The other DM from Wickham has run this event the past few years the weekend before Halloween every year, as a sort of no-frills, “bare bones” (pun completely intended) event. Last year he instituted a Trick-or-Treat format to the rounds as well, where during the first round there would be a Trick on every odd-numbered hole, and a Treat on every even-numbered hole: round 2 they reversed. Each hole has a specific Trick or Treat mandated for it: for example, Hole 1 during the first round must be played off-handed. But during the second round, there’s no OB on that hole. I may be making it sound more complex than it is, but it should be a lot of fun. Costumes are also mandatory this year, and I got mine at Target last weekend. I’ll be the one wearing my rocket ship footed pajamas.

Work kicked my ass a little bit this week, there seemed to be a natural overflow in the workload to the rest of the department since my officemate has been out after trying to run over a tree with his car last week – he lost that battle bad, but at least he’s doing better now. Don’t drink and drive, kids.

Have a lot of things to catch up about but I think I’m calling it an early Friday night this week. Thanks to CtrlAltDel for sharing this in his news post, I felt it needed to be reposted here as well because this just made me laugh. 1920′s Charleston dancing… to Daft Punk.

So the Ace Race that I’m running at Panthorn Park is almost here! It’s a neat concept that Discraft has; to run an event, the Tournament Director must charge $20 and $20 only as the entry fee. Each player who signs up receives two identical prototype discs from Discraft, plus a SuperColor mini disc and a Discraft hat. You play the event similar to a normal disc golf tournament, only rather than traditional stroke play the players try to earn marks on their scorecard based on number of aces and number of metal hits throughout the day. The course gets shortened up quite a bit in order for every hole to be an “ace race”, and each player only gets one throw from the tee on every hole in an effort to get an ace. Very low key, very low pressure as a TD, all in all should be a good time.

And today, the player’s packs showed up at my house! The pile isn’t nearly as impressive as the amount of stuff I get every year when I run the Amateur Challenge, but it’s still a good amount of stuff that I somehow wish I could just keep all of. Although I will admit, owning 46 of these discs would probably be a bit much even if they DO feel really nice in the hand. Here’s the stash by my front door… can’t wait to throw these babies and see how they fly!

The PDGA released their latest ratings post, and the news made me very excited. I had one tournament “in the queue” where I had done extremely poor, coming in DFL (definition for the uninitiated, see #2), but I also had a tournament where I shot lights-out and scored my first ever sanctioned cash. I went online to check it out and… my rating jumped by 27 points from 931 to 958! Woooo!!!

The numbers don’t mean much to people outside the sport of disc golf, but you can look at it like this. A “scratch” golfer in normal golf would typically shoot a course at par, whereas someone with a handicap of 7 would typically shoot 7 strokes over par. In disc golf, a 1000 rating is considered roughly “scratch” golf (there are top pros with ratings higher but we won’t address that here). On average, every 10 points in your rating that you drop below 1000 is worth 1 stroke on the course, which means that a 958 puts me just over a 4 handicap in layman’s terms.

After finally earning a 920 rating in September of ’04, and then from September of ’05 until now bouncing between a 931 and a 941, going up to 958 is a huge improvement for me and gives me some positive reinforcement that I can shoot good golf. Now I just have to try and keep it up!