Edmond's Disc Golf Scene Is Older Than the Boom That's Supposed to Explain It
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
A few years back, at a family Christmas gathering in Edmond, a handful of uncles quietly slipped out of the house. Dylan Kuehni, newly married into the family, noticed and asked where everyone had gone. The answer: disc golfing. He tagged along the next round and never really stopped. Today he's one of the people keeping Edmond's disc golf community running week to week, and that origin story matters for reasons that have nothing to do with nostalgia.
The national conversation around disc golf treats it as a pandemic discovery, a sport that exploded once everyone needed something to do outside and six feet apart. That framing is mostly right at the national level. It is also the wrong lens for Edmond. The tournament this city hosts every spring at Mitch Park didn't start when the rest of the country found the sport. It started when Kuehni's in-laws were already playing it, and it has been running long enough that the current growth curve looks less like a discovery and more like everyone else catching up.
Every April, the Tye F. Cunningham Memorial Disc Golf Course at Mitch Park hosts a PDGA-sanctioned B-tier tournament named for the course itself. In 2026, that event ran its 18th annual edition on April 11 and 12. Count backward and the math is plain: this tournament has been running since roughly 2009, years before the growth curve everyone now cites to explain why disc golf feels suddenly everywhere. UDisc's 2026 Growth Report puts national participation up 86 percent since 2020, with more than 21 million rounds logged by its users in 2025 alone. Those numbers describe a sport that arrived late to a lot of towns. Edmond isn't one of them.
That distinction is worth sitting with if you've lived here long enough to remember when disc golf was something your neighbor did, not something a national market report tracks. The course at Mitch Park wasn't built to catch a wave. The wave caught up to a course that was already competitive enough to earn a PDGA sanction and hold onto it for close to two decades.
Ask Kuehni what he tells new players and the pitch is almost aggressively simple.
"People don't realize most disc golf courses are free and city-owned. It's an unknown gold mine; you can go play whenever you want."
Edmond backs that up with three real options, not one flagship course propped up by marketing:
None of these charge a greens fee. That's not a footnote. It's the entire reason a suburb with no professional sports presence and no golf resort marketing budget can still put on a nationally sanctioned tournament every spring. The infrastructure was already public.
Casual interest in a sport looks like showing up once. Community looks like showing up on a schedule, and that's the part of Edmond's disc golf scene that doesn't make it into the tourism copy. Kuehni runs a weekly mini-doubles tournament every Tuesday, open enough that it's listed on UDisc for anyone tracking local events. When the weather turns, the group doesn't disappear indoors and wait for spring. He also runs a winter putting league at Patriarch Craft Beer House, moving the competitive format from fairway to bar without losing the regulars who show up either way.
That's the piece that separates a town with disc golf courses from a town with a disc golf scene. Courses are infrastructure. A Tuesday night that people plan their week around is something else, and it's the reason Kuehni volunteers with the Oklahoma City Disc Golf Association, helping organize tournaments in partnership with the parks and recreation department rather than around it.
It's worth pausing on the contrast sitting a few miles away. KickingBird Golf, Edmond's traditional course and the city's oldest, recently went through a $22 million renovation and was added to the Oklahoma Golf Trail, the 18-stop network the state built to showcase its best courses. That's real investment, and it's the kind of number that shows up in tourism guides because it's easy to point to.
Disc golf's version of that story doesn't have a dollar figure attached, because it doesn't need one. The courses were already there, already free, already municipal property. The investment Edmond made in this sport wasn't capital. It was zoning a piece of Mitch Park for baskets decades ago and then leaving the door open long enough for someone like Kuehni to walk through it and build a community on top of it.
If you've never played, the entry cost is a handful of discs, not a membership or a tee time. Kuehni's advice is to start with three: a driver for distance, a midrange for approach shots, and a putter for the basket, then check PDGA.com for the basics on rules and etiquette before your first round. If you have played, the Tuesday mini-doubles and the winter league at Patriarch Craft Beer House are open invitations, not closed clubs.
The bigger point is about what Edmond already had before anyone was tracking it. A tournament that turned 18 this year, a course named after a local player, a volunteer who organizes leagues through both a bar and a parks department, courses that never charged admission in the first place. None of that shows up in a growth report. It shows up on a Tuesday night, which is exactly where it's supposed to be.
If you're weighing what daily life actually looks like in a neighborhood like this, beyond the listing photos and drive times, Homes by Matt Berry can walk you through Edmond block by block. Schedule a consultation when you're ready to talk specifics.
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