Community Connect 22: Portland Open

With a huge smile on my face, I am so happy to sit down and write this Community Connect Impact report. It brings us to a very special time and location for our beautiful program to unfold and evolve into our future together. Please enjoy scrolling through all of the photos from the traditional school CC #6 at Menlo Park Elementary School and our CC#7 at Blue Lake Park, a make-up event from the DDO.

Our 6th CC program brings us to Menlo Park Elementary school. This school was chosen based on the location which was a half mile down Glisan street from Glendoveer Golf course. I was joined by Pro Ambassadors Ella Hansen, Cynthia Riciotti, Luke Humphries, and Dustin Keegan, for a day of teaching disc golf to 125 Kindergarten - 5th grade students and their PE teacher Mr. Jackson. Among that total, Uplay was granted the opportunity to teach an entire class period filled with 7 students with a wide range of special needs. This was an incredible experience for those children and our staff members. The success that children of all abilities get to experience through playing disc golf is absolutely breathtaking and incredible. Experiences like these continue to support that disc golf does not discriminate against any population- and can be a healthy activity enjoyed by ALL!!!

This brought our total number of children taught up to 1,699, and adult educators up to 32.

*At the request of the principal, we held back from offering a disc for the students to take home at the end of each class period, due to only seeing 1/3 of the school in a day. Instead, we honored her request to invite the entire school to spectate at the Portland Open that weekend and offered them free entry plus a disc at the event as a thank you for coming.

 

Our CC #7 event took place later in the week at Blue Lake Regional Park. This event was the first of our newly formed summertime presentations, and also served as a make-up clinic from missing the DDO event.

We had more than 120 kids and adults enjoy the demonstration and lesson that our Pro Ambassadors, Paige Pierce, Ella Hansen, Missy Gannon, Cynthia Ricciotti, Madison Walker, Cole Redalen, Gannon Buhr, Luke Humphries, Dustin Keegan, local highlighted youth ambassador Dallas Garber and myself were able to give.

It was a wildly successful week of teaching and introducing disc golf in Portland. 98 discs were given out to children that came and brought parents with them to spectate the event, bringing our total number of discs given out to 1,435!

We'd like to give a huge thank you to our partners for helping us make these events so successful: Disc Golf Pro Tour, Upper Park Disc Golf, UDisc, Discmania, Paige Pierce, Disc Dot, and Trash Panda.