Disc golf in Wake Forest: the seminary course, the seasonal woods course, and how to start

Wake Forest has two real disc golf courses, and they could not be more different. One winds through a seminary campus at the edge of downtown, free and manicured, playable after work. The other hides in the woods near Falls Lake, deliberately wild, open only half the year, and hard enough that experienced players complain about it affectionately. Between them, the town covers the whole spectrum of the sport. Here's how both work, plus what a first-timer needs to know.

The SEBTS Disc Golf Course: downtown's 18 holes

The headline course is a partnership you wouldn't predict: the town's parks department and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary jointly opened an 18-hole course on the seminary campus, dedicated on July 20, 2023, with the mayor and the seminary president throwing ceremonial discs. The Capital Area Disc League designed and built the course at a total cost of $50,000, and the result is a proper course, not an afterthought: concrete tee pads at every hole, signage throughout, and a kiosk with a course map.

Hole No. 1 sits behind the seminary's Carson Hall at 101 N. Wingate Street, which puts the whole course a short walk from White Street. That location is the course's superpower: no other Triangle course lets you finish 18 holes and be sitting at a brewery ten minutes later without moving your car.

The hours reflect the shared-campus arrangement, and they're the one thing to memorize. The course is free and open year-round, Monday through Friday from 4 p.m. to dusk, and Saturdays and Sundays from dawn to dusk. Weekday mornings belong to the seminary; your window opens at 4. Weekends are wide open. The course is listed on the UDisc app, where players log scores and pull course info, which is also the easiest way to navigate it on a first round.

Playing through a working campus comes with obvious etiquette: the seminary's walkers, students, and events share the grounds, so wait on foot traffic the way you'd wait on a group ahead of you. The town notes that disc golf's rules mirror traditional golf in scoring and etiquette, and nowhere does that apply more than here.

Forest Ridge Park: the winter woods course

The area's second course belongs to the City of Raleigh but sits at Wake Forest's doorstep, in Forest Ridge Park near the banks of Falls Lake off New Falls of Neuse Road. It's a different sport out here. The 18-hole course is mostly wooded with tight fairways, moderate elevation changes, several par 4s, and a water hazard, and UDisc's community rates it "Hard" to "Very hard," with a typical round running about two hours.

The defining quirk: it's seasonal. The course opens only from roughly mid-October through mid-March and closes to public play for the rest of the year, a schedule designed to reduce impact on the natural environment. The park asks players not to cut trees or trim limbs, to keep the course wild, and the season's exact end date shifts a bit year to year, so check UDisc before a March trip. Players' one consistent gripe is exactly what you'd guess: it's a fun course, and it stings that it isn't year-round.

The two courses schedule around each other almost perfectly. Summer evenings and weekends belong to SEBTS; winter weekends belong to Forest Ridge. A Wake Forest player never runs out of season.

The park previously ran a 9-hole layout, free to play, with gravel tee pads and good signage, rated 4.0 stars across 241 UDisc reviews before the full 18 took over, which is why old maps and reviews mention two configurations.

One warning about the name

Search "Wake Forest disc golf" online and you'll hit a familiar local confusion: Wake Forest University's disc golf course is in Winston-Salem, 100 miles away on the Reynolda campus. If a website mentions Martin Hall or Reynolda Village, you're reading about the university, not the town. (Why the university isn't here is a whole story of its own, and we've written it.)

Starting from zero

Disc golf's entry cost is one of its best features, and Wake Forest is an easy place to begin:

• Gear: a single mid-range disc or a cheap three-disc starter set (driver, mid-range, putter) covers your first ten rounds. Big-box sporting goods stores and online shops carry starter sets for the price of one round of ball golf.
• Where to learn: the SEBTS course on a weekend morning. Concrete pads, clear signage, and enough open early holes to find your throw before the tighter lines. Save Forest Ridge for when you can keep a disc under the tree canopy on purpose; its single-line wooded fairways eat beginners' discs.
• The app: download UDisc. Both courses live on it, it keeps score, and its hole maps save you from wandering a campus looking for a tee pad.
• The scene: UDisc lists an active league in the Wake Forest area, and the Capital Area Disc League, the group that built the SEBTS course, anchors the regional community. Showing up to a league night is the fastest way from "I own a disc" to "I have people I play with."
• Etiquette basics: let faster groups play through, stand still while others throw, and leave every hole cleaner than you found it. That last one is doubly true at Forest Ridge, where the wild character of the course is the whole point.

The local disc golf year

Put the calendar together and it looks like this: from spring through fall, weekday rounds at SEBTS after 4 p.m. and full weekend mornings there before the heat. From mid-October to mid-March, Forest Ridge opens and the serious rounds move to the woods, two hours of tight lines with Falls Lake through the trees. Total cost for a year of both: zero dollars past your discs.

For a town that had no course at all until 2023, that's a remarkable amount of disc golf. The $50,000 the league and its partners put into the seminary campus bought Wake Forest a legitimate new sport. Grab a disc and go collect on it.