Pushing an opening tee shot into a row of pine trees is not a new experience for me. Having to find a way to salvage bogey after a doomed start is no shocker either.

All pretty much par for the course, so to speak, for this hack.

But this was indeed a new experience. Instead of a golf ball, I hit a soccer ball. And instead of a club, I had only my right foot at Awbrey Glen Golf Club’s five-hole Loop Course.

The game is called “FootGolf,” and if you are anything like me, you hear that term and immediately think of that nudge back into the fairway you gave your golf ball when your playing partners were not looking.

In actuality, FootGolf is a relatively new sport that is spreading rapidly to golf courses across the nation. And some in the golf industry hope it will introduce a new generation to the conventional version of the game.

Awbrey Glen is the first to adopt it in Central Oregon, and according to the Oregon FootGolf Association (yes, there really is such a thing — and world and national associations as well), one of the state’s three early adopters (joining Glendoveer Golf & Tennis in Portland and Mallard Creek Golf Course in Lebanon).

“With as young and active as our membership is here, the number of young families with kids, maybe the 6-year-old isn’t up to playing golf a lot yet,” said Mark Amberson, the general manager at Awbrey Glen. “But they can sure come out and have fun kicking a soccer ball.”

I got my first taste of the sport Wednesday on a crisp, clear morning at Awbrey Glen with Amberson and two young members of the Bend private club, 15-year-old Zach Parsons and his 14-year-old brother Ryan.

As part of its new player-development initiatives, Awbrey Glen has jumped to the fore of the new game with its five-hole, par-3 course that wraps around the club’s driving range.

Following the basic rules of golf — including a dress code that nixes soccer cleats — a player kicks a regulation-sized soccer ball to a golf hole that I have been waiting for my entire golf life: a behemoth 21 inches across. Each kick, obviously, equals a stroke, and the holes range from par 3s set at less than 100 yards to par 5s set at 150 or more yards.

At Awbrey Glen, the tees are placed near the Loop Course’s regular tees, and the holes are set just off the conventional putting surfaces. In all, the 642-yard FootGolf course is five holes and a par 20.

Awbrey Glen added FootGolf as just another amenity to its membership, and in its infancy it has sparked considerable interest, Amberson said.

“We’re expecting it to be well-utilized, to the point that we might expand the days and hours,” Amberson said. “We’re just putting it out there right now, but I’ve heard a lot of families saying, ‘Wow, what a great idea.’ ”

Admittedly, I was skeptical of the merits of such a game. I am no soccer aficionado, and I struggled to see how FootGolf could attract a new golfer.

Still, I wanted to give it a try.

The draw is clear once you see it in person. For one thing, it does not take long to pick up the gist of FootGolf, and that makes it instantly entertaining, even if you have to dig yourself out of the trees after your first shot.

For another thing, at Awbrey Glen a golfer can actually play side by side with a FootGolfer, which seems ideal for a parent with a child not yet ready for real golf.

The downside so far is that FootGolf is not yet available at a local public course. Amberson envisions groups such as local soccer clubs using the Awbrey Glen facility.

And if Mark Tunstill is right, it will not be long before the game is far easier to find. The head professional at Mallard Creek Golf Course in Lebanon, the closest public course to Central Oregon to offer the sport, Tunstill estimates that in five years FootGolf will be offered at a third of public facilities.

“I’ve listened to the PGA (of America) talk about ‘grow the game’ initiatives for the past 10 years, and the facts are that golf course closures have outnumbered golf course openings by 10-to-1 for nine consecutive years,” Tunstill said by phone. “It’s time course operators start looking at different ways to get people out to their facility.

“This is pretty exciting. Our community is responding very nicely to it.”

Playing with the Parsons brothers, it struck me just how accessible the game of FootGolf is as I made my first par on the 175-yard finishing hole. We played the entire course in about 30 minutes, and all three of us (all experienced golfers) managed the course with relative ease.

Here I am playing better than bogey golf on my first try (I shot a 24, a mere six shots off the course record) and having fun. Try doing that on your first attempt at traditional golf.

That is just the appeal of the game. Golf is intimidating for beginners, but FootGolf is no more daunting than a kickball game played by schoolchildren at recess.

Brad Parsons, my playing partners’ father, saw it firsthand when he explained the game to two friends of his daughter Grace.

“The idea of a golf course to them is extremely intimidating,” Brad Parsons said. “But they are both avid soccer players, and they thought, ‘Huh, that sounds kind of fun.’ ”

Fun even for a stubborn, old-school golf guy like me. But if the idea is to engage nongolfers, I am hardly the key audience.

Tunstill, the Lebanon pro, envisions how FootGolf might work.

“When you have that many people coming out and getting to see what a golf course is all about, smell the grass, and enjoying the scenery, then they start noticing that it’s fun to kick the soccer ball around the course,” Tunstill said. “But wait until they hit a golf ball and watch it go 150 yards and not 50 yards.

“I think it is more of a silver bullet than people are aware of,” added Tunstill while pointing out that last week at the grand opening of Mallard Creek’s FootGolf course (an 18-hole layout stretched over the course’s front nine) 60 percent crowd of 90 FootGolfers were folks who had never played golf before.

Awbrey Glen is expanding its FootGolf offering slowly, limiting the course to Sunday afternoons.

As the Parsons, Amberson and I stood around the fifth hole Wednesday, Amberson reiterated that he expects to offer more days of FootGolf in the future.

“You should,” Ryan Parsons, who was also playing for the first time, interrupted. “It’s fun.”

After seeing it for myself, maybe this new game really does have some legs.

— Reporter: 541-617-7868, 
zhall@bendbulletin.com.

On the web

Oregon FootGolf Association: 
www.footgolforegon.com

American FootGolf League: 
www.footgolf.net

Federation for International 
FootGolf: www.fifg.org/