WWJDG?*

I think there's a fairly good chance this sentence has never before been written or spoken:

Christians don't seem to know how to make a good Disc Golf course.

A couple months ago, when a friend came out for a weekend visit from Virginia, I got sucked into the whole Disc Golf thing. (That's Frisbee Golf, for the uninitiated.) Since then, I've roped a bunch of my friends and most of my family in as well. With one notable exception, none of us are really any good yet (I'm not the exception), but we're all enjoying it enough to have gone out to get our own sets of discs.

We're also constantly on the prowl for new courses to try. There's one very close to my house, but it's pretty sad. We've dubbed it Gopher Town, because it's nine "holes" (with virtually no obstacles) in a wide open dirt field infested with prairie dogs. Yes, Prairie Dog Town would be more accurate, but it just doesn't roll off the tongue.

Well, the Colorado Christian University, near my friend's house, has a course. Actually, it has three courses, all the full 18 holes, spread throughout its campus. We decided to try one today. We weren't impressed.

First of all, their web site claims (here) that the courses are all "clearly mapped out." With divine guidance, maybe. Thankfully, one of our group had gone and printed a map of one of the courses before hand. If we hadn't had it with us, I guarantee you we wouldn't have found everything.

There were no tee pads. You began every hole by throwing from where the last hole ended. Not necessarily a bad thing, except that you could kind of pick and choose a bit whether you wanted to go from the left of the previous hole or the right -- flexibility you don't usually get.

There were no baskets. I've been to one other course with no baskets that wasn't so bad. That one at least had posts with chains. This one simply had signs screwed into trees, or posts stuck in the ground. Just hit the post, was all you had to do. There were obstacles aplenty, which might ordinarily be a plus, but sort of seemed arbitrary when you're trying to "hit this tree, not that one."

We might have guessed it wasn't going to be great before we went. The name of this course, according to the map we printed, was the "Ghetto Course."

So the search for good courses continues. For any of you out there thinking of converting to Christianity, don't do it for the Disc Golf.

(* Where Would Jesus Disc Golf?)