My birth city of Greensboro has been gravely disappointing over the years...the Sit-ins, the Klan Nazi Shooting, which should have been labeled The Nazi Communist Shooting...but Greensboro's lack of understanding and appreciation for our sport of disc golf is grievous
There was a pretty cool little 18 hole course at Bryan Park in the early '80's. I discovered it quite by accident when I lived in Brown Summit, after moving back to NC from LA, where I learned the sport playing Steady Ed's Hahamongna and La Mirada in the 70's with only a dirt brown Aero with a pending patent number. The course at Bryan Park was literally bulldozed and pushed over a cliff. I recently heard from a source who should know that that was done at the bequest of the man for whom the park is named.
After we and others created, designed and built Johnson Street in High Point in 1992, my primary playing partner and I, as newly elected officers of the newly founded players' association/club, TADGA, approached the city of Greensboro about putting a course at their Hagan Stone Park. They offered the property on E. Vandalia, which consisted of a gymnasium building and a tangled forest/jungle. Five years later, some local players got Greensboro to allow them to buy and install baskets and those crappy little cylinders at Barber Park, of all places. Now, 15 years later, it is still the same, with no improvements or design tweaks, both of which are seriously needed and warranted. About seven or eight years ago, a $10 million bond referendum for the park allocated $39,900 to the disc golf course. All I've ever seen spent on the course were some REALLY crappy little plastic tee marker signs that lasted about a week and a half.
I had and have no problems with the millions already spent on replacing the collapsed roof of the Simkins Center, the technical improvements of the amphitheatre stage, or the building of new shelters and the sprayground and playground. I have absolutely no problem with their scrapping the plans for building cement, stadium style seating for the amphitheatre and for the three on three basketball courts where the practice baseball field and hole number 14 are. I have no problem with the construction of a nice, state of the art community center with expansive dining and kitchen facilities. I do have problems with it being built right where number 14 is, as that is the best hole on the course and one of the best I've ever seen or played. I have no problem with GPD's only request of building a second road in/out of the park, off Florida Street, right across from where English Street T intersects Florida. I do have a problem with it coming across the field in such a way so as to destroy the baseball practice field and dozens, scores, hundreds of old growth, mature trees, when it should be built along the other side of the field, where a road bed already exists, where one, maybe two trees would have to be felled and the 14 basket could simply be moved 60 feet or so to the left to the middle of the field. My biggest problem with the Barber Park Master Plan is the taxpayer raping seven figure expenditure for a fancy pants, highfalutin office/maintenance building to be built where holes 2 and 3 are. That's where the community center should go. The present office/maintenance facilities should be improved as actual, technical need dictates, but an entirely new structure should not be built, just so Barber Park's handful of employees can have fancy new digs. In any event, the disc course is going to be relegated to the stinky sewer line/Buffalo Creek swampland/jungle/forest, if it survives at all, with its allocated funds going somewhere else...probably into some bureaucrats' and/or politicians' pockets.
As for Keeley Park. I'll be a dead old man before Keeley Disc Golf is ever born. That's probably just as well, because the design I see on that park's master plan is tree killing crapola that doesn't utilize any of the grand, picturesque open area along the two power tower runs or the only real body of water in that area of the park.
The final word is, that Greensboro continues to fall behind and trail most every other NC city in disc golf development, as it does in so many areas of endeavor.
But, have hope and take heart, local discers. My ancestral home county of Alamance might yet be persuaded to make Rock Creek a permanent course at Cedarock Park, in addition to their plans for a new 9 hole beginners' course there. That would rival the 81 holes of golf in High Bridge, WI and perhaps let Cedarock regain its former #1 ranking as best disc golf park in America. And there is talk of installing a "players' course" at Burlington's Springwood Park in the Whitsett community featuring two 1000'+ holes. Burlington's Parks & Rec Director seems very optimistic, enthusiastic and encouraging about it.
