Vibe Check: Northway Brewing Disc Golf
Week 7 of the Queensbury brewery's Wednesday night putting league was about as laid-back as an organized sporting event could be.
I knew I was in the right place when I pulled into a parking spot behind a car with a license plate that read BELAY ON. OK, maybe avid rock-climbers and serious frisbee golfers (a.k.a. frolfers) aren’t exactly the same oeuvre of 30-something stoner/hippie, but in a Venn diagram of the two populations, there’d be a pretty sizable overlap—with the guy in the “Dave Matthews Band ’91” hooded long-sleeve I ran into at the bar squarely in the center. (Please don’t tell me he’s the BELAY ON guy…it’d be too much.)
Now let me be clear, as stereotypical as I found the 60-plus person crowd at Northway Brewing’s weekly frisbee golf putting league this past Wednesday night, none of what I just said should be taken as an insult. I went to college in Vermont—I’ve done my fair share of bouldering, frolfing and jam banding. And so I grabbed a beer (the Condor—a grapefruity NEIPA named for the type of disc you use when trying to be as accurate as possible), a basket of chips from the Streaking Moose BBQ pop-up, and easily transitioned from gala-going Saratogian into hacky-sacking Vermonter.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. For the uninitiated, frisbee golf (or as the pros say, disc golf) is exactly what it sounds like: golf with frisbees. Players make their way around a course of “holes”—elevated metal baskets—with the end goal being to land their frisbee in each basket. Sometimes it may take several throws to get your frisbee from the starting point to a target, and each round is scored like golf, with birdies, pars and bogeys. It’s normally played outside, where there’s plenty of room to huck the disc; you may have seen frolf targets around the Saratoga Spa State Park, Shenentaha Park in Malta or Central Park in Schenectady.
While the hardest of hardcore disc golfers do play outside in the winter (“winter play helps highly competitive golfers rediscover the fun factor,” a post on the Innova Discs website reads), those Upstate frolfers who don’t necessarily want to freeze their fingers off don’t have much opportunity to play from November–April. That’s where Greg and Gail Hill of the organization 2 Far Under Par come in. The couple began hosting disc golf get-togethers at their home in Myrtle Beach, but they eventually got so big that parking became an issue. They moved things over to a brewery down in South Carolina, and after relocating to the Capital Region, began hosting putting leagues up here. (A putting league only requires one throw to land the disc in the basket rather than several.) They ran an eight-week league at Northway Brewing beginning in September, and Wednesday was the seventh night of a second eight-week league.
Still a tad confused about what this actually looks like in practice? We were too. After checking in with Gail, paying our $5 entry fee, and receiving our score card, we took our borrowed discs (everyone else had brought their own) and climbed up to the brewery’s second floor, where there was a line of putters in waiting (the league is flex start, so you can make your way through the course anytime between 5:30pm and 8ish). The first target was blocked almost completely by a wooden table turned on its side; frolfers had to throw their discs on a curve to arc them around the table and into the target. While we were waiting I asked someone who definitely looked like he’d done this before if he had any wisdom. “You’re asking the wrong guy,” I heard someone behind me say, laughing. “Practice, practice, practice,” said the man I asked. “The obstacles are only obstacles if you hit them...and don’t eat yellow snow.” I supposed the last tidbit of advice was just general wisdom unrelated to indoor disc golf.
Each armed with two discs, we (my two friends and me) took two putts apiece. Most of the six tosses hit the table and none of them landed in the target. The next hole had us tossing our discs back down the stairs to a target on the floor below. Make that 0 for 12 putts. Then 0 for 18, 0 for 24, 0 for 30, etc. Let it be known that each week’s course is different, and that the courses, all of which are designed by Greg, get more difficult as the league goes on, so this course was a tough one. You’re literally making your way through the brewing equipment, and anything can be an obstacle—kegs of beer, a forklift, a ladder.
Around hole five we caught up to the wise man who was measuring his beer with a tape measure he’d found lying around. “This is how you know if you need another,” he said. “I’ve got three inches.” “Don’t say that too loud,” someone responded.
When we finished the nine-hole course, the three of us had landed a whopping three discs in baskets, combined. (So much for needing a score sheet.) Most people go through twice to make it 18 holes, and the good ones come out with 20-plus successful putts. “There are some really good players here,” Meg the bartender told us, probably to ease the pain of our dismal performance. As she said it, the coverage of a pro disc golf event being projected on the far wall showed a player standing halfway up the amphitheater in a football stadium land his disc in the target on the field.
As someone who’s not necessarily hip to the goings on of the disc golf world, I wondered what the game’s popularity was around here. “These turnouts are incredible,” Greg told me of the 63 players who’d already played at least nine holes by the time we took to the course. There is an incentive, though: Frolfers can buy into a “bogey free” pool, which allows them the chance to win cold hard cash if they hit each of the nine targets on at least one of their throws; or the “ace pool” in which they can win money for hole-in-one-ing a long throw (not a putt). Someone recently won $125 by hitting the latter, but the bogey free pool is now up to more than $450, since no one has achieved the feat yet. “Every dollar goes back to the players,” says Gail of the buy-in fees.
Next week is the last week of this disc golf session, but there’s been some talks about potentially doing another eight-week league at Northway—follow the brewery on Instagram to stay up to date.
—Natalie
ICYMI: This week in Saratoga Living After Hours
On Monday, we asked SLAH readers to find the missing V-Day link between the trivia questions on these Linkee cards:
Then, on Tuesday, we filled paid SLAH subscribers in on the things Saratogians want to know, but don’t want anyone to know they want to know. For those of you who missed it, we’ll just leave this here with no context:
Want in on the madness? (And the answer to Monday’s Game Time puzzle?) Click here.