1000 Rated Disc Golf Players, News, scores, and more

1000 RATED: The Disc Golf Scene is one of the newest disc golf web sites on the web. Can you offer an extensive explanation of what the site offers for disc golfers, clubs, leagues, and tournament directors? What kinds of information can a golfer post that will help promote and showcase their skills/achievements?

PETE: The disc golf world is huge. We’re taking a world of disc golf information and reducing it down to what any given player is interested in - their “scene” - while also making that entire world available in a way that doesn’t overwhelm the user.

Let’s say you’re just a person who loves to play D. Poke around the “Courses” section. You can get weather updates and forecast, directions to the course, see pictures of the holes (hopefully, more on that later) and find out what tournaments and leagues are going on there. You can do all that without signing up for anything.

You’ll really start seeing the benefits of the site when you sign up for a free profile. Those courses you’re looking at? Add them to your Favorites. Now your “Events” page will show you all the tournaments and leagues that are scheduled at your courses. Your “News” page will show you when other players add pictures to your courses, or when new events are posted there. You can add other DiscGolfScene.com members as Friends, and your News page will update you on what they’re doing, as well.

Your profile section is a really good way to track your disc golf career. You can post the scores you get at any course, and we automatically calculate your statistics: best scores, average scores, rounds played at a given course on a given layout, etc. Along with scores, you can post every ace you’ve ever gotten, where you got it, when you got it, what hole you got it on, what disc you aced with, and more. We are developing more features to make the stats really cool.

Players who sign up for profiles can add Clubs to their Favorites just like courses, and their “News” and “Events” pages are updated with their favorite Clubs’ news and events.

For tournament directors, we have a pretty extensive list of things we allow to be posted on tournament pages. TDs can post the schedule, location, entry fees, added cash and a blurb about the tournament, and they can add pictures, graphics and flyers, too. We hope that putting up a picture of the sweet 1st place trophy will get you a few more players at your tourney.

After a tournament is over (or when it’s in progress), TDs or any permitted staff member can post pictures, standings or final scores. DiscGolfScene.com members will automatically be awarded “achievements” for their performance in the tournament, and any scores they get will be added to their profile statistics.

If you’re looking at tournament listings, we show you when and where the tournament is happening, how far away it is from you, how much cash is added and more. The idea is to make comparing tournaments quick and easy so you can make your choice, get directions if you need them, and go. If you need more details, each tournament has a dedicated page where you can see pictures, flyers, schedule, etc.

Our “Leagues” section allows Clubs to post their leagues. League pages include the schedule and locations, scores with Leaderboards and player stats, and a “Talk” page for players to post comments. Any player who has “favorited” the Club that organizes the League or a course that the League plays will see the League on their Events page.

A new concept for the site is “Achievements.” Achievements are a kind of superficial awards system for players. They are basically little medals that you get on your profile when you accomplish various things. For example, you get an achievement when you finish 3rd or better in a tournament, but you also get an achievement if you get any kind of payout (cash value), or if you shoot a hot round. Each achievement has its own look, so you can build up a collection of all your pretty medals.

1000 RATED: With all of the professional and intuitive open-source content management systems that are available today, why was the site developed without using one of these options? From a coding perspective, can you explain to our readers why it was custom developed, and what benefits this will provide you in the long run?

PETE: The bottom line is that DiscGolfScene.com was built for disc golf. There are things on the site that are really unique to the sport, and trying to wrangle a pre-built CMS into doing what we wanted to do was just not worth it. Sure, there are some features on the site that could have been done with Drupal or Joomla, but there are also a lot of really complex, d-golf-specific things going on behind the scenes, and we wanted to make sure that the site was as fast and efficient as possible. For example, there’s a dozen different ways to score a league, so we created a plug-in system to add new league scoring systems as necessary; it would be really hard to do that with an existing CMS.

Most importantly, we expect the site to evolve constantly as players let us know what they like and what they want. We’re adding features every day, and we believe that having our own system is the best way to improve the site as it grows.

1000 RATED: What professional experience do you have that helped you develop a site of this magnitude?

PETE: I’ve been working in web design for about 13 years, and I’ve spent the last six years or so developing websites for several companies. About a year ago, I built a small website for my friends at the Local 101 Disc Golf Players Union, and some of the concepts from that site led to DiscGolfScene.com.

1000 RATED: Social networking and user response is the wave of the future on the web. With the many new disc golf sites that seem to be popping up, what positive aspects do you think this brings to the sport? How does it feel to be helping the sport in this regard?

