I started playing disc golf three or four years ago, most weekends with a friend who threw forehand (FH) and only used a Discraft Cyclone and Magnet. I throw almost exclusively backhand (BH), although I’d learned how to flick (synonym for forehand) at mid-ranges last year as I was finding myself deep in the woods a lot and you can’t throw a backhand when surrounded by branches or have a tree right in front of you. The first driver I’d been able to throw straight was a 172 gram Innova Sidewinder, then Beasts at gradually increasing weights from 162 to 170 and now I was using a 167 gram Discraft Surge, but had recently purchased a 168 gram Avenger. Someone had shown me how to grip a disc last year, but that is about all I’d bothered to learn about the sport.
For her birthday, I decided to get my girlfriend a driver that would fly further than the Leopard. I went to a store, and after staring at hundreds of options, dropped $18 on the latest and greatest disc- advertised as a super-fast distance driver for beginners- a Discraft Nuke SS. When I got it home, I decided to get some opinions on what I’d just purchased. I found a relevant website at www.discgolfreview.com (DGR), but it didn’t seem to have been updated for a few years so didn’t include the Nuke series discs. It took a strange amount of further exploration before I discovered that this same website had a forum section full of people discussing all manner of disc golf in a relatively intelligent manner. Actually, the reason I didn’t find it sooner is because I had previously perused another forum on discgolfcoursereview.com (DGCR), which is THE site for finding courses in the United States, but the discussions are rather silly and juvenile, and I didn’t realize they weren’t the same forum.
The first thing I discovered was the Nuke SS was unanimously panned. I educated myself on the difference in disc rim widths, which I hadn’t really considered before. The disc with the largest rim I had tried was the Orc, which took a drastic nose-dive whenever I tried to throw it. Turns out, I wasn’t the only one who had this issue with this disc, but others swore by the Orc, insisting one only needed to keep the nose down on it. It took me some further reading to discover that “nose down” was divergent from the disc’s angle of ascent.
In airplane terminology, nose angle is called “pitch,” and keeping the pitch from being angled up is essential for getting a long, straight backhand or forehand throw. Every newbie I’ve ever seen throws with the nose too high, causing the disc to “spike-” or “knife-hyzer.” This is when, on a RHBH throw, the disc goes up in the air, banks left, and crashes back down. (A RHFH throw will bank right.) Until a thrower can keep the nose down on a disc, it really doesn’t matter much what model of disc is thrown.
While several companies make disc golf discs, the most popular are Innova, Discraft, Discmania, Millennium, Gateway, MVP, Latitude 64 and DGA. There are others, including Vibram and Prodiscus, whose products I have never used. With so many choices, it becomes quickly evident why purchasing a disc is daunting. The most knowledgeable member of discgolfreview.com is named Blake Takkunen. He has compiled a comprehensive chart that compares the flight characteristics of hundreds of discs from many companies. It is called Joe’s Universal Flight Chart and can be found at http://www.gottagogottathrow.com. The only other chart I know of that compares the discs of different companies side by side is by Marshall Street (http://www.marshallstreetdiscgolf.com). Both of these projects were funded by online disc retailers in an ingenious effort to assist shoppers and attract traffic.
Banking left or right is called “roll” in a pilot’s world, but in disc golf, the tendency of a disc to roll is the real important factor, and is called stability. The design of the disc will cause it to behave in a range of stabilities. A disc which resists roll is considered “stable,” while discs which roll to the left on a RHBH throw are “overstable” and those that roll to the right are “understable.” Highly overstable discs are considered “beefy” or “piggish,” and understable discs are “flippy.”
You can also create roll by angling the disc when you throw it. Angling a disc with the side opposite the grip location tilted down and therefore banking to the left on a RHBH throw is called “hyzer.” Anhyzer, the antonym of hyzer, refers to angling the disc with the side opposite the grip location tilted up to encourage roll to the right on a RHBH throw, and that understable movement is called “turnover” or “flip.” One useful technique is to throw an understable disc at a hyzer angle so that it flips to horizontal and consequently flies straight. This is called a “hyzer flip.”
