About Queenstown Disc Golf
Disc golf has been played in the beautiful Queenstown Gardens since the early 1980s. In 1995 permission was obtained to mark out the course and James Smithells, Andy Cooper, Chris Davies, and Dave Laurent, raised the funding and established the first permanently marked out course in New Zealand. This extensively redesigned course included just one basket. It was officially opened by Mayor Warren Cooper in March 1996, at the inaugural Queenstown Classic Disc Golf Tournament.
The new course rapidly became very popular with both locals and visitors, resulting in both wear and tear, along with increasing safety concerns. Queenstown Disc Golf has therefore maintained an active focus on minimising the likelihood of adverse interactions with both the physical environment e.g. vulnerable flowerbeds, trees, and other users of these popular Gardens.
Playing disc golf in the Queenstown Gardens has continued to grow in popularity, being a novel, fun, inexpensive activity located in a beautiful setting. The course has long been the public face of disc golf in New Zealand and has featured on television several times. It is now a full 18 basket course, sensitively embedded in the environment, with widespread public support. The community has benefited in that many sports stores now sell scorecards and a wide range of discs, visitors come every year to play in our regular tournaments, and the under-utilised Gardens are now well used, making them a safer environment.
It is extremely important that people playing disc golf in the Queenstown Gardens continue to respect both the physical environment and other users of the Gardens. NEVER throw your disc/frisbee if there is any chance that it might hit someone. Either guard them, wait, politely ask them to move, choose an alternative target, or play that hole later.