I really only bid on USWDGC because of Wildflower.

The timing of where Mint(and Austin) was going growth wise plus the explosion in the women's game locally were the catalysts. 

Krissie was working for us. Renae was running events. Steph had been running women's events for a decade plus. Des had done just about everything under the sun in disc golf.

The team was there. They were going to train new female TDs at their events. Build the culture that way by developing the people who were next.

The Austin area had already been an advocate for the Women's scene for decades. With Texas Women's being a 20+ year event and USWDGC being hosted at OSP in 2011.

Plus all the other amazing TD's and club organizers we had that would not be playing. Chris Harris, Patty Justice, Mitch Justice, Gordon Kelley, Wallace Hall, Efrain Aguilar, Xan Erwin, Andrew Jauregi, Brian Litke, Goose and I'm sure many more that I am forgetting because I'm totally just winging this blog from memory.

So I asked Krissie one day, "should we bid on this?"

Everything was lined up.

That was it. We went for it.

We chose to focus on Round Rock again as the main host site. At the time the City of Austin did not have a public reservation system for the courses. So we pieced together the best collection that we could: OSP, Benbrook, Wilco, Wells Branch...and maybe we'd throw in this new course we might work on.

I want to emphasis why we chose Round Rock again...That speaks to the PDGA and the history of the event.

If you want to sell yourself, you have to know who is buying.

That new course? Sprinkle Valley. The potential future home of Mint Discs.

It didn't even have a name. We had not signed the lease here yet when we applied, but we had been talking to ABW off and on for the previous year.

So we put together the bid. Gathered 30+ letters of recommendation from people we knew and respected in the sport. Had potential commitments from major sponsors already lined up. I even reached out to Lone Star to ask if we could visist and get their help.

Krissie and myself put together an incredibly detailed and well thought out plan. We even called the PDGA and asked questions like we were the student and they were the teacher. We wanted to show them how serious we were.

And one day we got a call.

We won the bid.

We nailed it.

Oh shit.

This is real.

Here's the extra motivation to go all out with Sprinkle Valley now.

We found out we won the bid sometime around Nov/Dec 2022. It was via a phone call, so I don't have an exact record of when it was. The PDGA later announced it on Dec 21st, 2022.

By January 2023, we had signed our lease and were starting to build our warehouse.

By February 2023, Olse had mapped out the course and we started cutting.

By November 2023, the full 18 was open. It had a different version of Hole 18 then.

Yeah, that hole was already redesigned completely before USWDGC even happened!

It was the only hole on the course that I just didn't like. Parts of the old tee box are still tucked up on the fence line parallel to the current boxes.

In between January and November, we were still trying to run the company. Adding a retail store to this mix was also new for us. That's a new business model to learn there even though I used to do it at Disc Nation. Running our own store was different than working at someone else's. 

We also faced a ton of logistical issues with the USWDGC plans.

In 2023 I went with Krissie to caddy for her at USWDGC in North Carolina.

All 3 of their courses were in the same park.

Alarm bells started going off in our heads.

Man...having everything in one park sure makes it easy to pull this off.

All of our courses are 15-30 minutes apart. They just have one staff HQ. We were going to have 4-5 HQ's.

Every course also had it's own municipality to deal with. We weren't just paying one fee for one park and all the courses. It was 4-5 different negotiations. 4-5 different people to check in with every week or month to make sure the courses were on track.

That was a big lesson for me.

Finding a host site for the welcome dinner/meeting was also challenging.

We toured the Dell Diamond, Kalihari, Churches and Schools. There's apparently nothing in Austin that was either available or affordable for a few hours of meetings for 500 people. We ended up at Austin's where they made a good deal on the buffet, meeting space and a free $10 game pass for all the players. In the end it made for a really fun way to welcome the players.

By the end of 2023, Krissie was handling almost all of the sponsorships, admin work and reservations. 

I focused on courses, rules, and competition.

I had Sprinkle to build.

We were also making small but important layout changes to Wells Branch, Wilco, OSP and Benbrook. These were mainly safety related but some were also for competition.

That's where I will leave you for today.

I need to get over to Roy G league

Tomorrow, we'll catch back up on courses and the competition schedule.

I'm going to enjoy finally talking about that part of the event.