Discs are also designed within a tolerance of how forcefully they are to be thrown, measured in terms of “speed,” and the best speed to choose primarily depends on the distance to the basket. Blake’s chart calls speed “power,” and helpfully provides the distance a nose-down disc should travel under normal conditions at each power rating to behave according to his stability measurements. The route to the basket also plays a significant role in speed selection. If the disc is traveling faster than its tolerated speed, it will become understable, and if slower, it will become overstable. Therefore, you can create various flight paths simply by adjusting the power on the throw. Eventually all but the slowest rated discs will become overstable as they are overcome by wind resistance, gravity and whatnot, causing them to roll in the direction counter to their spin at the end of their flight, which means to the left on a RHBH throw. This fade at the end of a disc’s flight is measured by the disc golf community in terms of LSS, or low speed stability.
Most companies rate their discs according to speed and stability, but Discraft frustratingly doesn’t make a distinction between stages of flight, of which there are three. The first part of the disc flight has been dubbed HSS, or high speed stability, by the disc golf community. Innova calls it “turn.” This is when the disc is released and at the max velocity the thrower has provided. Turn is universally measured on a scale using straight as zero, with increasingly overstable moving away from zero along a positive number line and understable doing the same along a negative number line.
The middle part of the flight is called glide. This is seemingly when the rotational spin, speed and design of the disc align to minimize drag, causing the disc to float through the air; effortlessly holding its line. Latitude 64 have recently raised the bar in terms of glide, but Discraft seems to have the largest variance in glide capability between various discs, and so I find it frustrating that their charts ignore glide altogether. While some discs can glide seemingly forever, others don’t glide much at all, and these are essential for use on holes which require an abrupt transition between HSS and LSS stages. Eliminating wobble and increasing yaw, which is the spin of the disc on its axis, will give the disc more glide and decrease both HSS and LSS.
A good disc is any one whose flight characteristics you can understand, utilize and trust.
One section of the forum is dedicated to sharing what discs are currently in one’s bag, and I became captivated by this. DGR promotes using a minimum number of discs and molds (the term they use in favor of disc models). Unless you’re the store or company selling them, it makes sense to learn to steer and control various flight paths of one disc rather than purchasing a different disc for every flight route you want to take. It is also useful to take advantage of the fact that as discs age, they lose stability. You can broaden the number of routes you can take at the same distance by using the same mold in various states of wear. But as a beginner, it’s sort of difficult to commit to buying a bunch of one mold until you’ve tried a bunch of different molds to get idea of what fits you best. The problem with this became readily apparent when I attempted to compare a Discmania DD with a Discraft Avenger. The drastic differences in rim shape caused me to lose my release point when switching between the two, so that I was either releasing the Avenger too early or the DD too late. I quickly realized I needed to choose between the two, and the predictability of the Avenger won out, despite the fact that the DD flies further and tend to skip off the ground when it hits, stealing several more feet.
My former playing partner’s Cyclone/Magnet combo, along with a Comet, are the classic “old-school” discs. I was sort of astonished that the Leopard was indeed touted as a great disc not only to start out with, but as a staple for slow and straight or s-curve fairway drives. In fact, the most-used discs were moderately stable fairway drivers, slightly understable mid-range discs and overstable putters.
I had expected to see a bunch of max weight, overstable long distance, super fast drivers. How else could those other people I sometimes see on courses be throwing so far? Score one for the marketing machine. Turns out, those max range distance discs are for throwing beyond 400 feet, and if you can’t throw them that far, there is no point in using them. Anyway, the average hole distance from the tee on a typical disc golf course is closer to 300 feet. It is easier to throw a disc 300 feet that was designed to travel 300 feet than it is to throw a disc 300 feet that was designed to travel 400 feet. Mind-bogglingly simple logic. There’s a caveat in this statement however, in that it assumes you are using proper throwing technique.
