(upbeat music) - Happy Saturday everyone, and welcome to Disc Golf Daily on the Weekends, a DGPT history. This weekend, we are joined by someone who helped encourage Steve to start the Pro Tour. Nate is known primarily for running the Wedge Stone Insurance Open, but also for being the current PDGA board president. And so we had quite the candid conversation about what it was like to encourage the Pro Tour to start and sort of where Nate was at in his professional tournament director journey whenever the Pro Tour was coming along. So please sit back and enjoy this great interview with Nate Heinold, one of the guys who really helped encourage Steve to start the tour. Enjoy. - All right, Nate, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I want to start off like I do with everyone, just asking you a little bit. People, obviously, I would assume at this point, know who you are, but maybe don't know how you got into Disc Golf. So I like to start off by asking, like, how did you find Disc Golf? What got you into it sort of to the level that you're out today? - Yeah, basically, wow, 2000. So 24 years ago, my best friend at the time his dad had picked up this random Frisbee sport and I went out to Washington Park with him here and just down the road from my office and took a champion Banshee and a DX Eagle and didn't quite have the right form and still don't. Actually, my form was awful, but I picked up the sport from then and from that day I was hooked and we started playing what we call the trifecta where we would play three courses in one day. Almost every Saturday we'd go out and play and I eventually, I was a ball golfer at the time and I wore golf bikes the first few years of disc golfing, but I picked up Disc Golf and did not, my passion did not subside. Ironically, for my first 11 years I had no idea the PDJ existed 10 years-ish, played a bunch of non-sanctioned events and finally sometime in late 2010 I found out there was this organization doing sanctioned events, ran the first legendary 2011 as an unsanctioned event with $4,000 of added cash at the time that would have been good for a sanctioned event but it was unheard of for unsanctioned. A lot of people criticized like what are you doing? An unsanctioned event with that much cash. Ran Ledgestone is an unsanctioned event and in 2012 it became an A-tier and so started it to promote my insurance agency and now it's my full-time job. - Yeah, so you talked about starting it in 2011 to promote the insurance agency. What made you think, hey I wanna run a tournament? - Yeah, I had sponsored the Spring League that Spring and it was like an eight-week league I think, March to May and I got a bunch of clients from it and I thought, wow, I could, like it was just the, whatever it was, Spring League presented by Ledgestone Insurance and I thought, wow, you know, Disc Golfers support businesses that support Disc Golf, I'm gonna start a tournament and I'm gonna call it the Ledgestone Insurance. I forget what I called it in the first year, classic or open or invitational, but whatever I called it, it was with the sole goal of getting insurance clients and honestly, it worked for several years. I mean, eventually I picked up close to 100 clients from running the event and so that's kind of how it started. - Awesome, so you have the Ledgestone event starting and right now we're sort of looking at telling the history, the prehistory of the Pro Tour. So how did you get connected with Steve Dodge and then ultimately sort of start the ball rolling with the Pro Tour? - Yeah, you know, it was 2015 when I first ran the Ledgestone as a national event, it was on the national tour and at the time, you know, adding $10,000 added cash to the Pro-Purse was one of the highest purses for added cash, that year for Ledgestone, we added $65,000 and so it was kind of unheard of. That was 2015, that was the first year of Eureka, definitely had some mistakes with the course, didn't go as well, but it was on the national tour. I share plenty of blame for that, but that event actually caused some bitterness between myself and the PDGA though, because I think they showed up, you know, Wednesday before the event and said, "Hey, make these changes." And I said, "You're too late." I mean, everything's printed, you know? So, I mean, it was my fault for setting the course up too hard and tricky the way I did, but I was frustrated that, you know, the PDGA came in that late to say, "Make these changes like why didn't you guys come before?" And so that frustration boiled over where in that fall, they said, "Hey, we don't want you back on the national tour." And so I became frustrated because I had added all this cash and gave money to charity when my frustration was, you know, I mean, I should've been frustrated at myself still for not quite getting the course right the first time or the second time, you know, but that fall, I kind of became aware that Steve was trying to get the PDGA to sign off on a tour and have that be the only tour. And I knew that Steve had tried before and had failed. And this was, I believe his second time going to the board directly, maybe it