FlingGolf To Hold New England Classic

AMESBURY – Watch some of the nation’s best FlingGolf players compete on ESPN next week and become a flinger yourself in September at the New England FlingGolf classic held at the Amesbury Country Club and the Apple Hill Golf Club in East Kingston, NH.
ESPN2 will broadcast an expanded version of its Ocho competitions, including FlingGolf, over 43 hours on the seventh and eighth days of August, the eighth month of the year.
The seventh edition of the event, inspired by the 2004 film Dodgeball, is “the Ocho-est Ocho to date,” the network said.
FlingGolf’s 23-minute segment, which features its San Diego tournament earlier this year, will be shown in the prime-time slot at 10:30 a.m. on Friday.
The video was shot by NFL Films veteran Rob Parker, who edited hundreds of hours of video with John Pruellage, president of New Swarm FlingGolf and commissioner of the World League of FlingGolf, to create the segment for ESPN.
“Golf is tough to videotape,” Pruellage said. He praised Parker for his ability to shoot just the right shots.
Invented by Alex van Alen, FlingGolf is played on an 18-hole golf course, using a regular golf ball. Instead of 14 different metal and wood clubs, FlingGolf is played with one FlingStick that looks like it is the offspring of a lacrosse stick. A player uses the stick to hurl the golf ball hundreds of yards before putting it with the same stick into the hole.
The FlingGolf segment will feature the San Diego tournament, which attracted some of the sports’ best competitors. It also will showcase the women’s competition and the first-ever team competition.
The New England FlingGolf Open will be held on Sept. 16 and 17, on two courses 15 minutes apart. For the first time, the New England tournament will add a senior division for flingers 60 plus years old.
Because the two courses are close to the FlingGolf headquarters at CIWorks in Amesbury, participants can tour the facility and create their own custom FlingStick, which come in a variety of colors and motifs.
On Saturday night, what New Swarm describes as the “best community in sports” will be invited to a local brewery.
Although most of the ESPN Ocho broadcast features little seen sports such as fan favorites slippery step competition, pillow fights and corgi races, Pruellage hopes viewers will see FlingGolf as the serious sport it has become.
Last year, most viewers asked, “what is FlingGolf?” he said. This year, Pruellage expects viewers will be more familiar with the sport and begin to see players competing at a high level.
The sport, which is attracting new players and sponsors every month, “is not golf dumbed down,” Pruellage said.
FlingGolf is much easier to learn than golf. But it has many nuisances and requires a lot of finesse to score at an elite level, particularly in the shots that approach the green.
Since New Swarm introduced FlingGolf in 2014, it has been played on at least 1,400 golf courses in 31 countries by tens of thousands of players, the company’s web site says. On most courses, FlingGolfers play alongside traditional golfers.
The New England Open has 7:30 a.m. shotgun starts on Saturday at the Amesbury Country Club and on Sunday at the Apple Hill Golf Club.
To register for the competition or become a sponsor, visit, https://flinggolf.com/pages/new-england-open.