On a Friday evening in early June, nine-year-old Eloise Flanigan lined up a putt at the new disc golf course behind Murrysville Community Park's dog park. Her seven-year-old sister Sadie watched from a few feet away. Their dad played through with them. He also designed the course.
Dan Flanigan is a course designer certified through the Professional Disc Golf Association, and the ground his daughters were putting on had been sitting unused for years. Parks officials had looked at that hillside, decided it was too steep and too choked with underbrush for much of anything, and moved on. Flanigan looked at the same slope and saw exactly what he wanted to build. That decision, more than any ribbon-cutting, is the actual story behind Murrysville's newest recreational amenity: land nobody could use has become a course that opened to the public before it was finished, and the finishing is happening right now.
The Land Everyone Skipped
The site sits between Scouting Knob on Bollinger Road and the municipal dog park off Wiestertown Road, on a hill above the park's wetlands. Early conversations with the recreation department floated a different spot, closer to the existing ball fields. Flanigan pushed back.
"You want the course to fit the property not just in how it plays, but in a way that's safe for everyone," Flanigan said. "Pros can throw a 180-gram disc upward of 70 mph, and that can really hurt someone who's not expecting it."
That safety concern is why the course ended up on ground everyone else had written off. The steep, overgrown hillside kept foot traffic away from ball fields and playgrounds, and Flanigan turned that same isolation into the course's defining feature. Murrysville Council approved the project unanimously at its August 6, 2025 meeting, with Chief Administrator Michael Nestico projecting a build cost between $50,000 and $70,000. For a municipal recreation project, that's a modest number, and it stays modest because the course needed almost no built infrastructure. No building, no utilities, nothing beyond small concrete tee boxes and chain baskets. Crews cleared underbrush and cut a walking path from tee to tee, but left every tree larger than four inches in diameter standing.
What's Actually Out There Right Now
The course opened to the public in early June, and it was playable within days. Players had logged more than 100 rounds through the UDisc app by the time TribLive visited the following week. That's a fast start for a course that, by its own recreation director's admission, wasn't done.
"There are pink survey flags out right now marking the tee areas, because we won't get the concrete pads put in until late summer or early fall," Recreation Director Carly Greene told TribLive in June. "But the course is open for play."
Reading through the UDisc reviews posted since then gives a clearer picture of what that half-finished state actually looks like on the ground:
- Tee areas are still marked with flags or ribbons rather than poured pads on many holes
- Several players describe losing discs to thick brush, calling parts of the terrain a Western Pennsylvania mix of jaggers and ivy
- The back nine draws mixed reactions, with some players noting the fairways still need to be cut in more clearly
- Nearly everyone who's played it agrees the bones of the design are strong and the course will improve as it seasons in
That last point matters as much as the complaints. A wooded disc golf course isn't like a freshly sodded soccer field. It needs a year or two of foot traffic wearing in the fairways before it plays the way it was designed to. Players who show up now aren't seeing a lesser version of the finished product. They're seeing the raw layout Flanigan carved out of a hillside nobody wanted, before regular play and maintenance smooth it over.
The Season That Was Supposed to Finish It
Greene's timeline put concrete tee pad installation somewhere in late summer or early fall. We're there now. Whether the pads are already in the ground or still a few weeks out isn't something a September visit can answer from a search result. What it does mean is that anyone who plays the course this fall is catching it at the exact moment it's supposed to change.
That's a genuinely narrow window. Once the pads go in, the course stops being the flag-marked, ribbon-guided layout described in this summer's reviews and starts being the finished version the design was always meant to become. If you've been meaning to try it, the next few weeks are when you'll see both versions depending on the day you show up.
Where It Fits Among the Region's Other Courses
Murrysville isn't the only nearby option for disc golf, and it helps to know how the new course stacks up against the ones players already know.
| Course | Municipality | What Players Will Find |
|---|---|---|
| Murrysville Community Park | Murrysville | Brand new 18-hole course, wooded and technical, still finishing infrastructure |
| Oak Hollow Park | Irwin | Established course with more than 2,100 players and 13,000 logged rounds since it was built |
| Monroeville Community Park | Monroeville | Recently renovated, with UDisc reviewers noting the improvements |
| Deer Lakes Park | West Deer | A longer drive, but a regional option for players covering the area |
Oak Hollow's numbers give a sense of what Murrysville's course could look like in a few years once word spreads and the fairways wear in. It's also worth knowing that Oak Hollow sits in Irwin, just down the corridor, so players who want variety don't have to go far to compare a mature course against a brand new one.
Disc golf itself has grown fast enough nationally to make this kind of municipal investment make sense. Rounds tracked through the UDisc app climbed from 2.4 million in 2018 to 20.1 million in 2024, a jump that tracks with the pandemic-era surge in outdoor, low-cost recreation. Murrysville's course was on a possible-projects list dating back to a 2017 resident survey, but the timing of its build lines up with a sport that's been on a real upward trajectory for years.
More Than a Golf Course
Part of what made the hillside site work is that it serves double duty. When it's not in active use by disc golfers, the same cleared path functions as another walking trail through the park, one that hikers and birdwatchers can use without needing to know a backhand from a forehand. That's not an accident. Flanigan's design approach treats a disc golf course as a trail with baskets attached rather than a golf course carved out of woods, which is part of why the build stayed under $70,000 and why the land now has a purpose beyond sitting empty behind the dog park.
If you're curious about sponsoring a hole or a basket, the Murrysville Parks and Recreation Foundation has information on its current park projects page. And if you want to see exactly what other players are finding out there this month, UDisc's course review page for Murrysville updates in real time as new rounds get logged.
Either way, the story here isn't really about disc golf. It's about a piece of Murrysville that sat unused for years because everyone assumed the terrain was a problem, until someone looked at the same steep, overgrown hillside and saw the reason the course would work. That's usually how the best parts of a town get built. Not from flat, easy ground, but from the parts nobody else wanted.
If you're thinking about what else makes a Murrysville address worth having, from the parks to the school-day commute to what a specific street actually feels like at 6pm on a Tuesday, that's the kind of local detail Katrina Sells Pittsburgh builds into every conversation. Let's talk about your neighborhood, whether you're settled in for the long haul or just starting to wonder what's next.
