Meet The Spinstress

by Carla Engelbrecht / DiscLife.com
March, 2003

Howdy! Bear with me as I adjust to writing for an audience older than eight. I've been in children's media for four years now, although lately I've been threatening to support my disc golf habit by writing romance novels. But I promise I'll do my best to stick to disc golf and leave the men with bulging muscles and eyelash-batting women on my laptop. ;-)

Sad to say I lived in Rochester, NY, for four years (including during the 1999 Pro World Competition) and never even heard of disc golf. Not once. Then I moved down here, to the northeastern most corner of Pennsylvania. Deer outnumber residents around here something like eight to one, which means you have to have hobby.

Luckily, an Iowa-raised (and therefore disc-golf-savvy) coworker convinced me to try a round of disc golf at Prompton, a course a few miles outside of town. (By the way, thank you, Stephanie!) We'd play a few holes every now and then, always careful to avoid throwing near the lake and the nasty hole lined with trees and poison ivy.

Unlike many other disc golfers, though, my addiction was slow to develop. I always had fun when I was on the course, but I didn't go the dentist wishing I could play disc golf instead. I played a couple dozen of times each year, tried two tournaments at Prompton in 2000, and added one more in Lancaster county the year after. It just wasn't a big part of my life... yet.

Then I made a New Year's resolution to play more in 2002. After hours of practice, fifteen or so tournaments, and trips to eighteen courses in eight states, I now compete as an advanced amateur and can say with confidence that I actually lived up to a New Year's resolution.

Otherwise, a few things you might want to know about me include:

• I'm the only woman in my area to play disc golf regularly, so I'm big on encouraging women to play.
• I have two cats and a dog, Fynn (named after a Swedish troll). Fynn is probably the only collie/Australian shepherd mix on the planet that refuses to play Frisbee. We're working on that, though, and her therapist agrees she's making progress.
• I once had a dream that I arrived at a tournament with a bag full of putters.
• I'm VP for the Pocono Disc Golf Association.
• I like lists.
• My favorite riddle is, what did the fish say when it ran into the concrete wall? "Dam." (I'm not a lot of fun at parties since I know tons of clean jokes and riddles-a side effect of working in children's media.)
• I had a fish named Fuzzy. It died and I replaced it with a fish named Fuzzier. It died, but I did not replace it with a fish named Fuzziest.
• And Andy Rooney (you know, the curmudgeon on 60 Minutes) told me to call him if I ever dyed my hair black.