The sound of chains clanging through the trees along Ralston Creek is nearly constant now. At Johnny Roberts Disc Golf Course in Arvada — the busiest disc golf course in the nation — players of every age weave through wooded terrain, sending plastic discs soaring toward metal baskets from dawn to dusk.
In 2025 alone, players logged 21.2 million rounds at that single park. What is unfolding in Arvada is not a local quirk — it is the leading edge of a national surge, and Colorado is right at the center of it.
From fringe sport to mainstream fixture
The numbers behind disc golf’s rise tell a story of steady, compounding growth. There are now more than 17,000 courses worldwide, with over 11,000 in the United States alone — a figure rapidly closing the gap on the roughly 16,500 traditional golf courses in the country. Colorado sits at the top of that curve, ranking first in the nation for disc golf availability with more than 320 courses statewide, including 144 full 18-hole layouts.
Technology has helped accelerate that momentum. The UDisc app, launched in 2017, lets players locate nearby courses, check difficulty ratings, and track scores round by round. By 2023, an estimated 500 million people globally lived within six miles of a disc golf course — a reach that few recreational sports can claim.
Why disc golf spreads where other sports stall
Part of what makes disc golf so hard to slow down is how little it costs to start. A full course can be installed for $15,000 or less — roughly one-quarter the cost of a playground. That price point puts it within reach for municipalities, schools, and community organizations that would never consider funding a traditional golf course.
The financial barrier on the player side is equally low. Roughly 89% of U.S. courses are free to use. No green fees, no memberships, no reservations — you just show up and play.
The sport’s physical footprint helps as well. Disc golf courses fit into existing parks, school grounds, and urban green spaces without displacing other uses. A new nine-hole course recently opened at Summit High School in Breckenridge, designed by students and named after a beloved teacher and disc golfer, Rick Karden, who died last summer. It is a small but telling example of how the sport can embed itself into community life at almost no cost.
A global surge with local roots
Colorado’s emergence as a disc golf hub did not happen in isolation. The sport is expanding internationally at a pace that surprises even its organizers. Norway has been building roughly 100 new courses per year for the past five years. Iceland now has more disc golf courses per capita than any other country — approximately one course for every 4,500 residents.
What Colorado offers that few other states can match is outdoor culture, scenic terrain, and an unusually dense network of existing courses. Monica Thomas, chief operating officer at UDisc, points to Colorado’s identity as an outdoors-oriented state as a central factor. “They have so many courses, it’s just really amazing to see,” she says. The UDisc 2026 Disc Golf Growth Report documents the accelerating pace of adoption, giving communities concrete data to make the case for new installations.
Communities built one basket at a time
Statistics can describe the sport’s growth, but they do not fully explain its staying power. Much of that comes from what happens between players on the course.
Ali Lance began playing in 2014, when women were rarely seen on the fairways. Rather than accept that as a fixed condition, she founded the Boulder Ladies Disc Golf Club. The group now has more than 70 members and meets every Monday in summer at Belmont Park in Longmont. “I wanted to create a space for the women to play together and learn from each other while they play,” Lance says.
That kind of organic community-building runs throughout the sport. Josh Lichti, cofounder and CEO of UDisc, describes a culture that is genuinely open to newcomers. “You could probably go up to any of these people and say, ‘Hey, this is my first time here,’ and they would give you a Frisbee and teach you how to play,” he says. Strangers offering discs and informal instruction is not unusual — it is closer to the norm.
Health, parks, and what comes next
Disc golf is increasingly framed as a public health opportunity. Walking between baskets provides low-impact, accessible exercise, and courses function as green space that benefits entire neighborhoods, not just players. “It’s good for public health, good for the environment, and it’s really good for parks too,” Lichti says.
The sport also serves a wide range of motivations — some players come for competition, others for solitude, social connection, or simply to move their bodies outside. “That’s what I love about disc golf,” Thomas says, “is that you can pick one of many, many things.”
Colorado’s model — dense course availability, inclusive clubs, school integration, low cost — may be the clearest blueprint the country has for what disc golf looks like when a state fully commits to it. As other states watch those 21 million rounds accumulate in Arvada each year, it is reasonable to expect they will start asking how to build something similar. The chains are already clanging. The question now is where they echo next.