PETE: As a disc golfer, I’m definitely glad to be helping the sport in any way I can.

We hope that having an online community of players will allow both rookies and veterans to meet new disc golfers, discover new courses and find new clubs, and that definitely can’t hurt the sport, especially for new players (disc golf can be an intimidating sport for newbies). People who love disc golf really love it, so we’re not trying to keep people on their computers and off the course- we want the site to actually improve their disc golf experiences in real life by giving them a wealth of information about where and when to play. And maybe allowing them to brag online a little bit.

1000 RATED: We noticed the disc golf course list and we very much like the features that are available. Can you talk about all of these features and tell us why you think this course directory is a step ahead of some of the others that are already available? Also, will there one day be a chance for course pro’s to add descriptions and amenity information?

PETE: The Courses section is really cool. We have information for about 2000 courses in the United States.

Course listings show you the park name, city, state, distance from you and a preview course picture if its available. Specific course pages show current weather and forecasts, offer a link to get driving direction and have a calendar of scheduled events. We’re not the first website to do this, but we’ve worked hard to make it simple and easy to use. We’re also adding features to make it easy for you to decide where to play on a given day. You’ll be able to see where and when your friends are playing and what the weather’s like there.

One of the things lacking in most course directories is pictures. Some directories have pictures, but they’re controlled by the website owners, which means there usually aren’t a lot of them. We’ve tried to make it easy for anyone to share their course pictures. Of course, one of the difficulties in allowing this is unfortunately, people may publish junk. So what we’ve done is create a mini-voting system right below every picture where any member can quickly vote the picture up or down. The pictures with the most votes stay on the course page; the ones that are voted down will eventually disappear.

The pictures also help with Aces. On a player’s “Aces” section on their profile, their aces are listed along with the hole they got them on, with a link to that hole and any pictures of it. This way, your aces aren’t just a random listing of hole numbers and course names; there may be a direct link to the view from the tee pad.

As far as course pros adding information, there’s actually a system already in place for that. All we have to do is quickly “turn on” someone’s ability to make changes to the course information, and they can enter hole distances, descriptions, and amenity information. Also, anyone uploading pictures can add descriptions to their own pictures, so that should help as well.

1000 RATED: Your success is largely based on help from the golfers who visit the site. They’re the ones who will make the site powerful and engaging by adding all of the clubs, associations, tournaments, course photos, aces, etc. How long do you think it will take for the site to catch on? Why should club officers start a profile and add their club info and tournament info?

PETE: During research and development for the site, we found a lot of disc golf websites. Most of what we found were “Club” websites that represented the disc golf scene in their respective areas. There were several common traits on the sites: tournament listings, pictures of events, course pictures, tournament scores. We saw that quite a few of these pages hadn’t been updated in a while- way too many “Coming Soon” and “Under Construction” messages. Obviously people hadn’t quit playing disc golf; the problem was that these websites appeared to be maintained and updated by one person, probably a programmer, and suffered because of it. The bottleneck for these sites was having only one contributor.

So we built the Club section to make it easy for multiple people to contribute to their Club. Any given Club can choose to have an unlimited number of staff members, and any one of those staff members can be allowed to post news, tournaments and leagues, along with scores and pictures, so Johnny Webmaster doesn’t always have to be the one to add content.

We’ve tried to make it really easy to do all this; adding pictures is a snap, and posting scores doesn’t involve much more than entering names and strokes.

1000 RATED: On a personal level, what are you most excited about in terms of this new site?

PETE: I love the course pictures. I just played Victory Park in Albion, MI, a few days ago. I never would have thought to play there, except a friend of mine uploaded some pictures he took of the course, and I thought it looked fun so, no kidding, I got driving directions from the site and there I went. I posted my score when I got back. The site has already expanded my disc golf experience, and I’m sure it will help other players do the same.

1000 RATED: We ask this question to everyone - who is your favorite 1000 rated player and why?

PETE: He’s not at 1000 right now (just dropped below), but my buddy Josh Romine is a great player. I saw this guy pull the coolest disc golf stunt I’ve ever seen. At a tournament a couple years ago, there’s a CTP for a basket. Everybody’s taking a shot at this basket which is about 180 feet away down a hill. A couple of guys park it, but nobody hits anything until Josh steps up and drains a perfect shot smack into the middle of the chains. Somebody yells, “Luck!” so Josh immediately grabs a new disc … and aces another one. Legendary.