A few years after graduating with my B.Ed. in Brisbane, Australia, I moved to Shanghai, China, in January
2002 to work as a teacher. I have been resident in China since then and got married here in 2015. I am fairly
comfortable in speaking, listening, reading, and typing in Mandarin Chinese to a competent conversational,
but not highly technical, level.
I’ve played many sports in my life, notably soccer, cross country running, track and field, tennis, and
mountain biking. In about 2008-2009, I and some others (in Hangzhou city) started organising some casual
Ultimate sessions. I’d seen the sport in Australia as I cycled through Queensland University, but I had never
tried it before. I soon fell in love with it and it became my main sport for the next 8-9 years. When I moved
to Qingdao city in 2016, I also helped to set-up a new Ultimate club there. Unfortunately, starting a new
high intensity sport at about 40 years old, when almost everyone else was 20-something, eventually led to
all too frequent torn muscles and finally a knee injury.
As chance would have it, right when I got injured in December 2016 was when organised disc golf was just
beginning in mainland China with both Yikun disc sports and XCOM disc sports holding micro
“tournaments” (more like come and try disc golf events) in 2017. I’d already been throwing some disc golf
discs for 3 or 4 years during my once-a-year summer holiday trips back to Australia and in 2017 I switched
my main sport from Ultimate to Disc Golf.
In 2017 I moved to Suzhou city and started the Suzhou Disc Golf Club with a temporary pop-up practice
course which became a bit of an incubator for quite a few future Chinese disc golf players and club and
event organisers. I also began to travel to play in disc golf events and increase my disc golf tournament and
course design knowledge in other countries and regions including Australia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore,
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan at many PDGA sanctioned C-Tier tournaments, some B-Tiers, and a couple
of A-Tiers.
In 2018 the first ever PDGA sanctioned tournaments were held in mainland China. I also started to organise
my own tournaments as TD and over the years I also became the TD for several other tournaments
organised by Chinese players/organisers. I have always tried to involve the Chinese players and venue hosts
in the tournament organisation process so that the local disc golf community here develop more knowledge
of the processes and standards required to be followed in running PDGA sanctioned tournaments. I’m
especially proud to have been the organiser and TD for mainland China’s first ever Women’s Global Event
(WGE) tournament in 2021 which, I think, in spite of Covid restrictions, remains the largest PDGA
sanctioned tournament held in China so far with 53 players. I also organised and was TD for the 2022 WGE
in China.
I’m very much looking forward to doing all I can to help WFDF ensure that the Disc Golf events at the 2025
World Games in Chengdu are well run and also give opportunities for local Chinese players and organisers
to see how elite tournaments are organised. I have a soft spot for Chengdu as I lived there for 6 months in
early 2010. It’s a beautiful city with some unique cultural and culinary elements and is one of the major
modern metropolises in central China.