TENNERTON – Construction on a new disc golf course at the Upshur County Recreational Park by Buckhannon-Upshur High School is nearly finished.

Josh Hinchman, president of the Buckhannon-Upshur Recreational Park Advisory Board, said the poles and baskets are already established, but the signage hasn’t yet been completed.

“We haven’t had a chance to go up there to measure out the distance for the holes and the pars to get the signs designed,” Hinchman said. “They’re still up if anyone wanted to play, but you would be guessing your own pars and stuff like that.”

Hinchman hopes to get measurements finalized within the next several weeks, but then the signs must be ordered, and he does not know how long that will take.

“The number one hole starts right behind home plate on the baseball field and wraps around towards the park, and then through the woods and into the large field you can see when you’re coming up into the high school – the field over on your left,” Hinchman said.

Disc golf, sometimes referred to as frisbee golf, is a game in which players try to toss a plastic disc or frisbee into a series of basket-like receptacles set up along a course. As in the game of golf, the object is to land the disc/frisbee into each basket or target in as few tries as possible, according to Merriam-Webster.

Courses may have 18 basket-like receptables, but sometimes they have fewer. Essentially, instead of hitting a ball into a hole in the ground as players do in golf, frisbees or discs are tossed into a metal ‘disc-trapping’ baskets attached to stationary poles. Hinchman said the sport is already pretty popular throughout West Virginia, so he wanted to add a local course for veterans of the sport and novices.

“I just wanted to add more recreational opportunities to the park, and [a disc golf course] is a pretty easy, budget-friendly activity that anybody can get into. There’s no specialized skills or equipment for it,” Hinchman said. “Anybody that can buy a $15 disc golf set can give it a try and it brings more to the park. We have the pool, more bike trails, and you know, a lot more activities are going on up there, so we’re just trying to expand with the room that we have.”

He explained that disc golf is scored similarly to regular golf and even encourages players to use different discs, depending the on the range and situation.

“It’s basically scored the same as regular golf but played more like frisbee,” Hinchman said. “You will have different discs, so just like in golf, you’d have a driver and a mid-range putter, and the more experienced players will have more specialized discs that could fly different ways for pitching to the right or to the left, and things like that.”