Ledgestone prepared for August; Additional Spots Added; Course Schedule Update

Ledgestone TD Nate Heinold is happy to announce that additional spots have been added to the event and the event’s team is fully prepared to host the event in August. “We have been closely following the COVID-19 situation and are strongly urging people to practice social distancing and to take this virus seriously. If everyone does their part we will all be playing sanctioned disc golf sooner than later,” stated Heinold. The tournament is prepared for various scenarios and certain event social activities could be adjusted based on the conditions in August. “At the same time, we are continuing our preparations for the event and we are excited for August. We had a feeling that demand would be off the charts for this year’s 10th Anniversary event but even we couldn’t predict having more than 1200 players registered 5 months before the event. We felt the desire to try to accommodate as many players as possible while still making sure that we could guarantee a high quality event, which is the goal that the staff had when evaluating this possibility,” said Heinold. Number one on the list was making sure that a suitable course could be added for competitors. Heinold evaluated 4 different course options, including a potential temporary course on a golf course, but eventually settled on Westwood Park in Morton.

“Westwood Park is a course we have used off and on for many years. We made the initial decision to not use the course for the 2020 event because of two projects we felt needed to be finished before using the course again for a large scale event. We now have a plan to take care of these projects before the 2020 event, so we felt comfortable adding this course,” continued Heinold. Those projects include a new bridge on hole 11 to cross the creek, and three small bridges on hole 14 to cross that creek. At the time of this writing the small bridges on hole 14 have been completed. The tournament will also have alternate pins on hole 4 and 18 that will be used in the event of inclement weather. “Westwood is one of our hidden gems in the Central Illinois area, but it does become problematic in heavy rain. The 2019 Ledgestone event featured heavy rain and caused some issues with the course, so these enhancements will help take care of that potential issue.” The other positive about the 2020 versus the 2019 event is that while the 2019 event took place during the rainy reason, the 2020 event will move back to what’s typically the dry season. The 2019 event was moved to June because of the Ledgestone team hosting Worlds in 2019; August has generally been a very successful weather month for the event.

While many divisions will see additional players added, some divisions will not. MPO and FPO will not be affected for their pool size or course schedules. Additionally MA1 and MA2 will not see additional spots added (or a course schedule change). “As much as we wanted to add additional spots to MA1 and MA2, it simply wasn’t possible without doubling the pool size from 180 to 360. Additionally because MA1 plays Lake Eureka and Northwood Gold, courses that the MPO division also plays, it wouldn’t be possible to fit another pool of MA1 players into that course schedule matrix. Likewise MA2 plays Northwood, and adding more players to MA2 wouldn’t be possible while still playing the same course schedule,” continued Heinold.

The following divisions will see increases to their division:

This is the only change the team will be making to the course schedule and the only time spots will be added to the event. Anyone currently on the waitlist in a division with a spot now available will be promoted to the event and will need to make payment within 72 hours; payments not received after that time will result in that player not being promoted to the event. Registration for the waitlist will be temporarily disabled effective immediately, until 3/30/20 at 6PM CST, when we will re-open registration for the event. During this time and until 3/30/20 at 6PM CST, only divisions that already had spots available before this announcement will be open for registration. We will not “add” the new spots onto Disc Golf Scene until Monday night at 6PM CST. This will give adequate time for people to prepare to register for the event for the newly available spots.

This change to add additional players has more than just the benefit of adding more players; upon further review of the course schedule we decided the existing course schedule was not entirely appropriate for some current divisions. For example, we originally we had MA4 playing Sunset Hills with the intention of them playing some shorter tees. Those plans won’t come to fruition in time to get those shorter tees ready, and so Sunset didn’t look like the best fit for that division. Accordingly the following divisions will see course schedule changes:

• MP40 will go from playing Sunset, Eureka Permanent and McNaughton to playing Westwood, Eureka Permanent and McNaughton.
• MP50, MP60 and FP40 will go from playing Sunset, Eureka Permanent and McNaughton to playing Westwood, Eureka Permanent and Kennel Lake.
• MA40 will go from playing Eureka Permanent, Bradley and Kennel Lake to playing Westwood, Eureka Permanent and Sunset Hills.
• MA55 will go from playing Eureka Permanent, Kennel Lake and McNaughton to playing Eureka Permanent, Bradley and Kennel Lake.
• FA1, FA2, FA3, FA60 & Junior divisions will go from playing McNaughton, Bradley and Kennel Lake to playing Eureka Permanent, Bradley and Kennel Lake.
• MA4 will go from playing Bradley, Kennel Lake and Sunset Hills to playing Bradley, Kennel Lake and Eureka Permanent.
• MA3 will go from playing McNaughton, Sunset Hills and Eureka Permanent to playing McNaughton, Sunset Hills and Westwood.

This will bring the tournament capacity to 1400 players, making it by far the largest Ledgestone to ever take place and one of the largest disc golf events in the history of the sport. The adjusted course schedule and pool assignment file can be found on the Course Schedule page.

Caddy guides will all be loaded within the next few months showing which tees are to be played at the various courses. Some courses are currently on the site including Bradley, McNaughton, Northwood and others. The updated projected payouts can be found at on the Projected Payout page.

Registration for the 10th Annual Discraft Ledgestone Insurance Open presented by GRIPeq takes place exclusively at Disc Golf Scene: dgscene.com/ledgestonex

See you in August!