Fulton Disc Golf Club to host tournament

George Shellady tosses a disc Saturday, Aug. 13, 2016, at the Fulton Disc Golf Club Trilogy Challenge at Veterans Park in Fulton.
George Shellady tosses a disc Saturday, Aug. 13, 2016, at the Fulton Disc Golf Club Trilogy Challenge at Veterans Park in Fulton.

The Fulton Disc Golf Club will host its first sanctioned tournament next month.

Tim Rickerson, president of the club, said he hopes it proves to only be the beginning.

The Fulton City Council approved on Tuesday a request to host a vendor at Veterans Park as part of the tournament. It is capped at 72 participants to keep the course from getting too crowded.

Over 30 people have registered, he said. Most are coming from Columbia or Jefferson City.

“We’re at a healthy number right now,” Rickerson said.

The club’s roster for the summer is around 57 people with about 30 coming to weekly league meetings on Sundays, he said.

One of the goals for the club this year is to keep the course well kept and work with the Fulton Parks and Recreation Department on pieces it might need. However, the other main goal is to host a Professional Disc Golf Association C-Tier tournament.

Rickerson said the club is hoping to be able to host higher tier tournaments in the future, but this is a starting point.

The city has an 18-hole disc golf course at Veterans Park, which will house the event.

“We would absolutely love to do this on a regular basis,” Rickerson said. “We’re very much interested in possibly putting in another course together at some point. We know when if comes down to it, it’s a matter of having the available space and funding in order to do it. We’ve gone through and looked at a couple places.”

One area, he said, is behind the fire station on Tennyson Road. While there’s been discussions about other plans for that acreage, club members mapped some of those plans and walked around the property to lay out a potential course in addition to those plans.

Rickerson said if the club can have a course that’s the right size and difficulty level, it could host those higher tier tournaments.

“The B-tiers are where you get the really competitive players. That really gets their attention,” he said. “C-tiers are often times more community-based, more amateur-oriented … If we had more courses we could work with, we could elevate what we can do. That’s one of our long-term goals.”

The Council unanimously approved the request to include a vendor in the tournament. Rickerson said the main purpose of the vendor is for the winners in the amateur levels to turn in the vouchers they get for placing.

“I think its a good event, its going to bring people into the community,” Fulton Parks Director Clay Caswell said.

For more information, see the Fulton Disc Golf Club's Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/fultondiscgolf.