By ALIN HETT
Hays Post
A decade-long vision is taking shape among the trees in Hays where hundreds of hours of volunteer work are turning a wooded stretch of land into a different kind of disc golf experience.
The Bison Trail disc golf course winds through a natural, wooded landscape before completing an 18-hole loop near Allen Street. The course is being developed by the Flying Bison Disc Golf Club.
Ethan Tschanz, Frontier Open tournament director and disc golf course designer for Hays Bison Disc Golf, said the nature-based layout is unlike anything disc golfers will find nearby.
“There is no type of woods disc golf between Kansas City and here,” Tschanz said.
While the course is not yet open to the public, Tschanz hopes that will eventually change. The property belongs to Kansas State University.
“My hope is that when K-State sees this, because this is their land, people will be excited to play disc golf and hopefully make this adopted into the public trail system,” he said.
The physical work to transform the area into a playable course has taken about three months, with more than 30 volunteers contributing 1,200 hours of work.
Much of that work has involved clearing a path through an area that was never designed to be a disc golf course.
Volunteers have encountered plenty of reminders of the land's past along the way. Tschanz said he found glass bottles dating to almost every decade since the 1930s while cleaning the area.
Nature has presented its own obstacles, too, including freshly chewed beaver stumps.
Rather than removing the natural character of the property, the course has been designed around it.
The layout starts near the Glassman ball fields, wraps around the Hays Parks Department building and continues through the wooded area. Hole 11 offers one of the course's more photogenic views, while hole 14 continues players through the nature-based layout.
Once Bison Trail becomes available for public use, it would add to an already significant disc golf presence in Hays. Tschanz said the community now has 99 baskets in total within the city, with 21 not currently in use.
The new course will also play a role in the Frontier Open, scheduled for Sept. 12 and 13. Tschanz said the Frontier Open is the second-largest disc golf tournament in Kansas.
For all the work that has gone into adding another course and growing the tournament, Tschanz said his connection to the sport goes much further back.
“Disc golf to me has always been about family because I started playing with my parents when I was a toddler,” he said. “As I've come up through the sport, I've made friends that have been lifetime friends since then, and presumably all the way into the future.”
That sense of community has carried into the work at Bison Trail, where dozens of people have given their time to help turn the decade-old idea into something players can eventually experience themselves.
“We're all a big family down here," Tschanz said. "The whole point of building more courses and growing the tournament is to make our family bigger."
