Poll 50: Booze during tournaments

March 18, 2013 / P.J. / Leave a comment

To continue our series of polls of items on the course and about the rules, we’re going to touch on a pretty interesting one here.

Booze.

It seems like this discussion has likely come up many times before. And in the end, the result is often the same — no alcohol during tournament play.

Let’s clarify this, though.

These questions are more about PDGA-sanctioned tournaments. After all, it’s tough to police the non-sanctioned tournaments, especially if it’s an extremely lax setup.

So having your cordials during an event is illegal by PDGA standards. Never mind that many courses are in public parks and might have already made it illegal for you to have alcohol on park premises.

But for here, we’ll stick with tournaments. In the player Code of Conduct, a part of the PDGA rulebook, Section 3.3.10 says:

“Possession of alcohol from the start of play until the player’s scorecard is submitted is not allowed. Such possession shall result in immediate disqualification at PDGA events sanctioned at B-Tier or higher. The Tournament Director may, at his sole discretion, elect to issue a warning to the offending player in lieu of disqualification solely at PDGA events sanctioned at C-tier and below. If a player has been previously issued a warning for alcohol possession at the same event, all subsequent violations shall result in immediate disqualification.”

That’s pretty implicit, no?

So let that stew for a bit. Before we get to the question and its merits, let’s go back and check last week’s question, which asked: Should people be allowed to smoke while playing in leagues and tournaments?

It was a lot closer than expected, that’s for sure.

Continue reading →

Poll 49: Smoking on the course

March 11, 2013 / P.J. / Leave a comment

With such a good discussion with our last poll, it seemed like a good time to tackle this subject.

And it is quite a hot topic.

Now, at some point down the line, we’ll cover the wacky tabacky. For this poll, we’re sticking with the legal stuff, such as cigarettes, pipes and cigars.

This is quite the topic in many places and it can get emotional. So it’s understandable that there could be different sides and thoughts to this poll question.

But, we’ll hit that up in a moment. First, let’s revisit our last poll, when we asked you about bringing dogs on the course.

Though we didn’t get as many voters as we hoped, this really had a great discussion. So, before we get to the discussion, let’s see the poll results.

We asked if people should bring their dogs with them when playing a round of disc golf. This was extremely close with 76 voters (52 percent) saying yes and 69 (48 percent) saying no.

So it seems like people are slightly in favor of it.

Continue reading →

Poll 47: Buying discs in 2013

February 18, 2013 / P.J. / Leave a comment

For those of us in states where there is actually a true winter, the season is somewhat approaching.

For those of you with great weather all year, well, the “official” season seems to be coming upon us.

That’s right — disc golf season.

And with that will likely come many releases of discs from all sorts of companies, big and small. Some new plastic from Innova and Discraft, perhaps? Maybe a nice new rubber disc from Vibram? Or how about something from Latitude 64? Maybe you’re even salivating to see what this whole Prodigy thing is about?

Oh so many new discs will likely be coming at some point!

But we’ll get back to that when we talk this week’s poll.

First, let’s go back to last week’s poll and see some results.

We wanted to know how old you were when you first started this wonderful sport of disc golf. We received 227 votes for this poll and the results were close.

The winning age group was 21-30 years old, garnering 65 votes (29 percent). Right behind was 11-20 years old with 63 votes (28 percent). The group 31-40 years took third47 votes/21 percent).

Continue reading →