I had been in the habit of throwing everything as hard as I could, and meanwhile was frustrated with my lack of consistency. According to the DGR forum, one could throw further with more accuracy using less power but maximizing disc glide. My bag contained six distance drivers, most of which I never used, and zero fairway drivers. I took most of the high-speed drivers out and purchased three fairway drivers- a Firebird, a Teebird and a Glow Stalker. I bought my girlfriend a Cyclone and gave her my P&A Aviar putter, which I replaced with a Gateway Wizard.
Once upon a time, I was a drummer. I wasn’t some prodigy blessed with the gift of rhythm; I learned what it was and how to express it only after years of diligent practice. One thing I’m aware of about myself is that while I am incredibly adept at improvising solutions, I have little to no natural athletic instinct. Also, I am a passionately devoted person with a stronger work ethic than most. I’m not particularly proficient at solving riddles, but it’s something I enjoy doing. All this is to say that I understand one improves not buy purchasing the “best” materials, but through practice, practice, practice. Beyond that, the obsessive quest to discover the brand/size/shape/thickness/material of drumsticks/bundle sticks/mallets/brushes/drumheads that best fit your individual hands/approach/style/needs is exactly like choosing distance drivers/fairway drivers/mid-ranges/putters/utility discs. The frustration of product consistency after finding exactly what you’re looking for is also familiar.
Because of various factors associated with humidity, cooling rates, etc, there are variances between discs of the same mold, especially when compared year to year, giving forum members infinite fodder to bitch/debate about. These obsesses tend to lead to a preoccupation with purchasing every disc one can find that most resembles one they had success with in the past, which certainly works in favor of those selling discs. Also, the real fear of losing a preferred disc can set in, leading one to withhold using it until a suitable backup has been procured.
All kinds of tricks are used to determine when a disc was made. Some companies make this easier by changing their stamp designs more than others (and none more than Millenium). One obvious way with certain Innova discs is simply by the number of national championships credited to Ken Climo (he’s up to twelve). The lettering embossed on the inside of the disc, called tooling, often changes from run to run.
Some companies occasionally modify their disc molds without letting anybody know. The forum is very useful for ferreting out variations within a mold. The Innova wing, or shaped underside edge of a disc, for example, can be in at least three variants: X, L and + (plus). The disc Innova calls Beast has a completely different wing than it did when it first came out, and is not the same disc by any stretch of the imagination. According the DGR forum, certain discontinued and old mold Discraft discs reappear as DGA discs.
A disc is made by combining a top and bottom mold. Once a company has built two molds of the same diameter, they can potentially double their profits by swapping halves and “inventing” two more discs. From my cynical point of view, that means half the discs out there are little more than a practical way of lowering overhead costs.
The line on the disc at the point where the molds meet is called the parting line. Excess plastic sometimes found on new discs at the parting line is called flashing, and will cause new discs to be more stable. It wears down after a few rounds of throws. As the disc ages, it loses some structural integrity, which also causes the stability to decrease. I’m too late to the party to start offering suggestions now, but I don’t know why the parting line isn’t instead called the flash line. Anyway, some guy with the avatar “Marmoset” figured out that when comparing the same mold side by side on a flat surface, a disc with a higher parting line will tend to be more stable. I am a sucker for such nerdiness.
I had never understood what a disc “bead” was, but now I figured out it was the vertical ridge on the underside of the inner wing of some discs that acts as a stabilizer. The P&A Aviar I gave to my girlfriend doesn’t have a bead, but there is another Aviar putter that does. The Roc is probably the most popular beaded disc. Beaded discs tend to have better wind resistance. The down-side of a bead is that, when you grip the disc, it rests against the side of your index finger with the comfort of a dull axe.
