Kris O'Malley of the Des Moines Disc Golf Club came up with the idea of free women's lessons in 1995. We've had seven complete summers of the lessons and have discovered what makes the lessons successful. We conduct the lessons at a course that has amateur and pro tee pads. We play from the amateur tee pads. The average length of the short tee is 250 feet. After a couple of weeks of lessons, the women are able to score well and encourages them.
The first thing we do each year is advertise the free lessons for women. We hand out flyers to participants of World's Biggest Disc Golf weekend and post brightly colored flyers on course bulletin boards. We contact the local free weekly paper and the paper runs a paragraph each week the lessons are given. The last three years we have advertised the lessons in the city's adult education summer calendar.
EQUIPMENT
We keep a box of disc (many of them are light weight) in the car that we loan out to the women who need them.
We give each woman two stable drivers and a putter. After they've played a few times, the women usually go out and buy some discs of their own. But they don't need to if they don't want to, because we share the discs anytime.
FORMAT
The first year of lessons, Kris divided the groups up and put one experienced woman player with two or three new players. Everyone would play nine holes. Then the next week she divided up the groups again and made sure the new players would go with a different experienced player than the one they went with the week before. This worked well because each of the experienced players had different techniques for different types of shots, and we'd let the new players know that they could try the different techniques and see what works best for them.
During the second year of lessons, pro player Juliana Korver volunteered to help. This was truly exciting for everyone who
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