Homemade BI mini-golf tournament draws record attendance

Competition was steep at an unconventional mini-golf tournament on Bainbridge Island July 20, but participants of all ages took on the ski slope, squirrel invasion and Skee-Ball on the greens in stride. Some even tried them twice.

About 330 mini-golfers tested out 12 different homemade putting courses, each with elaborate themes and decorations, during the 2024 Putt-Putt Clash, a homegrown BI-based minigolf competition now in its third year running. Blackmouth Design, a BI engineering and construction firm that specializes in unconventional projects, hosts the event. Event attendees test out each course, then vote on their favorites: the winners, Alex Crease and Madeline Gorchels from Ballard, were awarded a cash prize of $500 and bragging rights until next year.

But for a lot of the contestants, the prize money is a motivator, but it’s not the only motivator, said Bryce Moulton, event organizer and designer at Blackmouth.

“I think it’s very fulfilling for everybody to be here, and to watch people have a lot of fun with something you made,” he said. “I know that’s at least the main emotion that I feel the whole day — just like, ‘I’m just so glad that everyone here is having so much fun.’”

Since the event began in 2022, interest has steadily risen. This year, there were more contestants than ever who volunteered to build a course, including five teams who were repeat entrants, and nearly 100 more attendees of all ages. It’s a fun project, but planning a novelty mini-golf course can be daunting at first, Moulton said, which is why he helps steer contestants through the initial design process.

“Sometimes I’ll suggest something to people that might be up their alley, and when you get that bug of an idea, you can immediately can start picturing interesting or cool things you could do to make that concept a mini golf course,” he said.

Most people’s instinct is to go big, he added, but the key to success is to take construction one step at a time.

“I always tell people, ‘If you start and you just keep adding to it, you’ll have added as much as you could add, and then the event will happen, and then you have a course,’” Moulton said. “Rather than think of it as all-or-nothing for your concept, try and break it down into pieces and start building it. At a certain point, you run out of time, and that’s fine that it wasn’t the ultimate grand vision. It’s still going to be fun.”

Going big does have its perks. First place for the 2024 Clash went to Crease and Gorchels, a couple of mini-golf connoisseurs from Ballard, who won with a design that combined two classic ball-in-hole games: mini-golf and marble mazes. Players putt the ball into a giant maze filled with traps and obstacles, then stand on top of it like a surfboard and lean back and forth to tilt the maze and guide the ball through.

“It was a novel idea — it adapted really well to the concept of mini golf and the golf ball. And it was challenging in a way that made you want to come back and try again,” Moulton said.

Crease is no stranger to creative engineering. He has been involved in robotics competitions since high school — including FIRST Robotics, an international youth tech and LEGO building competition — and his designs have appeared on the Discovery Channel show “BattleBots.” Together, Gorchels and Crease narrowed down the essential elements of a memorable minigolf course and went from there. They also included a safety rail around the tilt-a-maze, which made it useable for attendees of all ages, Moulton noted.

“Before we even started building, the thing we prioritized the most when brainstorming was coming up with an engaging play experience: making something playful and fun to interact with – something that people would want to come back to and play over and over again,” said Crease. “After that, a lot of the time we spent building our course we focused on testing and iteration: proving out the concept to make sure it worked, and then slowly adding features and playing our course over and over again until we felt it was the right mix of fun and challenging. Turns out all that testing paid off, and everyone seemed to love it!”

Getting players involved in the mechanics of the course was a popular strategy. Second place went to “Camp Mulligan,” a classic mini-golf style campsite complete with miniature tent, campfire, mossy tree trunk tunnels lined with real bark and frenzied squirrels on pulleys that chased player’s balls as they navigated the course. Players — and squirrels — stepped in when the ball rolled into a tunnel in the center of the course. Using a hand crank, players could assist the army of squirrels to raise the ball back out of the tunnel and send it down another hollow branch back to the putting green.

“It was a lot of fun watching all the kids immediately understand, ‘Oh, go up here and crank this, and the squirrels run around,’” Moulton said.

The creativity didn’t stop there. Third place went to a simple but challenging setup: a ski mountain. Players had to surmount the ski mountain with just the right amount of force to climb the hill, and at just the right angle to turn the ball 90 degrees down the ski run on the other side. It was especially tricky as a one-shot course, Moulton said, but that made it fun.

Honorary mentions for creativity and challenge rating went to the cupcake course, which leaned into the theme with bright colors and baking ingredients, and the team of middle school boys who created a relatively-2D course made of boards and turf that had obstacles at every turn.

Calls for next year’s entries will go out on the Putt Putt Clash Instagram account, @puttputt_clash.

“Everyone will approach it in a different way. We’ve had entrants who are very engineer-minded, who are very focused on an interesting mechanism, or something like that, and folks who take a totally different approach,” Moulton said. “It’s all for fun, at the end of the day.”