What Do You Need to Start Playing Disc Golf?

• 1. A putter. Essential. Speed 2 to 3, fade 1 or less, soft base plastic. Buy two if the budget allows.
• 2. A midrange. Essential. Speed 5, understable or neutral. This will be your most-thrown disc.
• 3. One slow driver. Essential if you want to throw further than about 250 feet. Speed 6 to 7 with -2 turn.
• 4. A bag. Optional at first. A sling bag sized for 8 to 10 discs is enough for your first year.
• 5. Shoes with real grip. Optional but the biggest comfort upgrade after the discs. Trail shoes or hiking shoes you already own are fine to start.
• 6. Everything else. A towel, a mini marker, a practice basket, a cart. All genuinely useful and none of it needed for your first twenty rounds.

Three discs is not a compromise starting point — it is the recommended one, because keeping the variables low is how you work out what your own throw actually does. See how many discs you need.

Both work and the answer depends on whether you want to choose.

A starter set is three discs in a box, chosen by the manufacturer to be beginner-appropriate, usually cheaper than the same three bought separately. It is the right choice if you do not yet want to learn what flight numbers mean, and most of the major brands sell a sensible one.

Three discs bought individually costs a little more and lets you pick the specific molds and weights. It is the better choice if you have already read a flight-numbers page and want lighter weights than a standard set usually ships with.

Our starter set versus individual discs page works through the trade properly, and our starter set picks covers the sets themselves.

• A distance driver. The most common and most expensive beginner mistake. A speed-12 driver needs around 350 feet of arm speed to fly as designed; below that it fades out early and lands shorter than your midrange. It also teaches a throwing motion built around muscling a disc that is not responding.
• A tournament bag. Thirty-disc capacity is weight you carry whether the bag is full or not.
• A cart. Solves the problem of carrying 25-plus discs, which you do not have. See is a disc golf cart worth it.
• Dedicated disc golf shoes. Worth buying eventually, and worth nothing in week one. Any shoe with tread will do until you are playing weekly.
• Eight discs. Six of them will sit unused and all eight will make it harder to learn what your throw does.

Three of the most useful parts of starting out cost nothing.

The course. Most disc golf courses in the United States are on public land and free to play. There is no green fee, no booking and usually no equipment rental, which is a large part of why the sport grew the way it did. Checking locally before you travel is worth doing — some courses do charge — but free is the norm.

Learning to read flight numbers. The four numbers on every disc tell you whether it will work for you, and understanding them is worth more than any purchase on this page. Start with flight numbers for beginners or the full flight numbers chart.

Throwing in a field. Twenty throws of the same disc in an open field teaches you more about your release angle than a round does, because you can see the whole flight and nothing is at stake. It is also how you find out whether the disc you bought is the right speed for your arm.

Take three discs, a bottle of water and shoes with tread. Expect to throw somewhere between 150 and 250 feet, which is normal and nothing like what you will see online — see how far a beginner should throw.

Throw your putter from inside 30 feet rather than trying to drive it, throw your midrange on most holes, and only reach for the driver on genuinely open ones. Keep score if you want to, and do not be surprised if your first round is thirty over par; everybody’s was.

The next thing to read, once you have played a few rounds, is how to choose your first disc — it covers choosing by weight and plastic, which is the decision that follows once you know roughly how far you throw.