We are not fans of competitive sports. We have seen seventeen-year- old boys both crying on the softball field because their team didn’t win and throwing a folding chair at a girl who was about to catch them in a game of tag. (The girl did fall and trip over the chair but was all right.) That sort of behavior doesn’t fly at our school. So, exit softball stage right, enter disc golf stage left.
We have been trying to cultivate skill and camaraderie using one of our favorite games, disc golf. The game is played by throwing a little disc (not a frisbee, but a specifically designed smaller and heavier disc) into a little basket. It takes skill, but everyone can play together and have fun. It works.
So one nice warm spring day we took all of the 7th-10th graders out to a local park to play disc golf at an eighteen-hole disc golf course at a park in Waco.
And, as usual a few unplanned and unexpected events happened. First, one of boys borrowed one of my husband’s favorite discs, a Leopard, and inadvertently threw it into the Brazos River. He was reluctant to fish it out, so the whole group walked down to the river to help “encourage” him and watched as he took off his shoes and socks and waded into the river to retrieve the disc. Mission accomplished.
The next fifteen or so holes were going pretty well except for an occasional disc flying into a river bed or so, when the girls noticed something strange. Cars were slowing down to stare at us and take pictures of us. We laughed the first few times, but then phones and cameras began flipping up everywhere from passers-by. We were in a pretty big public park by a large river and the zoo, and here were eleven ladies in long dresses and white veils throwing frisbee discs. I guess it was quite a site for them to see. By the end of the day we had counted fifteen photographers who had snapped shots of us. Please let me know if you see them anywhere.
About halfway through the course I spotted a historical marker. These draw me to them almost in the same fashion a thrift store somehow draws my car into the parking lot. It was a natural spring, and the spot was a favorite resting and picnic spot for early settlers in the area. Cold water, history, and disc golf. What a great combination.
The last trauma was near the end of the course when one of the older girls teed off on a long 300 yard drive and got her disc stuck way up in a tree. We had been playing in two groups to save time, but the boys came and joined us to help out with this one. It took about twenty minutes of lobbing sticks, water bottles and discs up into the tree before one of the young men finally rescued the disc.
It was a very good day.
