has risen in recent years.

Disc golf involves the same principles as regular golf, but players throw different types of flying discs, similar to Frisbees, into large metal baskets. The sport started around the 1960s and grew a decade later when the inventor of the Frisbee, Ed Headrick, left Wham-O to start the first disc golf company.

The United States has the most disc golf courses in the world (approximately 6,652), and Stanly has five disc courses, four public (Fox Chase, Oakboro District Park, City Lake Park in Albemarle and Richfield’s Goose Landing) and one private course, Hardaway Point in Badin.

Albemarle has its own disc golf group, the Albemarle Disc Golf Association (ADGA), which conducts a league as well as tournaments which draw in competitors from outside the county.

Many of those tournaments, including the Ice Bowl each February, are played on the original, and perhaps the most physically demanding of the courses in Stanly, Fox Chase.

Within the boundaries of Chuck Morehead Park and operated by Albemarle Parks and Recreation, it is a championship-level 18-hole course which requires golfers to walk over various elevation changes.

The walking/running track which winds its way through the woods of Morehead Park has hosted many high school championship cross-country meets and tests the fitness of golfers and runners alike.

The Ice Bowl has challenged disc golfers to play in cold conditions for 13 years.

The two-round, one-day PDGA-sanctioned event has had golfers from amateur to professional levels compete in…