The Student Becomes the Teacher

A little over a year ago, towards the tail end of May 2024, I met Reegan Hanley. I was spending a lot of time hanging out on the /r/discgolf subreddit back then, in an effort to explain The Method system to the community. My initial post about the docuseries had attracted over 120,000 views, but some of the written feedback was negative. A fair description would have even labeled it cruel. I really wanted to set the record straight.

I spent much of May replying to form-related inquiries, particularly when I thought the poster would benefit from the chief insights of the system. This was a labor, because the disc golf subreddit mods kept harassing me and threatening to remove my feedback. I found this both confusing and frustrating, because they seemed totally fine with people heaping abuse on me in violation of the sub’s terms of service. They also seemed totally fine with people boosting “pay for play” companies like Power Disc Golf Academy, and expensive disc golf teachers like Scott Stokely.

I eventually earned myself a month-long ban for the crime of linking one of my Youtube videos for someone trying to improve their distance. But a day before that happened, I came upon a form video that really intrigued me. It showed a young, clearly athletic guy out in a field, doing his best to replicate an X-step. The poster explained he had just taken up the sport a week prior, that he was having a blast and hoping to throw farther. I read through the various comments on his post, and realized there was nothing there that would help him understand his fundamental problem, which was a complete lack of a brace. I sent him a direct message.

A week or so later, Reegan and I had our very first remote conversation.

The first thing that I noticed about Reegan was his overall exuberance and his eagerness to learn the game. Reegan came from a lengthy background as a high-level competitive athlete. Specifically, he played basketball at a collegiate level, which was astonishing in its own right, combined with the fact that he wasn’t a tall person, at around 5’8″.

It’s crazy Reegan was able to excel in a sport traditionally dominated by extremely tall and super athletic people. I knew his athleticism had to be off the charts. Reegan mentioned to me that when he was playing basketball, he had a 40-inch vertical leap, which was pretty mind-boggling. I cued into that as a starting point for how I might get him to understand how to brace properly. That was the focus of our first lesson.

We talked through The Method. I demonstrated one-legged swing mechanics I was working on at the time. I got him to feel the rootedness of firing his right quad to begin the swing. That got his upper body moving on its own, which helped him feel real arm leverage. That was the extent of the technology, as best as I could relay it, because my own form and my own understanding were evolving at the same time.

Fundamentally, the lesson taught Reegan how to brace for the very first time. The intuition of The Method, and very specifically the focus on that interior leg twist, which Reegan grasped instantaneously, immediately allowed him to feel a brace. It allowed him to understand that if he could stabilize his right leg, and not just stabilize it, but use it as a giant energetic piston to power the throw, his upper body would kind of just know how to follow along in sequence. The disc would explode away from his body with four times the energy he was producing with just his arm and his crumpling, toppling momentum alone.

The result of that singular lesson came just a few days later, when Reegan sent me a UDisc screencap of a driver thrown 444 feet. That was about as hard as I could throw a disc at the time!

It was mind-boggling to me seeing a complete beginner, somebody who had only been playing disc golf for about three weeks, capable of throwing a disc as far as I could throw after over 20 years of toiling on backhand form. Could it be that The Method system was actually very, very effective at teaching the proper biomechanics to a good and athletic student?

Reegan and I continued to work together. He also contacted Lee. The three of us set to work on tuning his emergent mechanics into something truly wondrous. By the time Reegan and I met for the very first time in person and worked together at Neatman Creek in August of that year, he was throwing the disc 66 miles an hour! He was able to throw that fast with very abbreviated footwork and on unstable, squishy footing, which was totally nuts.

The truth of the matter is that as good as Reegan’s mechanics were back then, he had so much more to get from his upper body. I couldn’t teach him that, because it was a big deficit in my own upper body mechanics. Reegan was getting his incredible velocity almost entirely from his lower body and his explosive plant leg, due to how strong his brace was.

Over the next seven to eight months, Reegan worked tirelessly to improve his backhand form. He took some time off during the cold winter in Pennsylvania, where he lives, but he ceaselessly studied video. Along the way, Reegan worked with a number of other online coaches, who helped him shore up power leaks and inefficiencies in other parts of his mechanics. By the time spring rolled around, Reegan’s backhand was a thing of true beauty and efficient, raw power.

The culmination of this story is that in the short span of just over a year, Reegan has gone from a complete beginner, with around 220 feet of max distance, to one of the longest throwing players in the entire state of Pennsylvania.

He even has aspirations to go after the Pro Tour, which is kind of unthinkable for someone of his age. To date, basically no one has successfully entered the sport at a pro level when they learned the game in their mid to late 20s. At the top level, you’re generally competing against people who have been playing since they were children. Despite that precedent, I think Reegan has a legitimate shot at getting to the Pro Tour.

My precocious student now throws the disc 73 miles per hour, measured by TechDisc. This speed puts him in the same velocity category as elite distance throwers like Garrett Gurthie and Adam Hammes. He throws at the lower boundary of Calvin Heimburg’s power shots, and at the upper boundary of James Conrad and Joel Freeman.

These days, whenever we talk, it’s usually me asking Reegan for mechanical help, rather than the other way around. His form is essentially flawless, it is frame by frame perfect. His own insights about upper body stuff have helped me progress immensely, as I endlessly work on improving my own form. The student truly has become the teacher.