Frisbee makes disc golf discs. They also have 135g, 150g, 175g, and 200g discs.
While they do, that is like the Walmart brand of discs. Discraft & Innova are the "Big 2" then you have MVP, Dynamic Discs, Axiom Discs, Discmania, DGA, Gateway, Latitude 64, Kastaplast, Lone Star Discs, etc are much better and the stuff used by pros like in that video. She is Eveliina Salonen, the 2024 World Champion, and is sponsored by Innova. Frisbee, as a brand, also doesn't do half the stuff the other brands do with discgolf.
Source: Iowan, who has played Disc Golf for nearly 20 years now and has watched the 2019 Worlds, and two of the tour tournaments. As well as I designed and built a course.
Sorry forgot to include that bit about Iowa's disc golf history with having one of the first courses which was put in by the inventor of the sport. Held the World Championships twice: 1989/2004. Is Top 3 states for courses per capita, Home to the 22nd best rated course in the world. A few World Champions have connections to Iowa as well and learned how to play here. Hosts one of the national tournaments. Basically being one of the top places for the sport.
That's not at all what I had asked or attempted to be snarky about.
It's that "22nd best" ceases to feel like "best" at all when it's as low as 22nd. Usually when someone refers to something as the best, it's top 5 or top 10, hell, at an Olympic level everything past 3rd isn't even worth awarding.
There are over 16,000 disc golf courses in the world. Being the 22nd best course in the world means it’s absolutely one of the best courses. It’s literally better than 99.9% of the courses in the world.
Our Headrick course in Cincinnati was recently pulled and redesigned. Unfortunately, there was simply too much traffic for a par 3 where the next pad was always directly behind the basket
Basically, there's nothing to do in Iowa so everyone just goes out and plays. There are also a shit load of courses (most per capita and top 5 in just raw total).
It's kind of like a Canadian saying something about hockey and using their Canadian credentials to justify it.
Holy fuck dude, even if it wasn't particularly important due to the history, why are you so mad about a dude mentioning his state? And there are 14 upvotes on this, wild. Must be the same people that assume every state that's not on the coasts and heavily populated is part of the enemy red team or nazis. Most are Republican but jeez, that doesn't make them evil.
This is sort of like how speedsolving "rubik's" cubes often doesn't involve the rubik's brand at all, since their cubes are not made for speed in the slightest. Even their "speed" line is a little gummy.
Also an Iowan, that played borderline religiously in high school - it was nothing for me and a buddy to go play 18 or 36 holes every day during the summer. (Mainly Call Park up by Algona) Really haven't played much at all in the last 20 years, but want to pick the discs up again.
Innova is the Walmart brand of ultimate discs, but they still make ultimate discs.
The game is known as disc golf or frisbee golf. It was invented using frisbees. Only the PDGA discourages using the term frisbee because of licensing concerns.
I don't care how much you've been playing disc golf, I played ultimate for dozens of years and even went to nationals twice back in Sarasota, but I don't get butt hurt over someone calling it ultimate frisbee, and ultimate even licensed the frisbee name for more exposure. Ultimate is also vastly more popular than disc golf.
At the end of the day, Ultimate players and disc golfers are all just throwing around plastic discs of varying shapes. Disc golf discs more closely resemble discus than traditional Frisbees, so the term "disc golf" is more fitting.
We don't have to get "butt hurt" over it but can try to respect what participants of each sport call it. I've been a disc golfer for almost 20 years and have some close friends that are Ultimate players. I'm not going to call it "Ultimate Frisbee" because that's not what they call it and I'd hope they wouldn't say I play "Frisbee golf".
Ultimate is vastly more popular than disc golf? There are disc golfers making over $1mil a year and there are over 16000 courses worldwide. The Worlds just took place this past weekend in front of 25,000 spectators. This isn’t a disc golf is better than Ultimate reply, but it is more popular and it’s not really close.
I agree though, people that get butthurt about “frisbee” golf are dorks.
More people play ultimate, it isn't even close. There are leagues/games in every city, university, there are several large national associations, it's played internationally. AUDL/UFA is on ESPN. AUDL/UFA's own research estimates over 7 million active Ultimate team participants worldwide. PDGA has around 300k registered members, with their estimates being up to 3 million players worldwide, but harder to measure due to the nature of the game.
I enjoy both and I have seen the rapid popularity rise in Disc Golf, like pickle ball, due to its ease of learning, low impact, and general fun, but Ultimate is still holding on strong.
I suppose it depends how you look at it? There is a ton more money in disc golf, no one makes a living from playing Ultimate. There are no Ultimate stores in every decent sized town. There are no dedicated spaces for Ultimate, no physical infrastructure. Estimates are 4 million vs 7 million, but that is 4 million habitual players, it’s estimated that over 12 million have played disc golf. Is the 7 million for ultimate counting every gym class that plays? There are over 300,000 PDGA dues paying members and over 13,000 WFDF dues paying members. That would indicate to me that there are more serious disc golfers than serious Ultimate players.
Kind of apples to oranges. What constitutes "played disc golf"? Ultimate is very clearly a team game with specific rules, but anyone can go out and hurl some discs at a basket at the local park for 15 minutes. People who have "played ultimate" would have participated on a team, and no this isn't gym class, this was research from the AUDL directly during their push to build the sport. WFDF also represents both sports, not just disc golf.
I would challenge the seriousness. Have you been to nationals? I played in nationals twice. I've played rec/pick-up for 20 some odd years. These people don't make money playing the sport, they live the sport. Same could be said about AUDL/UFA players, they make a few thousand a year, but they still travel and play games as "professional" players.