was his first, regardless, he went to the PDGA and they rejected him. And I remember him just being devastated. And so that fall, I played the USDGC back when I was halfway decent, don't look at the scores, but I met up with Jeff Spring and I said, "Wow, we should go to Steve and tell him to do the tour regardless." Like if the PDGA is not going to sign off on the disc off approach or concept being the official tour, Steve should do it anyways. And so I remember calling Steve after I met with Jeff Spring, because Jeff at the time ran GMC and Jeff wasn't widely known then, but his event was becoming more known, but Jeff had been rebuffed from getting on the national tour himself, if I remember correctly. So I called Steve and said, "Steve, let's just do it anyways. "Just do the tour, prove the concept, "and eventually the PDGA will see "that what you're doing is right." And so that's kind of how I got started with Steve, is that I had played Maple Hill, loved Maple Hill, I've played his event a couple of times as a player, but that was our first true interaction from what I can remember. - Yeah, and so the three of you, Jeff, Steve, and yourself sort of coming together for people who may not know is like, that was the three of the first six, right? And so we, when the tour started, it only took finding a few more events. So from your side of things, obviously you called Steve, you said, "Hey, I'm in. "Where did that go from there? "Did you have any part or hear anything "about the other events as they came into the fold, "or was it sort of like waiting to hear back from Steve "on putting it all together?" - Yeah, I mean, maybe Steve has a different memory, but the first six months I was single and wasn't married yet. And Steve and I talked every day almost. We were pitching ideas back and forth, but I had the idea to call Jim Van Landen from Wisconsin and Steve latched on. And initially I had said, "Let's go to Des Moines." And that didn't work out. But then I had played Blue Ribbon Pines the year before. And I said, "Hey, I know Ray Jordan, we should call Ray." And then, and so that was two of them that we quickly got on board with BRP and Manitowoc in Wisconsin. And then the sixth one, I'm already drawing a blank on, shame on me. - Well, that could potentially be a mess up on my part too. It may have, we may have just been five and then the sixth being the Tour Championship. - Yeah, because, and maybe they're, I just remember talking to Jim and Ray. Maybe there was a sixth one, but I do remember that first year was contentious because we had the Tour Championship maybe unsanctioned and it was kind of GMC of the Tour Championship the same week, but maybe there was five, maybe there was six, but I kind of, we had worked on Des Moines and it didn't work out. And ironically, now Des Moines is a great tour stop. But, and I actually, ironically, I think I played both of, I played the majestic that year and I played, I was signed up and had to drop from Silver Cup, but that was how I remember the first five events coming together. And I remember the first conversations with Steve were tour points and I remember when he started telling me about his idea for the circle and Steve, we were, you know, ideas back and forth, but eventually Steve got a team together and it wasn't just me, Steve talking or Jeff and Steve talking, he had other people that he started to bring in the fold. So I, you know, other, that he had a team behind him. - Yeah, yeah, and that's the, I think one of the great things about where we're going with the podcast is that the goal is to talk to each of those different parts of the team here, how it all came together, really for this first season, because it's a, it's really, I think a lot of people would be surprised to know how many people it took to pull it off. You know, we hear a lot about the role that you played. We hear a lot about the role that Jeff played, but we don't hear a lot about all of the other people. And I think that that's sort of one of the goals of the podcast, but as things started to come together and I mean, now knowing where you're at with the PDGA, how did that sort of like relationship feel, knowing that to your point earlier, like you guys started this off without the PDGA sort of like backing in some ways. - Yeah, it was definitely, there was some bitterness on both Steve and Icepart and probably not as much as Jeff, but Jeff had wanted to get on the tour as well. And so there was a chip on my shoulder, I would say, and I would, I guarantee Steve probably says the same thing if he's being honest. And so, and that, but that's a good thing. Competition's good, I think, and the PDGA probably wasn't wrong to say no to me and/or Steve, my event and Steve's tour because it ended up working out to where we, you know, the concept got proven, wasn't financially successful, but the concept was there. And now Jeff and Todd and others have, have proved, you know, that it can work. And so I would say that that bitterness wasn't a great feeling, but it allowed us to make it better, make legstone better, Steve made the tour better. And then that spurred