In the woods surrounding the Wilton-Lyndeborough Cooperative Middle High School campus, an 18-hole disc golf course stretches along the baseball, soccer and softball fields.
While the 1.7-mile course has lots of tree obstacles and some steep hills, the holes are accessible thanks to the volunteers who maintain the walkways, tees, targets and barriers that shape the course.
Noah Proctor is one of these volunteers and has been a disc golfer for about 14 years. Starting at the Wilton course in 2012, Proctor learned to love the sport and eventually played “professionally, quote unquote.”
Now, with all his kids under 7, finding time for disc golf has become harder, but he continues to play in a weekly league and has introduced his oldest to the course behind WLC.
With 69 different courses in the state, Proctor admitted the Wilton course can be harder, but he argued, “It’s a lot of fun. It’ll make you really a good disc golfer.”
The Wilton course is one of 30 courses in New Hampshire that offer 18 holes, with most limited to 9. The additional nine holes are another contribution from Proctor and a friend.
The course was originally designed in memory of young local disc golfers who died. Built with nine holes in 2010, it was later expanded after Proctor and his friends began volunteering to maintain and grow it.
The course continues to be maintained solely by volunteers, unlike other private or town-owned courses in New England that are better funded. Proctor and his friends fundraised for the baskets and built the tees and walls that protect the discs from falling down the cliffs and add to the course’s difficulty.
“Here we do it all with our own blood, sweat and tears,” he said.
On the course, each hole also has a sign declaring the set distance and par, with the farthest at Hole 7, with 408 feet between the tee and the basket.
When laying out the additional nine holes, Proctor explained, the team of volunteers followed their gut and experience.
“We just kind of figured it out,” he said.
And when playing, that seems to be the way athletes have to take on each hole. Even with a map showing where the basket is, there’s sometimes no way to see it through the thick trees.
Despite disc golf’s recent popularity since the pandemic, New Hampshire is not new to the sport.
Proctor explained that the sport was founded in California in the 1970s, and that one of the oldest courses is in Rindge.
Established in the late 1970s by the creator of disc golf, “Steady Ed” Headrick, Sunridge Development, known as “Hunt’s Mean 18,” is privately run and open once a year in September for a tournament hosted by the New England Flying Disc Association.