A look back on DGWT #1: La Mirada Open
One of the most important aspects of the Disc Golf World Tour is its ability to work as the pinnacle platform for the promotion of the sport. We see every event as a medium, a new possibility to showcase the best this sport can offer to as big of an audience as possible. In contrary to traditional inward promotion that is sadly still more of a rule than an exception in the world of disc golf events, we aim to provide best possible outward promotion so that audiences that yet to familiarize themselves with our great sport will be able to see the disc golf as a credible and dynamic choice of spending their precious past time, whether it is watching a tournament live coverage or picking up some discs and heading to the course.
The opportunity to arrange the very first Disc Golf World Tour event at the legendary La Mirada course was at the same time a great honour and a massive challenge. As shown on the SpinTV’s freshly released La Mirada course spotlight video, the venue certainly holds a massive significance to the sport and its players. At the same time the DGWT represents a new breed of the sport, one that at worst can feel distant and foreign for some of the players who have roamed the fairways of La Mirada since the late 70’s. The challenge was to find a way how the new viewpoint of the sport could live in harmony with the traditional approach.
Building an event that would please the existing player base while still catering towards the future players was no easy task, but we believe we were able to do a pretty good job. We did not have great expectations for the number of on-site spectators, so seeing up to 500 people following the action on Championship Saturday was most definitely a pleasant surprise. We believe total number of spectators would have been higher without the rough weather on Friday, but we especially want to thank everyone who was brave enough to challenge the elements to see the show first hand on Friday afternoon.
One thing we were especially pleased to see was the amount of engagement our posts received in social media. People really seemed to take interest in the tour and while some of them had different expectations of some aspects of it, we also received tons of great positive feedback that will help us long ways in chasing our dreams of establishing the sport of disc golf on a level similar to the current mainstream sports. We tried to make time for answering the plentiful questions we received throughout the week, but unfortunately we weren’t able to address each and every one. Our apologies for that.
One of the main things that caused stir on social media was the format we chose for our live broadcasts. Many die-hard disc golf fans expressed their disappointment in the fact that every hole of every round was not filmed and broadcasted live. While this may have become the expectation in just the past couple of years for big disc golf events, our take to the tournament media is all about creating credible, mainstream ready coverage that is easy to follow and understand for people outside the sport, ultimately resulting in more people being drawn towards disc golf.
We believe this sport is ready for big audiences and sponsors, but promoting our main events with exhaustively long live broadcasts with shaky cameras showing frisbees thrown in the woods topped off with a commentator panting to a microphone is not the image the big sponsors are looking for. This type of broadcast can also be very off-putting for non-discgolfers. We want to provide a well thought out product with lots of great footage and minimal amount of dead moments despite the challenges of broadcasting a live event.
It’s understandable that people inside the sport who are used to watching those 4 hour broadcasts don’t necessarily appreciate the fact that they can’t see every single shot of the tournament live. However, we want to point out that we also released the lead card play-by-play coverage videos from both 2nd and 3rd rounds. In addition to the SpinTV produced tournament coverage, Central Coast Disc Golf will also be posting more round coverage in the near future.
As for the live broadcasts themselves, we firmly believe there’s still a lot room for improvement. This was only the first event of the tour and now it’s time regroup and to look back on what can be done better in the future. Keeping in mind our goals for the media coverage, We would gladly hear your feedback on what you consider could be done better in terms of production and content. There’s plenty of ways to reach us, but it seems that messaging through our fb page has been proven the most popular. We will also put out a feedback survey in the near future, so stay tuned for that 🙂
View the full infographic of the images used in this article here (JPG, 3MB).
