To me there is no such thing as "the new generation of disc golf fans." It's just the new generation of disc golfers.I personally think it is a reasonable play, the Pro Tours association with Steve has hurt their brand among the new generation of disc golf fans. To me this signals a pretty big shift in the definition of the disc golf consumer and who the pro tour is really being marketed to. First it was the players, then the amateurs, and now they are ready to grow into the mass consumer market?
Steve did a great job of growing his brand to the pros and ams, we will see how the new team and ownership does at continuing to grow the pro tour to the masses.
The needle has moved in that you can get disc golfers to watch other people play disc golf, that wasn't the case in the not to distant past. Some people from here drove the 5-ish hours up to Peoria to spectate at World's, and that a pretty huge shift from my generation since I wouldn't drive across town to watch somebody else play disc golf. So a lot of progress has been made with the new generation of disc golfers as spectators, and that was a huge hurdle to overcome.
For the future I have no idea if we have to move past that. Can the number of people playing disc golf get large enough that the views from that group are enough to sustain something like DGPT? Or does it have to bleed over into a larger group of non-players? I mean, disc golf has such an easy entry as a player it opens the question to me of why would somebody who likes it enough to watch it NOT play it?
At any rate, the audience evidently needs to expand in some way and Steve was having some problems making that happen. He got it off the ground, though. He will get credit for that.