Doug Brown and Colton Martin walk through the woods on their way to their next shot on the newly-constructed disc golf course at the Peninsula Golf Course in Long Beach.

LONG BEACH — A budding sport with a broadening base is now teeing off on the Long Beach Peninsula.

If You Go

The course, located at 9604 Pacific Way in Long Beach, is open 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily.

The cost is $10 per person to play; cart rentals are $15.

Golf discs rentals are also available for $5, each including a driver, midrange and putter discs.

To arrange a tee time, call 360-642-4563.

In October, the Peninsula Golf Course in Long Beach officially opened a new 18-hole disc golf course, the culmination of a vision by course owner Doug Brown and disc golf course designers Derek Samuelson and Colton Martin.

The course, located at 9604 Pacific Way in Long Beach, held their first booking on Oct. 19, with more signing up for tee times in recent days as word of the new course has spread.

From vision to fruition

The premise and inspiration for the disc course came about four years ago, after Peninsula Golf Course owner Doug Brown peered through a strand of trees toward the north end of the 55-acre property.

“Five years ago we bought the course, and about a year into I saw the trees out in the distance and thought ‘that could be a disc golf course,’” Brown said.

“We cleared some brush and played with the idea, but we really didn’t have anyone to carry it forward. We saw the opportunity but there wasn’t a way to do it the right way with the resources or knowledge we had, so it was put on pause. I knew I wanted to do something for the kids and community, to give them something fun and safe to do on the peninsula.”

Meanwhile, a couple Cape Disappointment Coast Guard members, Derek Samuelson and Colton Martin, were seeking a new place to play disc golf after designing a course near the station.

“We built a course on our base about two years ago,” recalled Samuelson, 37, of Tigard.

“I got vacation and wanted to play disc golf, but I didn’t want to go back to base to play, so I started asking people online if they knew anybody that was thinking about disc golf courses on the peninsula. I just kind of cold-called Doug and met him. Doug looked at me and said, ‘You’re going to build it.’”

And they did.

Samuelson and Martin immediately began working as the creative engineers behind the course, providing instrumental insight into the design, planning and construction of the course in conjunction with the current traditional golf course.

“We incorporated the layout of the course with the entire lay of the golf course,” said Martin, 37, of Houston.

“It starts on hole one and plays all the way around with the 18th disc golf basket ending where the 9th green ends. We looked at different attributes the course had to offer and used our knowledge and experience from playing different courses to assemble it.”

The course includes a mix of holes with varying distances and obstacles, partially inspired by courses they’ve played during their travels with the Coast Guard.

“There’s a little bit of everything, from the possibility of a short ace to a more than 660-foot hole to going through a tight and technical throw in the woods. It’s not like other courses where you’re throwing through an open field,” Martin said.

The most labor-intensive part was preparing the holes in the woods, the same area that first inspired the idea for a disc golf course.

“For holes 10 and 15 we had to walk into the forest and visualize something in the canopy of trees,” Samuelson said, adding that it was among their favorite on the course.

Brown was impressed with the design and layout, with holes 10 and 15 serving as the course’s “postcard” holes.

“They did a really good job of planning and incorporating the disc golf layout without impacting ball golf. There’s no two holes or tee shots that are the same. Our goal is to make it a place where people are proud to play,” Brown said.

Growing sport

The origins of disc golf are murky, however the formal rules for the game were officially formed in 1976 by the newly founded Disc Golf Association. Many of the rules are based off traditional ball golf, only with discs instead of balls and clubs.

Since the mid-70s, more than 9,000 disc golf courses have been constructed in the U.S., however the sport remains relatively unknown compared to traditional ball golf.

“There’s a lack of exposure to the sport, because disc golf is much newer than traditional golf. A lot of people don’t understand it, but disc golf got a lot of their rules and basics from traditional golf. We use a lot of the same terms and ideas for different shots,” Martin said.

“It’s the same sport — just uses different tools.”

Martin, who started with traditional golf, began playing disc golf in college around 2008 as a lower-cost alternative.

“It was something to do when I couldn’t afford to go play golf all the time,” he said.

Playing disc golf is considerably less expensive than traditional golf.

“That’s the great thing about disc golf, you can get in and start playing with a decent set of discs for $30,” Colton said.

Bridging ball and disc golf

Adapting and integrating the course to allow both traditional and disc golfers to play simultaneously has been among the biggest hurdles.

“Some people have wondered ‘How are you going to do both of them at the same time? How are you going to have a disc golfer on your course and a ball golfer at the same time?’ But it’s not a parallel; it’s going to be sequential, just like in regular ball golf — some will have a 10 a.m. tee time, someone else will have a 10:20 a.m. tee time. We timed the course and a disc golfer can stay ahead of a ball golfer, just like a normal round of golf. There’s still the same etiquette, if you’re holding someone else up, you let them go to the next tee and play through — it’s the same thing in disc golf,” Brown said.

The traditional golf course hosts roughly 75 regulars, with busier summers and slower falls.

“We’re hoping to use disc golf to flatten that curve while introducing the sport to more ball golfers. We’ve talked about having a tournament where we pair a disc golfer with a ball golfer together and they go out and play,” Brown said.