news-record.com

REIDSVILLE — The Lake’s Edge course is hilly and heavily wooded, with more than a few doglegs and some great water obstacles.

And, no, this is not your daddy’s golf course — or even your older brother’s.

The 18 holes at Lake Reidsville are one of the best disc golf courses in North Carolina, just two years old and already giving the city a foothold in a growing sport built around the disc — what most people know as the Frisbee.

 “It’s a championship-caliber course. Very challenging,” said tournament organizer Tyson Harton, a Guilford County resident who competes in the sport’s advanced level.

“This course would definitely be one of the top 10 in the state,” Harton said. “In my personal view, it’s one of the top five.”

Lake’s Edge has brought people to compete in amateur and professional tournaments from as far away as Florida and New Jersey since its opening in June 2007 at Lake Reidsville Recreation Park.

“We saw this as a different offering, as something that would definitely enhance the park and bring more people to it,” City Manager Kelly Almond said of the city-funded course. “We’re very pleased with it. It’s bringing a clientele to the park that otherwise never would be there.”

Strange as it might sound, the course is the by-product of the city’s search for surveillance cameras several years ago. Police Chief Edd Hunt traveled to Jacksonville to check out that city’s cameras at a park that also had a disc golf course.

Hunt was impressed by the number of people the course attracted and mentioned what he’d seen to Almond, who then appointed a committee of city staff members to delve into it.

“I must have picked the right people because they just took this and ran with it,” Almond said.

The committee, formed in March 2007, took only four months to research disc golf, see its potential, persuade the City Council that disc golf would be a worthy addition to the lakeside park and help build the course.

“It was just a whirlwind. We worked on it for weeks on end,” said committee member Nick Aceves, a parks department staff member who also supervises the city’s teen center.

Doing much of the work on their own, they also were able to keep costs down. The city ended up spending $32,000 on the course, including work by a professional course designer.

Now the course is used by about 200 people a week, said Chad Merritt, supervisor of the park at Lake Reidsville.

The course draws both experienced and inexperienced disc golfers, attracting its biggest crowds on weekends, Merritt said.

Players seem to like the course’s challenging design, he added: “There’s a blind shot on most of the holes. You can’t see the basket.”

For the uninitiated, disc golf has rules similar to those of “ball golf.” The goal is to get the disc into an above-ground, basket-shaped goal with the fewest tosses.

Players use different types of discs for throws of different distances or angles of approach to the goal. There’s even a putting disc for the shortest shots.

Players compete at various amateur skill levels, and there’s even a professional tier, in which contestants compete for cash.

The course record at Lake’s Edge is 51. Harton estimates there are about 500 recreational disc golfers across the Triad.

The next major event at Lake’s Edge will be a pro-am tournament in mid-November expected to draw professional and amateur competitors from throughout the Southeast.

But the course also is a great pastime for anyone at any time, regardless of skill level, Aceves said.

“What’s great is that anybody can play,” he said. “Even if you’re not a great player and you really don’t care about your score, you’ll still get a good workout.”

Contact Taft Wireback at 373-7100 or taft.wireback@news-record.com