After Bocce Ball took up the entire evening, we didn’t actually have time to play another event before sunset. Luckily, it was easy enough to adapt our Putt Off rules to work in the dark. We:
- Threaded glow sticks through the basket chains and around the cage and top band
- Shrunk the playing area to 15 – 30′ from the basket
- Played to 5 points instead of 10
With these changes, the Putt Off ended up being a ton of fun to do in the dark! It was more difficult than regular putting, but the most challenging part was actually finding any missed putts after throwing them.
Since we had so many participants, we also decreased the putts thrown each round from 5 to 3. Even with this change, the first several sets took quite a long time as people lined up their shots and then had to retrieve their discs. About half of the participants lost interest after about 20 minutes, making the remaining sets go much quicker!
A lot of great putts were made early on, but it still seemed difficult for anyone to score – often multiple people would progress to round 2 or 3 and then both miss their shots; and at one location, both Luke and Gennie made it through all five rounds! Finally, Zach got his opportunity to “temple run” at one location – after being the only person to sink a putt in round one, he made it through three more rounds before missing, netting him a lead of 4 to everyone else’s 0.
After that, it was easy for Zach to cinch his final point and take the gold medal! Gennie, Luke, Rick, and Noah were all still playing but tied at 0, so we played sudden death sets until we could determine our other medalists: silver for Rick and bronze for Luke.
