Disc golf has found its home in parks and green spaces of all different shapes and sizes, sometimes those spaces are dedicated to disc golf, and sometimes they're in busy parks. "Designers" don't/haven't always thought safety first when it's one of their favourite holes on the line, and that can lead to a variety of safety concerns once the course gets busy. There are lots of excuses for this, I've personally heard, reasons like: "the park wasn't originally busy when I designed the course", or "the city added other stuff to the park and didn't ask us", or even "it's up to the disc golfer to wait if they see someone on the other hole". All of these reasons invariably point to one issue, the designer didn't do their job. Sounds harsh, but that's what separates a professional course designer from those who think it's an easy job or that we’re overly cautious.

As disc golf course designers, our job always begins with safety, or at least, it should. It's more than following simple rules like not throwing over pathways or roads, or not throwing into blind areas where pedestrians might be coming out of, etc. It also includes things like taking a good hard look at the long term plans for the space and planning for those changes now. It's planning for the course to grow in popularity and get busy (because why would we plan for a course to stay empty long term?). It's thinking worst-case scenarios and planning for those. In short, one of the biggest responsibilities we have is planning for tomorrow, and the day after, and the years to come, not simply planning for what it looks like today.

That doesn't mean that a good course designs don't have any risk. In recognizing the danger and understanding the implications of our decisions though, we can mitigate that risk, we can ensure we're not purposefully creating situations that will lead to conflict, or worse, injury. We have a large number of tools at our disposal when designing to remove dangers from spaces that might otherwise restrict us.

Before we even get to designing around dangers, I'm a firm believer that knowledge is the easiest way to mitigate danger, and signage is the best way to educate people of potential danger. You can't rely on it 100%, people are still people and can be distracted, but signage and early prevention is your cheapest insurance policy!

Other than signage, what are some of the other ways we can mitigate danger? The only way we can possibly answer that is to look at each scenario and all of the different criteria that lead to what could be considered a safe hole. This starts with looking at the "spray pattern". Technically, the spray pattern is a “circle sector” (wikipedia), or the area of a circle enclosed by two radii and an arc, beginning at the tee pad. In layman’s terms, it's the number of degrees to both left and right of the target that we expect players to throw into by mistake.

Novice designers often ignore this because they rely on things like "common sense", or they are designing for their own skill level or the level of the player expected to play the hole. These are mistakes, common sense is not a rule, and even higher skilled players grip lock shots, or let them slip on a rainy tournament day, etc. In fact skilled players can create some of the most dangerous situations because they have much stronger shots that travel further and faster. Local players can also be a big problem because they're the ones that will discover "local lines" throwing in ways or directions you might never have thought possible. Some designers will go the other direction and say things like 180 degrees. To be honest, I've been present when players have grip locked so bad, they've thrown behind the tee. There is no hard and fast answer, every scenario is going to have to take into account elevation, potential for wind, obstacles that take areas out of play or have the potential to create kicks, distance and strength of throw, ground cover, canopy or ceiling, etc.

Disc golf will always have risk, but in risk assessment, there are two variables in the final calculation, severity, and likelihood. A 330ft / 100m hole in the middle of a busy park will have a much higher likelihood of an accidental strike than a 150ft / 45m hole. They both have risk, but if all other things were equal, longer throws increase danger in a number of ways. At only 100ft / 30m out, a disc thrown 30 degrees off centre would end more than 52ft / 15m away from the middle of the fairway. At 150ft / 45m out that number grows to more than 91ft /27m, and at 330ft / 100m out you would have a potential landing more than 170ft / 51m away from centre, or a sector width of more than 340ft / 103m wide!

None of those numbers are great, however it’s much easier to deal with a sector width of 104ft / 32m on a 100ft / 30m shot, than 340ft / 103m on a 330ft / 100m shot. This is why our first job as a designer is to choose a hole/course design that fits the size of the space we’re working with. We also need to consider things like available obstacles like trees that we can use to limit that spray. A tree or a thick bush 30-60ft / 10-20m off of the front of the tee can actually limit a huge portion of that potential spray, when there are multiple trees in play, it gets easier still. Throwing away from hazard areas rather than along side them or at them can further limit the danger.

As mentioned earlier, there is potential for spray patterns well outside 60 degrees, and some designers will adhere to 90 degree sectors or even larger when asked the question “what’s the right spray pattern”. Remember, the real answer is “it depends”. In practice, if you need to be worried about a 90+ degree spray, then there are really only a couple possible reasons:

1. You’re in a dedicated wide open space like a golf course where you actually have a sufficient separation of holes and wide enough landing zones for it to not be an issue,

2. There aren’t enough obstacles available to tighten up the possible lines.

In the case of the first one, it’s perfectly acceptable to have wide open shots with lots of space, the debate over whether those are fun holes or not is a topic for another article. In the latter though, if there are dangers in range, then you need to reconsider the position of the tee and angle of the hole, potentially look at planting new foliage, etc. You also need to consider the long term use of the property, potential for growth, etc. If dangers still exist after you’ve taken all of these aspects into consideration, and the likelihood of an interaction is more than plausible, then a real designer will ditch it and come up with a better plan. It’s not only okay to ditch your first design and start from scratch, it’s a regular part of the design process that you should be comfortable with!

In conclusion, I’ll repeat what I said earlier, our first job as a designer is choosing a layout and routing that is suitable to the space we’re working with, and there is no hard and fast rule about what the correct spray pattern is, it simply depends.