2022 Texas State Disc Golf Championships Preview: A New Beginning

A great return from Texas to spectators.

March 25, 2022 by Charlie Eisenhood in Preview with comments

Last year, the Texas State Disc Golf Championships were the first stop of the PDGA National Tour’s final season. Consolidating with the Disc Golf Pro Tour this offseason means it returns as a DGPT Elite Series stop. This is the first event of the year that debuts as a DGPT tournament.

While Texas States has long moved from course to course, this year’s new layout – The Thorn, a safari combination of Lindsey Park’s three courses, including last year’s Dogwood course – reflects a changing reality of professional disc golf. We are, in fact, out of the woods.

Open holes, plenty of sightlines for spectators and way more distance become the themes of this year’s Texas states. It’s not just about having good courses anymore; these are ticket sales and cellular signal for live streaming.

Hey, they say everything is bigger in Texas. Let’s dive into what to watch for this weekend.

Past winners

Five things we’ll be watching

1. See these five times in the chart above that Ricky Wysocki won this event? These are the only five times he has played there. It’s a pretty remarkable streak, even if you don’t factor in the two years he won it against weaker fields when it was just an A-Tier. And it’s not like he’s dominating the Dogwood course every time they played last year for the event: this tournament moves around and he’s won all over Texas on all sorts of different setups. Everything is Ricky in Texas. Can he make it six in a row and kick off his 2022 campaign? It was on this part of the tour that he kicked off last season en route to unanimous Player of the Year honors. He certainly has the game to manage the combined open and wooded course that the Thorn presents.

2. Welcome back, Matt Orum! Matty O was hit with appendicitis before LVC and had to skip the first two events of the season after surgery. Armed with a fresh bag, what will he look like on his first start of 2022? He finished second in Texas States in 2021, so it could be fertile ground for him to find some rhythm right away.

3. With the Champions Cup, the first major tournament of the year, just weeks away, another group of European MPO players have traveled to the United States to begin their tour here. Luukas Rokkanen, Niko Rattya, Väinö Mäkelä, Kristo Raikand more particularly, Niklas Anttila, the 2021 European champion, will all be making their 2022 DGPT debuts this weekend. For Anttila, this is the first time he has competed in the United States! Can a full contingent of Europe’s best make a dent in the top 25 – or dare we say top 10?

4. Hailey King will not defend his title this weekend after turn around by the severe thunderstorms and tornadoes that swept through the central United States this week. This means eyes will be squarely focused on the best players in the division so far this season: Catherine Allen, Valerie Mandujano, Kristine Tatar, Paige Pierceand Eveliina Salonen. Neither Pierce nor Tattar have yet won an event this year; Could either of them take advantage of the distance charged layout to card their first W? Or maybe Valerie will continue her precise play and pick up back-to-back Elite Series victories.

5. This is the last stage of the Elite Series before the Champions Cup. Don’t expect to see full courts at the Music City Open or Open at Tallahassee. While these tune-up Silver Series events are still pretty competitive, this will be the only chance we’ll have to see (almost) the entire pro touring scene in one place before they take on WR Jackson in a few weeks. . Who seems ready to fight for a Major? Keep an eye on performance on the wooded, line-forming holes that define Jackson’s course.

The lesson

The thorn: DFO – par 63, 9,772 feet; FPO – par 67, 8,986 feet

The Thorn is a new layout at Lindsey Park that combines portions of each of the property’s three courses – Dogwood, Cedar and Hickory – into a safari layout that extends the distance to nearly 10,000 feet for MPO. Although it contains some dogwood wooded holes from last year’s course, it is much more open and will require a wide combination of skills to win.

Designed by Gregg Barsby and Rose City Disc Golf Club, The Thorn is a physically demanding course with a series of long and challenging finishing holes.

“I just wanted to challenge the best,” Gregg Barsby said. “It’s a course that I feel like the best player is going to win. There’s not as much chance with this course as at Dogwood, and we all love Dogwood, especially us local players. We love to play there all the time, but to bring an event of this caliber to Tyler and East Texas, I’m so glad they wanted to follow this layout.

Here is an overview of the course:

Texas States The Thorn Layout

here is Texas States 2022 Caddy Book.

Extended forecast

Finally, a great weekend for disc golf. It will be a reprieve from the cold, wind and rain that marked the previous rounds.

Friday: Sunny. 77 degree high. Little or no wind.

Saturday: Sunny, high near 80. Wind picking up to about 10 mph in the afternoon.

Sunday: Warmer, high of 86 degrees. Winds around 10-15 mph in the afternoon.

How to follow

UDisc Live will have live scores available all weekend. For video coverage, see our How to Watch article.

Read on for PrizePicks lines and best bets…