The City of Ames honored volunteer Carroll Marty and officially opened the Carroll Marty Disc Golf Course in a ribbon-cutting ceremony Saturday at Gateway Park in Ames.

David Feree, chairman of the Parks and Recreation Commission, welcomed about 35 people to the ceremony, including Mayor Ted Tedesco, several city council members and members of the Parks and Recreation Commission.

“Thanks to Carroll Marty, we now have one of Iowa’s finest disc golf courses,” Feree said.

Disc golf is similar to golf but is played with a frisbee instead of a golf ball. Instead of holes, metal baskets catch the discs.

Director of Parks and Recreation Nancy Carroll said Jeff Harper, a former ISU student who was a national competitor in disc golf, generated the idea for a disc golf course in Ames several years ago.

“He came to me in the early 1990s with the idea,” Carroll said. “He said that the Ames-ISU community was the only community in the Big 8 Conference that didn’t have a disc golf course.”

Carroll said the Parks and Recreation Commission liked the idea but needed $12,000 for equipment. After a few years, the project received funding from the city.

“We needed someone to take on [the project],” Carroll said. While members of the Town & Country Kiwanis Club and several disc golfers also helped, Marty did the bulk of the work. He volunteered over 300 hours of his time to develop the course, according to a press release.

Work on the disc golf course began last summer, Marty said. He laid out the course, designed the stairway and bridge and did all of the construction on the bridge and the stairway.

“It was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of play,” Marty said. He said the course was “one of the most beautiful settings” he has ever worked in.

Marty said the new disc golf course is located on the site of the old Ames golf course, which hasn’t been used since 1975. He said one can still see the original fairways and a green at the corner of Elwood Drive and Mortensen Parkway.

“It’s a lovely place to play [disc golf] or just walk,” Marty said.

Marty said while he was unable to completely finish work on the course last fall due to an early snowstorm in October, “we had people playing on it all winter long.”

Paul Larson, member of the Town & Country Kiwanis Club, listed many of Marty’s other volunteer projects and praised Marty for his leadership, skills and love of community.

Larson said Marty helped to construct several octagon shelters for Ames city parks, storage sheds for baseball diamonds, the mark-post and scoreboard for the ISU cross country course and a press box for the high school athletic field.

Tedesco compared the opening of the disc golf course to the VisionAire Corporation opening earlier in the week.

“Some openings may seem greater in magnitude, but it’s a lot of these little things [like the disc golf course] that make people want to come to Ames,” Tedesco said. “We couldn’t do it unless we had citizens contributing like Marty Carroll did.”

The Carroll Marty Disc Golf Course is free to the public.