The steep, downhill tee shot of hole 6 at Heritage Hills. Photo: Matt Gregoire, PDGA

When you make it to the tee of your fourth hole of the round and you realize an hour has already passed, you’re in for a long day. For some competitors at the 2019 PDGA Amateur Disc Golf World Championships powered by Prodigy Disc on Wednesday, such was the case. While it is certainly one of the most beautiful disc golf layouts on a golf course in the country, Heritage Hills also involves walking close to six miles through steep elevation changes by the time you tap in on 18, a journey that averaged five and half hours for the competitors of the Advanced division's A and B pools on Wednesday.

To be fair, the round completion times on Tuesday by the Advanced division’s C and D pools were much faster, averaging closer to four hours. But here in the greater York, Pennsylvania, area, four-hour rounds are NOT few and far between. Many of the courses being used for the event are just as difficult as they are lengthy. Quaker’s Challenge DGC, for example, measures in at 8,222 feet, which isn’t the longest course in the world, but its narrow, densely-wooded fairways and elevation changes have meant average round times of four and a half hours thus far this week.

Despite the challenging courses and lengthy rounds, the competitors push on. Now with the first two days in the books, we finally get to see a much clearer picture of which players are at the top of the leaderboard, as the larger divisions that contain multiple pools have now been shuffled and reordered.

The largest field of the event, as is tradition, belongs to the Advanced division, where the aforementioned A, B, C, and D pools comprised of 278 players have duked it for three rounds on three different courses over the past two days. The scores at the top of the leaderboard are extremely tight through the first 54 holes of the event, with only five strokes separating the competitors who are tied for 10th place from the leader, Casey Cox of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

*Note The pools were originally ordered by PDGA Player Rating in descending order (e.g. A pool players have higher ratings than B pool players, etc.). The same goes for the Amateur Masters 40+ M and N pools.

In the Advanced Women’s division, the scores at the top of the leaderboard are just as close. Montana’s Ali Pistora continues to fend off West Virginia’s Taylor Crammer, Colorado’s Sammie Jo Guerrero, California’s Carli Beith, and Michigan’s Kallie Howell. With only four strokes separating Howell from Pistora and several more rounds to go, it’s still anyone’s world championship to be won.

The race for the top spot is tight in nearly all of the divisions, as 10 of the 13 have five or fewer strokes separating first place from second, the only exception being the Amateur Masters 60+, where North Carolina’s Donna Stanley leads by 12 through their first two rounds.

It might sound crazy, but there’s still a ton of golf left here at the 2019 PDGA Amateur Disc Golf World Championships. Follow along via pdgalive.com as we slowly but surely make our way to the semifinals and finals on Saturday.