February 2026

 

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A band of misfits, a forest full of chains, and a lesson in how to be human.

by Scott Bandremer

Bzzzzz. Bzzz Bzzz.
I peeled open my eyes, slowly turning towards my phone. Six-thirty a.m. A Sunday morning my wife and I had sworn to sleep in after a long, chaotic week, to pretend adulthood occasionally came with rest.
I could feel it. She was already awake, peering at me over the satin berm like an artillery scout awaiting bombardment.
Bzzzzz. Bzzz Bzzz.
“It’s the Douchebags again,” she muttered with resignation.
Of course, she was right. It was always the Douchebags.

The Secret Society of Throwers

I’m part of a club — part sport, part therapy, part traveling circus — called disc golf.

And yes, I know what you’re thinking. It’s that thing hippies do in public parks, right? The poor man’s golf. The stoner’s excuse to loiter. The weird cousin of ultimate frisbee.

Fine. You’re not wrong. But you’re not right either.

Disc golf is a bona fide sport — legit, growing fast, and quietly taking over the world’s green spaces. Nearly four million players. Sixteen thousand courses. There’s a pro tour with true international championships; sponsorships; even million-dollar endorsement deals — like Paul McBeth’s ten-year, ten-million-dollar pact with Discraft.

Watch a PDGA event on YouTube — perhaps featuring Calvin Heimburg, Paige Pierce or Kristin Lätt — and tell me it’s not beautiful. Those discs cut through the air like poetry. It’s golf without the pretense, yoga with a scoreboard.

The world can be a painful, difficult place at times. Not on the course. Here, it’s about your next perfect throw. Here, the world drops away, and you’re along for the ride.

Enter the Douchebags

The Douchebags of Skylands. That’s our club.

About 20 of us scattered through New York and New Jersey — a mix of lifers, rookies, philosophers, and degenerates who’ve somehow turned irony into identity. It began innocently enough, a couple of old timers hurling typical R-rated ribs in all directions as we played. When — POP — it struck us together, a lightning bolt of stupidity – we’d stumbled on a name for our growing band of players.

It took on a life of its own from there. People wanted in, wanted to be counted amongst the Douchebags of Skylands. There’s a group chat that never sleeps, a library of inside jokes, and a Sunday ritual that borders on religion.

By the third hole, something happens. The game envelops you as the noise of the week fades. The trees become cathedral columns. The fairway turns sacred. It all fuses into a kind of moving meditation. We become a roving band of Douchebags, synchronized and serene, navigating trees, ponds, and the ever-looming threat of OB – out of bounds.

The outside world fades. The course becomes sanctuary, an oasis for us all (and in fact, one of our favorite courses in Warwick goes by the name of Oasis).

You aim, you throw, you breathe. You curse. You laugh. Someone yells “nice!” while someone else’s disc ricochets deep into the woods. And just like that, the world makes sense again.

When the round ends, we linger in the parking lot – dusty, happy, slightly sunburned, ready to exchange our club tags with each other based on our scores. The stress has evaporated. For a few hours, we’ve been exactly where we belong.

The Cast of Douchebags

Every Douchebag member is unique, with quirks we’ve come to roast and to love.

There’s Roach, a beer-guzzling, seventy-something legend of ball busting, who’s been playing longer than some of our members have been alive. A club co-founder, he swears he’ll someday die mid-putt, right there on the green, and no one doubts it.

JByrd, a co-founder, once steered a corporate ship at a Big Four firm before sailing off for calmer waters. Known for his “aarghs” and “ayes,” this patchless-pirate maneuvers through our courses with reckless abandon. You’ll know him by his baby jogger disc carrier rolling down the fairways.

Donnie Douchebag, a rural mountain-man rebel philosopher who teaches the rest of us (especially city folk like your author) about camping, venison, and the Zen of hitting trees. His least expected special gift is remembering everyone’s birthday as my Aunt Annette was known for, which makes him both terrifying and indispensable.

Then there’s Big Mike, RAK, Sings, MJB, Rev, a couple of Jeffs, and Alicia the Champ, a former world champion who still throws like she’s chasing the crown. The roster is long, and the stories longer.

We play everywhere – Orange, Sussex, Morris, and Westchester counties. Forests, ridges, lakesides. No greens fees, no dress code, no starter telling you to tuck in your shirt.

Just trees, chains, and the faint smell of bug spray and coffee.

Not Your Typical Douchebags

Despite the name, we’re not actual douchebags. (Except maybe Brian, but that’s another story.) Our moniker is satire — a badge of ironic honor.

We are, in truth, a microcosm of inclusivity — a melting pot of age, gender, and background — teachers, welders, deli guys, entrepreneurs, retirees, a cannabis grower or two. Seventies playing alongside twenties. Trump voters and Bernie bros sharing the same beer cooler.

And the miracle? None of it matters.

Politics, religion, whatever — gone. It’s just about the game, and the flight of the disc.

When’s the last time you saw that? People who’d normally clash online laughing together in the woods? That’s what this is about. The game’s the excuse. The connection is the point. Genuine, hard-earned, and human. Beyond the throws and the laughs, the club has become something sacred: a refuge where we can share what brings us joy and what weighs us down.

There’s safety in Douchebags.

Some of us are nursing heartbreaks or layoffs or health scares. Some just need to be outside. But every week throughout the year we show up – in 95 degrees of heat, or ten below in a foot of snow. We throw. We roast each other mercilessly. We listen. And somehow, that’s enough. I live for it. I’ve been playing for decades and have no plans to stop. Screw old age.

The course is the confessional. The Douchebags are the congregation.

The Theology of Throwing Plastic

So what does a bunch of multi-aged weirdos flinging frisbees have to do with anything larger?

In an era when “community” means arguing in the comments section, this is the antidote. The Douchebags of Skylands are proof of what’s possible when we choose connection over conflict.

For a few hours, we share one goal: make the disc fly true.

And that simple focus — 20people watching a piece of plastic spin toward a metal basket — becomes its own quiet life lesson.

You throw, you miss, you adjust. You try again. Someone laughs, someone swears, someone hits the chains. You high-five, you move on.

It’s life distilled to its cleanest form: failure, recovery, grace.

If enough of us practiced that, maybe the rest of the world would start to level out too.

Toward a Kinder Brand of Douchebaggery

I’m not saying the United Nations should settle disputes over a doubles round – though I’d pay to watch Putin miss a 10-footer — but the Douchebags of Skylands have tapped into something the world’s forgotten.

Connection — it’s real and at times, it’s spectacular.

No algorithms. No talking points. Just the shared pursuit of a stubborn little disc that refuses to go straight.

And when the last putt drops, the world feels a little less broken. Not perfect. Just better.

So when you hear that early-morning bzzzz — your phone lighting up with a text from friends who refuse to let you sleep in — don’t roll over. Answer it.

It might not be a summons to play, but rather, a call to action to be a little better to each other today. Will disc golf save the planet? Probably not, but it’s rocking the world of my knucklehead friends, and that’s a good starting point.

And if nothing else, a reminder that real human connection still exists. That joy can be small, round, and airborne. And that somewhere, in a forest at sunrise, a group of Douchebags is already throwing.

Because deep down, we all have a little Douchebag waiting to get out — and the truth is, the world could use a few more of us.

Scott Bandremer is a writer and lifelong disc golfer based in the New York/New Jersey metro area. He’s still trying to make par on hole 18.