Gatekeeper Resolutions Day 17: Wrong Disc Challenge
Day 17! This is a fun and silly day that still has some usefulness. Go play a round at your home course, or a course you know well. BUT here’s the twist. On every shot, throw the wrong disc of the same speed. If I have a hole that’s an easy Comet turnover, I have to figure out how to cram a Buzzz OS flex shot on the same gap. If you’d normally throw a beefy fairway driver, find a way to make your roller disc work. You can be even more creative with this too, by throwing different disc speeds, or making all of your upshots be skip-shots or rollers.
Obviously this is a foolish way to try to play for your best score. The point of this drill or play style is to expand your awareness of what you can do with certain discs. If your mentality is that “this disc does this, and only this” then that’s an artificial limitation.
If you need a grouchier and less affirmative way of saying that last sentence, go talk to an old-school disc golfer who’d be glad to talk about when Stingrays were the distance driver.
The sneaky thing about doing this is that sometimes a hole seems straightforward, but the optimal shot is more complex, in order to get the disc to push or break to match the fairway shape, or ground slope.
You “win” the game when you can better conceptualize how your discs will act differently at a variety of speeds and angles, and then find ways to implement those into real rounds as necessary.
Written By Andrew Fish, PDGA 58320
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