me, that frustration spurred me to run for the board. I almost ran in 2016 and then it got married. And so I ran in 2017 for the board, and I'm no longer a bidder at the PDGA. Obviously I'm, you know, the board, you know, the board president and, you know, kind of the board spokesperson. And so I'm very PDGA, I'm pro PDGA and pro disc golf pro tour. - Yeah, so to, I guess to sort of circle back a little bit to where we started with the event itself. So for people who don't, maybe don't know the history, it's, it, legstone has, has, was started historically at Eureka and with a course that definitely doesn't look the same as it did when it started. I know you, you mentioned and alluded to some of the issues with it, like, do you want to maybe walk us through some of those like growing pains, I guess, that you experienced after, not necessarily like where we are today, but after that first event and getting it to a point to where it was good for tour. - Yeah, you know, my inspiration for Eureka is part Augusta National, part Winthrop, part the beast, part, you know, Medina Country Club. You know, it's the white scoreboard at Augusta. Let me rebuild that. And the ropes at Winthrop back when they used ropes and the out of balance and the stroke and distance and the rolling terrain of the beast. And then I have this beautiful park and I tried to put it all into this first iteration of, I did at that time the first legstone layout at Eureka. I didn't use 13 through 17. So I wasn't even using that land. I somehow fit 18 holes into a smaller footprint. And that involved and allowed some goofier holes. You know, the vivocort hole was squirrely. And we had some just some lame part threes, but the stroke and distance out of bounds for the viewers that don't know the history was, you know, you re-through it from your previous line with penalty and that's a common rule in golf when you get well off of the course. But here where the stroke and distance didn't quite work was shots that were just a little bit off where all of a sudden doing the re-through. And so I was trying to create excitement and it did. We had a lot of spectators there. In fact, I'd never have achieved that amount of spectators at legstone until last year. Like we've never hit that number that we did in 2015. And we hit it in 2019 for pro worlds, but it created excitement. But what it also created was, at the time, Simon won that event. And someone said Simon's strategy. Instead of, you know, his strategy was Simon Laysup. And didn't want that. So I tweaked the course over the next three years to be less punitive on the out of bounds, stroke and distance and eventually got rid of the stroke and distance and eventually, you know, kept the ropes. But now the course is essentially unchanged for the last several years. And a lot of courses nowadays, they change every year. Even the best ones change every year. And Eureka really doesn't have changes for the last five years. And I do love that. And so that's kind of how the course has evolved. I was not a good course designer back in 2015. I would say I'm always improving. I'm still not a good one. But I have been able to make some tweaks to Eureka and, you know, make some tweaks to toboggan. I designed the course that will be used this year for pro worlds at Ivy Hill. And so I've gotten better. We'll say that. - Yeah. So you also talked about how for the NT, the PDGA had showed up, you know, like three days before the tournament started. - Two days. - You know, like it's like, I want to take a little bit of time just to sort of talk about how like maybe you saw or I guess maybe hoped because it hadn't existed yet. Like what the professional tour. I mean, we know where it is today, but like what that could look like having something, you know, maybe with a little bit more support or I guess maybe sort of asking the question of like, what did you hope to achieve by having the pro tour as opposed to the national tour? - Yeah, I think at the time it was the mindset of Steve and myself and Jeff was the pro tour can make money. And at the time that was not the case. But the PDGA at the time said, "Hey, the amateurs make the money." Like people want to run AM worlds, not pro worlds. And that was the case. I mean, there were many years in the early, in the 2010 to 14 range, one bid for pro worlds. In fact, I'm confident there were years, there were no bids. You know, Crown Point, I love that place. They went to their twice for pro worlds. I don't think there was much competition for other people to want that event. Back then there was no spectator revenue. And so you weren't getting the ticket sales, you weren't getting it, entry fees. And so it wasn't a great model to run pro events back then. But I grew up watching ball golf and seeing fans line up out the wazoo to buy a gust of National Merchandise or buy Ryder Cup merchandise at, you know, and saw the potential for that to happen in disc golf early on. I knew I couldn't get it right away. And then eventually, you know, I started doing the legible merchandise. Actually, that was right away. I did that in 2015 and saw the potential there. But