Disc golf event July 22 at Tuttle’s Hartin-Hambleton Memorial Park

Tuttle is becoming a disc golf destination, thanks to the disc golf course at Schrock Park, and the disc golf course being constructed at Hartin-Hambleton Memorial Park, which is located at 1501 N. Cemetery
Road in Tuttle.
The Tri City Flyers is a local group of enthusiasts, many of which have been volunteering to permanently improve the Hartin-Hambleton Memorial Park by helping to install the new disc golf course.

Tri City Flyers volunteer Todd Littleton announced that the club will soon host a tournament at Tuttle’s new course, even though it’s still a work in progress.
“We have set what’s called a pop up tournament for July the 22nd,” Littleton said, “so we’ve been trying to hustle around and get as many of what will be permanent holes where they’re playable. We’ll have 14 of those playable by the Saturday, July 22 event. We’ll have 11 of our permanent baskets installed, and we’ll use some temporary baskets for some of the holes that we can’t access until the city is finished with the waste water treatment plant. We’ve got about eight or nine concrete pads. A couple of them need to be put into place, some of them just need to be worked a little bit, but it’s coming along really well.”

The work being done at the park is substantial, especially considering the city is not having to pay for it.
“We contracted with a fella who owns a forestry kit that you attach to a skid steer,” Littleton said, “and he cleared up some of the fairways that are in what we call the woods holes, down in the belly of that flood way. We’ve taken out trees. We’ve taken down widow makers that have hung in there. That area hadn’t ever been worked. It’s been mostly farmland. Several ice storms created a lot of dead limbs and trees, so we’ve tried to get all the ones that we can reach down so that it’s safe. We have worked to arrange it with the city to use their wood chippers so that we can chip up a lot of that wood we take down, branches, et cetera, because mulch is real good around the greens and will be good in the fairways. We’ve done a good bit of brush hogging, and we’ve got some more to do. We’re right now in the process of building a couple of temporary bridges for this 22nd event.
We have some local fabricators who are going to help us with a couple of permanent bridges that we’ll use for the course. It’s been a lot of work. We started on Saturdays in December, and we’ve averaged three
out of four Saturdays a month every month since then, doing some kind of work related to building out the course.”Disc golf has been bringing a lot of people to Tuttle, thanks to the Tri-City Flyers’ leagues at Schrock Park.
“We’ve been running consecutive six-week leagues at Schrock Park,” Littleton said, “since about this time last summer, and we ran those until daylight savings time was over,” Littleton said. “We average probably 25 to 30 people every week, and not the same 25 to 30 people. There is a disc golf app, a scoring app that has nearly every playable course in the country, and Schrock Park is on it. We get a monthly update in terms of how many people have played, how many rounds have been played, who came the furthest, and that sort of thing. We use a PDGA scoring app, instead of UDisc. If you and I went out to play a round, and wanted to keep score, you can keep electronic score and it keeps your history of scoring, so you can kind of compare, and it will show if you’ve improved on a course. It even keeps your steps, and your miles. With some courses, there’s a lot of elevation up and down, and it’ll track how many flights of stairs up and down you’ve traveled. I played a course on vacation in Branson last week and the elevation changes meant we were going to walk up 49 flights of stairs and we’re going to walk down 48 flights of stairs.

“That’s the kind of elevation that course has. We’ll have some of that on the new course. Obviously, Schrock Park doesn’t have a ton of elevation, but, man, the city has it in great shape. We’ve lost a lot of trees, due to some of these high winds and storms, and the city has cleared it out, and
cleaned those up, and we’re in our third consecutive league since daylight saving time, and we’ve got about two weeks this session.

“It doesn’t raise a lot of money, but it does help the club with a couple of dollars per player, and then it helps us do some incidental things. We want to try to improve the park. We need nine new tee pads for the back nine that we put in. We designed a lay out and we use dirt tee pads, and the city put new signs up. They look great. There’s signage on the course, so new players can come, and they can follow the course around, and know how far a hole is, where the danger lies, here’s the out of bounds, that kind of thing, just like you’d have on a golf course. Our goal is to eventually try to get nine more tee pads in on those dirt tee pads and try to keep those who are just starting out playing, and those who want just kind of a nice recreational round. It’s close to the high school, so they’ve got a club. There were about eight or nine high school kids playing yesterday, right before our league started, and they’re out there all the time.”

Hartin-Hambleton Memorial Park was previously known as the Tuttle Soccer Complex.
Littleton was at the city’s dedication for the new name of the park.

“They have a new sign naming the park,” Littleton said. “They had a dedication ceremony. They had a great little dedication and a lot of the folks who have been in Tuttle a long time knew this family, some locals shared some memories of this family and the family was out here to talk about it. I was able to mention to one of the grandsons that we were building a disc golf course out on the area. They were pretty excited about an additional amenity for the community, which is really why we’re doing it. It took off during COVID. Since COVID they’re now handing out in the 250,000 registered PDGA members. So they’ve accelerated the number of players, it’s, it’s relatively free. You can spend as much as you want, but it’s free to play most places and it’s a good walk, it’s outdoors, great with the family, good exercise.”

The Flyers’ goal is to have a grand opening for the new disc golf course at Hartin-Hambleton Memorial Park towards the end of the year. For those wanting to get involved, find the Tri City Flyers on
Facebook.
“If someone wanted to volunteer, they would contact me,” Littleton said. “We have a Shrock Park Disc Golf League group, and we have a Tri City Flyers Facebook page. We try to post what’s going on, what we’re doing on work days, what sort of tools or implements we need and what we need to get done, for instance, by the 22nd. We have a tentative grand opening date of November the 18th. Some of that will be pretty dependent on the progress of the wastewater treatment plant. We’ve got three holes that are in the floodway, but they’re between the valley of the floodway and the east side of the waste water treatment plant. We’re not able to kind of develop those.

“Those are the first three holes we actually cleared before they went to work. And then they, by requirement, have to put up a silk fence and the silk fence is running along the tree line which is below the floodway line. We just said we’ll delay cleaning those back up and getting those ready, but those are essentially done. They’ll just need to be cleaned up again. Once those three holes are ready, we’re cooking with butter, as they say.”

Littleton also shared some of the crews’ encounters with the wildlife they have come across while clearing the wooded areas of the park.
“We know that there have been some deer laying down,” Littleton said. “We’ve jumped some deer down in there. A neighbor of the cities was, aiming to trap, i want to say he was trying to trap a raccoon but ended up with a bobcat. Then we run into a beaver. There’s a pond that’s south of the waste water plant and as the water backs up, there’s a little creek, the belly of that at the floodway and in rainy season there’s enough water for that beaver to kind of go up and down there. We’ve got to do some clearing out of that water way that included beaver work. I haven’t seen any recent work, but he took down a couple of trees over by what we call the Beaver pond.”