Rogers State University’s disc golf club is shooting for an 18-hole course to be built in the school’s nature reserve.
The club plans to pay for it with proceeds from a doubles tournament it will host Aug. 10 at the Centennial Park course, 15403 E. 87th St. N in Owasso. Tickets are $50 per team.
Ben Brown, who graduated from RSU in May, started the disc golf club late last fall with his friend Gunner Evans. They both loved the sport and had played it informally for a while.
Both were part of the school’s Honors Program. Brown said when spring came, he and Evans decided to link their nascent club to their honors capstone project.
“We’re kind of given the freedom to basically do whatever you want,” Brown said. “It just has to reflect your honors experience and benefit the community. … We have played disc golf all throughout college, and so we thought it’d be a really cool idea to try to see if it was at all possible to get a course going on campus.”
Rogers County has three disc golf courses. Brown said the RSU club intramurally plays together at the nine-hole Claremore Lake course and the full-size Twin Bridges course at Rogers Point Park north of Catoosa. A course with 27 holes, Re-Tire, has a Claremore address but sits east of Foyil, about 20 minutes from campus.
The club is commissioning a professional disc golf player and designer, Matt Bell, to create the campus course. Brown said Bell is playing tournaments in Europe right now but will have returned to the United States by October, when Brown said he will submit his concept.
Bell designed the Eagle Valley and Nest disc golf courses in Stroud, according to his website. Brown said Bell is also working on a course at Silver Canyon in Muskogee.
“It’s very exciting,” Brown said. “Whenever we first started this, we never at all thought that it was going to get to the level of working with professionals. … This became a lot bigger than we ever expected it to be.”
With Brown and Evans no longer on campus, junior Cade McCall and senior Ian Busking will take over the club this fall as co-presidents.
McCall said the course will sprout up in the Conservation Education Reserve, the hundred acre wood trailing from the west edge of campus.
“There’s some areas that are already open enough to put in a few holes, but I’m sure there’ll have to be some sort of navigating the trails back there as well, because there’s a lot of walking paths,” McCall said.
The club held a fundraiser tournament in April and is hosting a second one Aug. 10 at Owasso’s 18-hole Centennial Park. McCall said all proceeds from the event will go toward building the future course.
It is a flex-start doubles tournament open to players of all skill levels, McCall said. Teams may tee off when they wish but must play between 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. McCall said people must purchase tickets, $50, with cash at the tournament.
“We’re just looking to have fun,” McCall said. “We’re gonna give out free mulligans and stuff; we’re not looking like, ‘Who’s gonna be pro out here?’ We just want to get a lot of people out.”
McCall said people may register in person the day of the tournament or online at tinyurl.com/4z9peknh.
Brown said RSU felt like home to both him and Evans, but both wished student life was bigger there. They were part of the group that in 2023 started Phi Delta Theta, RSU’s only fraternity.
“We thought that this would be a great way to help improve student life, to bring more students in and to get people active,” Brown said. “Being able to leave that kind of legacy behind, it’s a great feeling for us.”
