My new job: Spotting hole 17

 

Finding the discs

After the sometimes tedious work of setting up the course, I got to be a spotter on hole 17 on Friday, the first round of the MVP Open.

A spotter stands on the fairway to keep an eye on where the tee shots land. For the pros, we are a long way from the tee.

Some holes have boundaries marked by ropes or stone walls: discs that cross those boundaries are said to be out-of-bounds and the player must add a penalty stroke to their score. Spotters help by marking where they think the disc crossed from being in-bounds to being out-of-bounds, though the players (as a group) make the final call.

Here’s a map of hole 17. The Christmas tree field to the left of the initial fairway is out of bounds:

At Maple Hill, many of the fairways (like this one) are riddled with Christmas trees that sometimes like to eat discs. Spotters save time by finding discs in and under the trees and marking them before the players reach the fairway after teeing off.

View from the teepad of hole 17, where I spotted on Friday.

Hole 17, Maple Hill, Leicester, Massachusetts

This hole was deemed not hard enough for the pros last year, so they moved the tee pad about 60 feet farther back into the woods. Both the regular trees and the Christmas trees in the fairway are hazards here. I would be happy to make it through the initial gap here, but most of the pros ended up way up the hill on the right side of the sunny Christmas tree field.