Steve eventually was the one to tell me you have to charge for people to watch. And I was, he was one year before me when I was comfortable, but I pushed it before I wanted to and he was right. It was, that was when the tide started to turn. It was more of a, the PDJ I didn't think thought the pro tour was a money, like it was a money pit. And it was at the time, so they weren't wrong. And Jeff, Steve and I thought it was a big potential for making money and not just making money, but developing stars and fans and not just PDJ members, but fans who don't play. And we're still getting there. I mean, I don't think the pro tour would say we're there, but we're way ahead of where we were. - Yeah, yeah, for sure. And yeah, it's, it, it's so, I do think it's interesting just to, to have you build off of it for a second when you brought up something that a lot of people probably don't know is that like most people are used to seeing the tickets started for them with the pandemic. But the reality is, is that certain pro tour events charged in the year before, because it started to become clear that we needed to. So maybe talk a little bit about, you said how that made you uncomfortable. So like talk a little bit about like how that came about and what that sort of meant for the event. - Yeah, I think what it was is that for the longest time, the legstone event was great for the amateurs, great for the pros because the pros got a great purse. And they, yeah, they may not have liked the course early on, but they were like, hey, we're getting way more money than we get other places we don't care about how much we hate Eureka. Now of course, I think they don't hate Eureka now. I think it's plenty of them like it, some hate it. But I think early on, that was the case. As the event grew, the amateurs loved coming for the player pack, but also they wanted to watch the pros for free. And eventually I had to realize that to grow the purses bigger and to get more assets and to get more people helping, because back then I didn't pay my staff. They were all doing it 'cause they loved it. But I knew that wasn't sustainable to ask Mike Krupeka, Michael Munn, Jamie Kemp to do it for free. So I had to pay them and pay hotels and rental cars. And so I realized quickly that if I wanted to grow it, I had to find more revenue and product was working. I was selling product, but I had to get ticket revenue. And when I realized that Steve was doing it already, I realized that by doing it, there would be some growing pains with amateurs upset. So for the first several years, amateurs got in for free and I've eventually just now they get a discount pretty heavily. If they play the event, they can buy discounted tickets. But I realized that to draw the event to a different experience, we had to bring in revenue and we weren't getting it from media. I wasn't getting big sponsors yet. Yeah, I've hit Merrill or I, you know, Discraft supports me heavily in my events, but it wasn't, you know, we're not getting blank checks from Nike. And so the spectator revenue was needed to be done. But honestly, the reason why I did it first and foremost before anything else is I truly actually believe, and this may sound weird, but I believe that we would get more spectators if we charged. And my assessment at the time was, if you charge for something, it's perceived value. People will come, but you have to deliver. And over time, that's proven to be, you know, not right, right away, but now it proves that people are willing to pay for value. - Yeah, I was glad that you said that 'cause I was gonna try to ask to get us to that point, just because I think that one of the things that a lot of people who maybe came in post-pandemic don't realize is that when people could come for free, there was a big sort of like uproar over, wait, why are they charging now? As opposed to starting to see after like year two, year three, not just because of the pandemic, but because people saw that they were getting a value out of it. There was some level of experience because the other thing that I think people don't realize is that when you don't sell tickets, when you just say, "Hey, you can show up." You have no way of telling vendors or sponsors, even how many people are going to see their stuff or come by their stuff. But when you have a ticket number, you can start to do that and that helps to grow things. What I wanted to, you alluded to the Nike and blank checks. You talked very early on about how you added money, not just to your non-sanctioned event, but then as you grew it, and to the point recently in the most recent answer about how it took you a while to start getting bigger sponsors. What was that sort of trajectory like? Like how many years of the ledge don't open, was it mainly just ledge stone before you were able to start seeing the opportunities to get the bigger sponsors? I mean, it took years. I mean, discraft was there from the beginning, and so without their support, ledge stone would have never grown, to be honest. If I put discraft and ledge stone aside, because they were the original presenting title sponsors, to get outside