Tournament fees help support Waller Park's disc golf events.
Santa Barbara County maintains the grass, the trees, and the two lakes that give the 154-acre park its shape. But the tournament calendar for the course, and the fundraising for course improvements, are shaped by a nonprofit called Friends of Waller Park. If you have walked your dog past the disc golf baskets on a Saturday morning and wondered why there were suddenly dozens of strangers with backpacks full of discs, or why the layout looked different than it did last month, the answer traces back to the same group and the same loop of money moving from one tournament into the next.
A Course That Pays for Its Own Upgrades
The county keeps Waller Park mowed and trimmed. Friends of Waller Park, a volunteer nonprofit, is the group that pushes for course upgrades and runs the tournaments that pay for them. That distinction matters more than it sounds. It means the quality of the disc golf course at any given time, whether the baskets are current, whether the tee pads are in good shape, tracks the health of a volunteer-run tournament schedule rather than a line item in a county budget document.
The clearest example is the Santa Maria Ace Race, held every May. Players pay ten dollars for a throw at each hole, with the option to buy up to four more throws per hole for another ten dollars each. The event is explicitly built as a fundraiser for that summer's Santa Maria Open, so money collected in May becomes prize money, shirts, and logistics for the tournament weekends in July and August. The course quite literally funds its own next event before that event has been announced.
The same pattern shows up in the entry fees for the Santa Maria Open itself. When players register for the Am Weekend, part of what they pay breaks down into pass-through fees: four dollars to the PDGA, five dollars to the SoCal Disc Golf Club if they are not already a member, and five dollars directly to Friends of Waller Park. Every player who shows up to compete is also, without necessarily thinking about it, chipping in toward the next round of course upkeep.
The Year Has a Rhythm, and Most of It Already Happened
By late September, most of 2026's tournament calendar at Waller Park is already behind it. The rotation looked like this:
- May 9 – Santa Maria Ace Race, the fundraiser round that seeded the summer tournaments
- July 18-19 – Santa Maria Open Am Weekend, a PDGA-sanctioned B-tier event with two 30-hole rounds
- August 1-2 – Santa Maria Open Pro Weekend, the same format, one tier up in competition
- December 5-6 – December Doubles, a best-shot team format closing out the year
That December date is the one still ahead. It is a bring-your-own-partner doubles tournament, PDGA XC-tier, with two full 30-hole rounds and a barbecue lunch included in the players' pack. There is an optional two-dollar ace pot, and organizers sell sponsor tee signs for thirty dollars to anyone who wants their name on a hole for the weekend. It is a smaller, more social bookend to the summer's competitive peak, and it lands the same season the park lights up for the holidays.
Layered underneath the named tournaments is a different kind of use entirely. A separate club, Buckets Disc Golf, has for years run weekly league nights on the same course, the kind of casual weeknight play that does not require registration fees or travel from out of town, just a disc and a free evening. That is the version of the course most Waller Park regulars actually experience: not a PDGA bracket, just a rotation of neighbors working through the layout on a Monday or Thursday.
What the Layout Looks Like Depends on the Weekend
One detail that surprises people who only know the course from casual walk-throughs is that the layout itself changes depending on what is being played. The Ace Race in May used a 26-hole configuration called the Big Loop, with baskets moved to shorter positions and temporary tee pads brought in closer, shrinking most holes to somewhere between 150 and 250 feet so more players could reasonably chase an ace. The Santa Maria Open, by contrast, runs the fuller 30-hole layout across two rounds, with a modified path for the 60-and-over and all-women's divisions. The course residents walk on an ordinary Tuesday is not necessarily the course competitors play on tournament weekends.
That flexibility is also why the tournaments end up feeling less like outside events dropped onto the park and more like an extension of it. The event organizers work directly with park staff to keep the grass cut and trees trimmed where a tournament layout needs it, coordination that has to happen before every major weekend so families still using the playgrounds and pony rides are not sharing space with a full tournament field.
The Santa Maria Showdown, a separate one-day tournament run by Legacy Discs each spring, draws a similarly wide range of players, from teenagers to competitors well into their nineties, according to organizers. One participant, Robert Arzate, described the course itself as a mix of terrain unlike other stops on the regional circuit, moving from open flat grass into wooded, rolling sections within the same round.
December Is Not Only a Disc Golf Month
The same weekend energy that builds a tournament field also builds a crowd for Waller Park's least competitive event of the year. According to KSBY, Friends of Waller Park hosts an annual tree-lighting kickoff to the holiday season, complete with hot cocoa, shaved ice, pony rides, and a visit from Santa Claus. At one recent lighting, officials switched on a twenty-six-foot Christmas tree stationed near the park entrance while families gathered to watch.
"We saw in the Orcutt Pioneer that they were going to have a Christmas tree lighting, and we really enjoy doing lots of holiday festivities, so we decided to come out tonight to see the tree lighting," said Courtney Koltes, as quoted by KSBY.
That quote points to something worth noticing about how residents actually find out what is happening at Waller Park. The city's own recreation department calendar points visitors toward a seasonal activity guide rather than a granular weekend-by-weekend schedule. The events that fill specific Saturdays, whether it is a disc golf bracket, a tree lighting, or the 805 Day in the Park car show that brought lowriders, classics, and imports to the park in August, mostly get organized and promoted by outside community groups rather than the county's own events page. Friends of Waller Park runs the disc golf tournament calendar and the holiday kickoff. The 805 Car Club runs the car show. Knowing what is happening at the park on any given weekend means knowing which volunteer group to check, not just the city's site.
The Course Keeps Getting Better Because People Keep Showing Up
None of this requires joining anything. The weekly league play welcomes walk-ins. The tournaments are open to registration from anyone willing to pay the entry fees, and those fees give Friends of Waller Park a steady source of funding for the course, alongside the grounds work the county already does. The park's disc golf identity was built the same way most of Santa Maria's public spaces end up defined, by a small group of people who decided to organize around something they already used for free and kept doing it long enough for it to become part of how the town spends its weekends.
The next event on the books is December Doubles, the first weekend of December. Whatever entry fees come in that weekend will, in some part, become next spring's Ace Race, which will fund next summer's Open. The loop keeps running because enough people keep showing up to it.
If you are weighing what it is like to actually live near a park like this, not just visit it, James Gallegos has spent enough time on the Central Coast to talk through what daily life looks like in the neighborhoods around Waller Park and beyond. Let's Connect.