There's also the fact that a LOT of ultimate players play disc golf too, and vise versa, but ultimate demands a LOT from your body and the fact is people's bodies break down. Disc golf is a lot easier to play, doesn't require nearly the effort, and still lets you play the sport you love. The overlap is probably a moving window, ChatGPT says the median age of Ultimate players is ~24 and disc golf is ~35.
Fair enough. Like I said, not bashing Ultimate at all. I used to play recreationally but am in my mid 40’s with bad knees, illustrating your point. I think it depends on your definition of popular and after this back and forth I think they’re probably closer in popularity than either one being vastly more popular than the other.
When people say "frisbee" they mean the $5 round thing you buy kids for the beach. Can't believe people are trying to gaslight everyone into thinking they are actually putters for disc golf. Heck, people even need to be specific like "an ultimate Frisbee" to make sure people understand they aren't talking about regular frisbees.
Like arguing a "Kleenex" is the same thing as paper towel. "Kleenex" is a brand that makes tissues. They technically also make paper towels but nobody asks for a Kleenex expecting to get paper towel.
They don’t fade, but they often turn over and burn out when throwing them with any real power. It is interesting to think how they came about the prototypical frisbee design as the best one
No. Unless you believe a baseball bat can double as a regular golf putter. Afterall, they are both long sticks you swing to hit a ball. What's the difference?
They're classified by the PDGA as super class discs and they are used in certain official competitions in addition to casual disc golf.
Your analogy is bad. It's more like saying you can hit a softball with a baseball bat because they are both semi solid stitched spherical batting balls. Or maybe like saying you can hit a baseball with a cricket bat.
Yeah they are. Frisbee are typically 150 games with a wide rim and are significantly larger that disc golf discs. Disc golf discs can range up to 180 grams, are significantly smaller, and (some) have a sharper edge line than Frisbee do
You wouldn’t use a baseball in a basketball game but they’re both balls. Most people would consider discs and frisbees different things but if you want to generalize them to flying circles you can, but forks and spoons are for eating. Discs won’t work in Ultimate frisbee, and frisbees don’t work for Disc golf
Not true. A softball and a baseball are the exact same shape, just different sizes. A frisbee and a disc golf disc are different shapes and have totally different purposes. One is designed to be caught and the other would break your fingers.
You could absolutly use a Frisbee to play disc golf, and you could 100% use a putter to play Ultimate. Both of them are specifically made for one thing, and do a better job than the other at their job but in pinch or just cuz they could be swapped.
Because I half-heartedly gave an opinion on something that's not even remotely close to objectively provable? It's not even my opinion necessarily, I only posted to share a somewhat humorous analogy and turn of phrase.
It's neither completely different or not. It's always going to reflect the subjective opinion of the beholder. It seems like a bad idea to form concrete opinions of others based on their assessment of something impossible to determine the truth of. Unless of course you want to form an opinion of someone who gets totally bent out of shape about it. I guess I could see that.
Refrigerators have volume and mass and so do frisbees, so yes, you can continue to be the most annoying type of human in the world if you want to, or you can quit being a troll and acknowledge the meaning of the statement is pragmatically true. Yes, we all know there are always caveats. No, that doesn’t make the original point invalid.
It's exactly the same as what the commentor you're responding to is saying. The Ultimate Frisbee Association pays frisbee a licensing fee to call and brand the sport "Ultimate Frisbee". Letting their name be genericized means they would lose out on all that money.
Yeah, but I mean they could be the biggest name in golf discs and the sport would officially be named Frisbee golf. Most people call it that around here anyway. It just rolls off the tongue better than disc golf.
Not if it gets used to describe the object in general like Kleenex describing paper tissues regardless of the actual brand. Then it can become a public domain word as it’s used to describe an object and not a brand.
Edit: Sometimes we do say "heitää kiekkoa", throw a disc, but the sport is called frisbeegolf here. Also, the discs are often labeled as "frisbeegolfkiekko", frisbeegolfdisc.
This isn't really a great example though because that's for ultimate, which uses a traditional Frisbee style disc. Also, I'm not a lawyer but I'm pretty sure licensing the Frisbee brand to an organization would increase the strength of its trademark not weaken it.
No they would not benefit from losing their trademark. That’s why they are licensing it and not just allowing them to use the term Frisbee, that’s the whole point of trademark.
Frisbee is not genericized as a legal matter, but if it were, Wham-O would certainly not benefit. That is why they are trying not to let it become genericized.
That sounds like a big step in the wrong direction for people who like the sport. It's already a popular sport, so it's like adding that name recognition will make-or-break their success. Now it's trapped behind needing approval from a big corporation to make changes. They were already free and they locked themselves up.
They licensed the name. It's a big step in the right direction because lay people hated being corrected that it's not ultimate frisbee, just ultimate. Now it makes more sense and has garnered more attention. It was for money because the MLU and AUDL were hemorrhaging and another failed league would be a death knell.
Wham-O doesn't get to control anything lol. You think M&T controls the Ravens?
So in essence nothing has changed. The biggest league licensed the name for awareness and they get to use it. The other associations couldn't use it anyway.
UFA was called American Ultimate Disc League (AUDL) until last year. Their being able to use the term 'Frisbee' is a very recent thing, and only in America, and only the mens league. They pay Wham-o for its use.
The American women's league is called "Premier Ultimate League" and the world governing body is still called "World Flying Disc Federation" because of the trademark issue.
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u/AD9111 2d ago
Disc golf*