of just the local sponsors, it took even for 2019 pro worlds, I didn't get it. Like I didn't get, and that was basically ledge stone version two that year, 'cause we did ledge stone and pro worlds that year. It wasn't 'til like 2021. So it took six or seven years, like the added cash in 2015 of 65,000, which the next highest event that year was half of that. All of that added cash came from, we ran 25 fundraiser events that year, and all of the proceeds from those events went to the added cash. So we ran a siege here with 100 people. If the AM payout was 3,000, I put all the profits from that event to ledge stone added cash that year. So we ran all of these events just to beef up the purse. And so back then, amateur events on the back of them buying plastic was the added cash. And that still helps now. I mean, ledge stone, we sell a lot of discs, and we put a lot of the proceeds to St. Jude and to the added cash, because this year, you know, ledge stone added cash will be six figures. And so, but now we're getting more sponsor dollars, but the other bigger benefit that we are getting, and even we get it for Lynchburg this year for pro worlds, we're getting tourism bureaus to buy in. They're getting hotel dollars, and they are giving us tourism grants. And we've been very successful in partnering with them to make sure that local communities get the value, but they turn around and support the disc golf events as well. - And so, you know, you talk about the growth sort of over the years. You, when you started the first ledge stone, I'm going to assume that it had all of the divisions, right? It wasn't just a pro tournament. And then as it's grown, you've always had all of the divisions. At one point, or at what point did it get to a point where you sort of had to say, okay, Eureka and Northwood and Sunset as it grew, are just for the pros, and we're going to have to start adding all of these other courses. - Yeah, I mean, that started back ironically in 20, the winner of 2014, I said, we don't have, 'cause back then I wasn't doing T times for the amateurs. They were playing two rounds on one day, which doubles the amount of courses you need that are unique. And so, Eureka temp was never designed for the pros. I always envisioned it being an MA1 course, and I'd have the pros at Northwood. And then when I finished designing Eureka, I was like, wait, I mean, the amateurs may not be able to make it over the water on a whole one, maybe the pros should play here. And then that's when it happened. And so, since late 2014, I mean, that first ledge stone in 2015, we had 10 courses that we used, but only eight of them were permanent. That was, so right then that year, I started to realize I needed more courses. And we basically, it hasn't been one every year, but we've almost added one course every year to the ledge stone inside. Now we have 15 courses we use, and we have some very good courses that are not used by the pros, that the amateurs get to play. And so, we put a lot of money back into the local courses because we want, I mean, we wanna get to 20 courses that we're using in the event. I mean, this year is 15, and next year will probably be 16. And so, we're trying to add a course every year is the goal, but 10 years ago, we realized we needed more courses. - So, with that, I mean, the, what do you think it was about the ledge stone event that made so many people want to come play it that weren't pros, right? The pros, the out of cash obviously was what got them there, but the am side does seem to just keep growing every year early on, what was it about that? 'Cause it'd be back then, we maybe had Bowling Green amps, we had the dynamic disc open. There were not a lot of like really large am tournaments. - You know, the business model, believe it or not, I mean, people can, I think they think that the ledge stone event makes a ton of money. The ledge stone, the actual event is a lost leader. It loses money, we make money off of the merchandise. But, I mean, the amateur event, you know, this year for the amateur side, the players are getting a pair of metal shoes and a $220 retail grip bag and then three discs in a shirt and a hat and other things. And they get an amateur payout of $130,000. We lose about $50 per amateur player at ledge stone. And that's always been the model. It used to be worse, I used to lose more, but as the scale has gotten bigger, we have shrunk that loss to where, you know, yes, we lose money on them, but the payout that they use is only at our pro shop, so maybe they become a lifetime customer. And because we have more players, we get more tourism dollars. And because we have more players, Merrill looks at us and says, "Hey, we'll give you this," or Zuka or Bushnell. And so we have tried to shrink that gap to where we're not losing so much money on every player that comes. But the goal is then to provide them such an amazing experience and give them way more value than they're paying for. I mean, I mean, the player pack this year, they're getting a waterproof pair of shoes or they can choose the non-waterproof pair and they're getting this grip bag and other things. I