I’ve barely used the Stalker, simply because it was made irrelevent by the Teebird (both at 171 grams) which quickly became my favorite disc. I had purchased it in transparent Champion plastic, which is Innova’s most durable disc. As discs age, they become less stable. Cheaper plastics do so at a faster rate than more expensive plastics. At the DGR forum, it is recommended to purchase baseline plastics at first, so you can more quickly learn how the flight characteristics change as it ages. I, however, had intentionally bought the better plastic in order to give myself time to learn the flight of the disc before it became too unstable. But curious, I bought another Teebird in the cheap DX plastic at the same weight for $8. It easily had more glide than the Champion version. The noticeable difference in the shape of the disc was that the edge was sharper when new. The third round after buying it was played using only the DX Teebird and the Wizard. This was not by design, but due to the fact that those were the only two discs I needed. Along the way, I hit at least two trees and a metal power line tower squarely, and by the final hole, a left hook over a river, the Teebird was beat in to the point that, when I threw it at a hyzer angle, it flipped to straight and sailed across the river into a tree on the opposite bank considerably past the basket. Despite the five minute walk it took to recover the disc, I viewed this as a success.
I had purchased the Firebird in max weight, or 175 grams, because I wanted to make sure it turned left. This turned out to be a mistake, as the overstable disc design itself was more than capable of doing its job. The heaviness of the disc relative to my other drivers tended to throw off my release point on the rare occasion when I needed the disc. However, I couldn’t find a lighter Firebird, so, after consulting the forum, bought a 169 gram Discraft Predator instead. You can turn a sharp left or get good distance on a strong throw with this disc, and it can be confidently “flexed,” or put on a hard anny line knowing the disc will pull out of it to yield a stretched S-curve.
I use mid-range discs mainly as utility discs to be used when unique circumstances present themselves as the result of a uniquely designed hole or a bad throw. The Roc is the most versatile mid-range disc I’ve thrown, but it has a lot of overlap with the Wizard, and I almost always choose the latter instead, so I’m contemplating getting a Buzzz, the most popular disc Discraft makes, as it purportedly can get more distance and work well for the shot I have the most trouble with- straight to slightly right downhill “tunnel” shots. (Actually, I do have one Z Buzzz that I can flick better than other discs, but it is very light for a mid-range (168 grams) and therefore too flippy.)
Besides throwing them, the best way to understand and appreciate the differences between discs is by feeling them. The variances in shapes and contours, tackiness and flexibility all become perceptible to the touch. Gateway offers the largest range in disc feels, while Discraft seems the most consistent. Right now I am particularly enthralled by the feel of some of Innova’s pearly Champion discs, despite the purported fact that the swirls only come from a batch made right after switching disc colors. While perhaps a bit too slick, Latitude 64’s discs seem indestructible.
Here’s what it looks like at the end of 2011:
Extra Long Range Driver:
168g Innova Star Destroyer (Long S-curves)
Long Range Driver:
168g Discraft Z Avenger (Pinpoint accuracy, highly predictable)
(After much searching, I am loving a 171g Roadrunner for understable duties)
Fairway Drivers:
169g Discraft Z Predator (Overstable, long left turns, heavy winds)
171g Innova Champion Teebird (Stable, line-shaping workhorse)
171g Innova DX Teebird (Understable, S-curves)
Mid-range:
175g Innova Star big bead Gator (Left turn!)
176g Innova KC Pro Roc
173g Latitude 64 Opto Fuse (Amazing turnovers, tons of glide, useless in headwinds)
Putters:
175g Gateway Soft Wizard (Approach shots, short drives)
174g Gateway Glow Wizard (Newer and grippier, hyzer finish putts)
???? Gateway Evolution HPP Warlock (Most putts, holds any line albeit a limited range)
Amongst my next disc golf related purchases will be a scale that measures grams.
Check back for Disc Golf Review, Part 2: Technique.
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