mean, and they're getting two meals and they're getting discount spectator tickets, they're getting a 500-hour player pack and the winner of MA1 gets $1,200 to spend. They can go buy 10 baskets. So they can go buy, you know, six grip bags. They can, I mean, you could buy 60 discs. So, you know, it's, that's why people keep coming back because most events, even Deaglow. I mean, Deaglow is a good AM event. They get a good player pack and a smaller payout, but a ledge stone is unique in that we have enough scale to where we could lose a little bit of money, give them a wonderful experience. So I'd say 50% of the reason is the player pack and the value from the payout, but the rest of it, I'd say 25% of the reason they keep coming back are courses, in my opinion, are better than almost any metropolitan area outside of maybe Minneapolis, Charlotte, because they have more courses because they have more people. But I would put Peoria in the top five for course quality. So course quality is one. And then honestly, the other 25% people keep coming back because we have so much staff. We prepare so much with our tournament app. We've added a shuttle, four or five staff members per course for the amateurs. I think they, and those staff members are paid. I think they feel like they're getting a higher experience than a normal amateur event. - Yeah, and so just to provide people a little bit of the understanding of the scale over the years, in 2016, first year on tour, how many staff members did you have versus where you're at today for 2024? - If we're talking about paid staff members, we're talking about three or four in 2016, 90 now. And that's, 2016 was almost all volunteers. I say three or four. It may have been 20 people on staff, three or four of them paid. But there were probably 20 people on staff. We had 10 courses. There's probably two at every course. Now we have four at every course, and then 20 doing stuff behind the scenes and 10 working the pro shop, and 10 at Eureka and five at sunset that are extra, and then people roving around. So, I mean, it's probably 90 people. And then we have 10 people doing course maintenance. I mean, at Amateur Worlds last year, we had five people chainsawing during the event because a storm took trees down, and we had to get restarted. And so I sent my guys out to get the path clear. And so I think having that quick reaction allows us to, I think people are impressed by how quickly we can respond to things. But I have an army of staff ready to do it to provide that experience. And that's why we've been able to grow the event from 105 players in 2011 to 650 in 2015 to 1300 right before COVID, I think. And now we're at 2,450 signed up right now. - So now that you've gotten into this point, if you were to look back and tell yourself something in 2015 and 2016 to maybe make the event better or to give yourself more hope of what was to come. Like, what would that be? - You know, we're always improving. And so to make the event better, we do a survey every year. We identified a page and a half of things to work on. One of the main things was spectators and fans saying, hey, we come with four buddies. We got one car. There's 15 courses in three places to watch the pros. How can we get around? And it's not like Emporia here, not Peoria Emporia. Everything's a tighter area there. Here we are spread out a little bit more to where the farthest end courses are 35, 40 minutes away. So we've added a shuttle this year now just for the Morton courses and the Morton locations. So we're going to do things every year to slightly improve the event. The biggest problem we have every year though is just weather. Some years it's great. Last year it rained four inches on Saturday and amateur rounds that should have taken three hours took six hours. And so parking at Northwood all of a sudden became impossible on our grass lot. So I think I can never control the weather but we can do things. I mean, because of last year's experience, we have spent a couple of thousand hours working on upgrades to Northwood and other facilities, other courses and courses in the event of bad weather. - Yeah, I wasn't sure if we were going to go in that direction but since you brought us there, you were talking about the chainsawing at Amworlds and it just led me to think of sort of like what the differences are between courses like Eureka and Sunset, which if people don't know are a whole lot more open, not as wooded and Northwood, which is one of the most wooded courses on tour and what it means to have to prep those and make sure that they're ready to go and how you deal with that during weather. I mean, I guess when you were before, I shouldn't even say before 'cause Northwood's always sort of been in the mix but before was Northwood black or we got even further into the woods. Like, what was it or what did it take, I guess, for you to start to have those plans in place? Because Eureka kind of doesn't. It's kind of self-sufficient outside of like spots to get muddy when it comes to weather. - Yeah, I mean, Sunset is the most self-sufficient because it's professionally mowed and sprayed and like Sunset, we do like a little trimming for weed whacking and like I think that takes my team like a half day, Eureka, we do actually trim the entire lakefront because I bought a week before Ledgestone, it's pretty shaggy, it's 18 inches tall, it looks rough, we trim it down. Eureka does flood on the bottom four or five holes, really bad, it's just the time of the year we play the event works out well. But what really caused me to change my mind was, I think it was 2015 Ledgestone, lead carded, teed off old hole five. And a massive tree came down right on the tee, 30 seconds after a hundred people have been standing there, it probably would have killed somebody. And I think that many people walking on the turf took the tree down, it had been raining and just took the tree down and I thought, "Well, I have to be prepared for work." And so that moment, I was an insurance, I understood risk, that moment led us to basically really be cautious about the work we're doing and making sure that any potential issue for spectators would be addressed, in fact, Champions Cups next week and we had this massive issue on seven or nine of the black course between those two, a big widow maker, trees down and the park just went, it was impossible to get to because it's wooded, it was, they had to get a crane out there and to take this tree down and I think, but that's what you have to do to be safe and to kind of take care of those wooded issues. - And so, I really like how, I mean, a lot of these things sort of reference back to that first in tee and that first year on the pro tour of these learning things that sort of helped catapult for lack of a better way, the event to where it is today. And so, what do you think it is? Like, especially as people look at the tour, they see other events came on tour events that maybe even have dropped off of tour. What do you think it was sort of around that time with those events that helped you sort of get to where you are today? - You know, I think the biggest difference between Steve Dodge or Jess Bring and Myself and some other TDs, and there are plenty of others that I can name there, UC Jonathan Poole. We all are different, but the biggest difference between those four to five to six TDs that are really successful and the ones that maybe left the tour or got burned out is that it's our full-time job. Like, if you look at Steve Dodge, yeah, he does other things, but he puts a lot of effort into his event. Jeff, yeah, he worked at Smugs, but he put, he was working in the event with full-time effort. You know, UC, Jonathan Poole, Myself, at the time I wasn't, I had a full-time insurance job but I put full-time hours into that and the insurance job. The main difference is the effort that's put in. If you even look at some of the events now, you know, I mean, you can tell the teams that have their own maintenance people and the teams that don't just, you know, I mean, I don't like there to be grass growing up around trees, and so my team will go out and weed whack around trees, you know? And so it's just the small things. I mean, I don't like seeing white flags whipping in the wind. We put out wooden stakes and get those things lined up and so at Northwood. And so I think it's the attention to detail, but also just the amount of time that is put in. And I think the teams that have the ability to have somebody full-time on it, that shows. And I'm not putting any TDs down because some people just don't have the time and it's not financially viable. But for me, I've made it work to where I can put my full effort into it. I'm not a better TD than other people, but I put a lot of hours into it. And I think that's what helps. - Yeah. And so to that point, I think this may be one of the ways that we can start looking to round, wind things down, but you talked about at the very beginning, one of the sort of off-putting things with the NT was how close to the event they showed up. And really, at that point, even early on in 2015 and 2016, but at what point in the year were you starting to work on the courses to make sure that they were ready for the tournament? - Yeah, I mean, even back then, we were, you know, six to eight months in advance, you know. So that actually has never changed. I've always, we pretty much start on the next year now a week after the event back then, maybe six to eight months, but I mean, the coursework, especially for a wooded course, for Eureka, I don't do much. As you said, you know, self-sustaining, but Northwood, I mean, we're working on it all the time. So. - Yeah, and so the, I think that's one of the things that sort of stands out to me in regards to every year, the tour schedule gets released. People are like, why is it always the same events? Why isn't there a event at this course and whatnot? And it's one thing, I think, to apply to say, hey, we've ran an event. We think that this event is worthy to be on the tour, but it's a whole other thing to recognize the work and what goes into it before that helps to keep an event on tour. I think that it gets a little overshadowed that many of the reasons why we see the same events on tour every year and the reason why we're able to talk to an event that existed before the tour was one of the first events on the tour and is a leading event on the tour today is a testament to the work that goes into that. And so I don't know if there's anything else maybe you want to add to that. - No, I would say I'm only a good TD because of the staff that I've hired. Michael Munn, Mike Cropica, Jamie Kemp, who's now works for the PDGA, my core staff that I employ day to day at Ledgestone now, I'm only as good as the people around me and I have put Jason Labella. I've put so many good people around me that I can focus on the big picture stuff and do more with what I have. And so really, I think any good TD would say the same thing. Put good people around you, pay them for their time and I think you're gonna see dividends. - And just to give those guys a little bit of shine too, all of those guys that you just named, I remember from my first Ledgestone being around in 2017, how many of them were with you even before that? - I mean, Mike Cropica's been there from the 2015, Jamie and Michael came on actually in 2017, but they've been there for seven or eight years. Jason Labella's been there for as long as I can remember and I've had, there's plenty more. I mean, Mark Cannon has been the voice of Ledgestone for at least, I can't remember. I mean, so they keep coming back. The same people keep coming back, Tom McManus and now my core staff that works for me, Dwight Powell was my volunteer coordinator back in 2017. He's gonna be working for me full-time now, starting next month. And so, the team that I have really, they wanna keep coming back. I would love to say it's because I'm a great boss, but it's because they just love, I think, working disc golf. - Yeah, and that's, I glad that you said Mark's name 'cause I don't know if he would let either one of us live if we didn't mention him at some point in the podcast, but it's great to hear how things are growing too and to your point. I mean, there's such a solid crew of people and people that have, I think the other thing maybe that people don't realize is really how close and edit all this, right? These people are not just doing these jobs too. The jobs that each of them are doing to the point of like, Jamie now works for the PDGA, but Mike has been the state coordinator in Mississippi, Jason, the state coordinator as well. And his state is on the, is he state coordinator and on a committee as well? - He's the chair of the rules committee and he's the state coordinator for Illinois. And Michael runs a big A tier in Mississippi. - Yeah, and so it's, I think it goes to show that while people like to say or ask why we're not seeing things in other places, the reality is that the people who are putting in the work to make these events where they are today are very few and far between. And if you see any of them, I think it really goes a long way to tell them thank you. Because to your point, we wouldn't be where we are today without any of them. Great. So I think that that's really a great place for us to wrap up with this. It gives us a great sort of insight into how Ledgestone got started, but also how you sort of helped us or helped the tour sort of get and be where it is today. I do think it's very interesting. One of the things that is actually written in the history books if you want to call Wikipedia history book is that if you go there and look today, it does say that you as well as Steve and Jeff helped sort of start the tour. Any idea how that made it there or what that means to you, that it says that? I mean, Wikipedia is my favorite encyclopedia. So, but no, I honestly, you know, you just did a series of articles a few years ago. And I don't remember if they interviewed me, but it went over some of the history of the tour. And I think, I don't know how it made it to Wikipedia, but I think the best thing that I'll say though, and you can end with this, is that the best thing for the tour was the piece saying no back in 2015, because I think that gave enough runway for Steve to make mistakes and try some things. And that allowed him to be free to do what he wanted to get the vision that he envisioned to try things and see what worked. I think if the PDJ had signed up right then and there, at that time, they didn't believe in the Pro Tour concept, it may have constrained it. So I think the PDJ saying no was the best thing because then several years later, you know, six years later, the PDJ board unanimously voted to dissolve the national tour and merge it with the Pro Tour. And so I think that it ended up working out well. - Yeah, I think that is a great place for us to end, but also lead to hopefully the next time we get to talk and talk about some of those really early things that Steve did to help sort of shape what the tour may have become. So thank you for your time, Nate. We really appreciate it. And look forward to the next time we get to talk. - Thank you. (upbeat music) - Thank you so much for watching. Please like, subscribe, comment, and share. It really does help us grow. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
