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The Glow Down Cup: Inside Toronto’s Glow-in-the-Dark Disc Golf Rivalry
Toronto's two glow-in-the-dark disc golf leagues turned a friendly grudge into an annual, oddly well-organized rivalry. Nobody gets paid. Everybody shows up anyway.
If the season ends in a tie, Toronto's two glow disc golf leagues don't flip a coin. They walk back to the tee at hole 1 at Beaches Disc Golf Course, and every player from both clubs gets a turn throwing for an ace, in the dark, glowing disc against a lit basket. Whichever side lands more of them wins outright. If that's still tied, four players from each team throw again, this time for closest to the pin. It's a considerably more elaborate way to settle an argument than either league needs for an ordinary Thursday night.
That's the first clue that the Glow Down Cup is not quite the loose, low-stakes exhibition its "friendly competition" billing might suggest. It's a rivalry between two Toronto disc golf leagues, one that plays Wednesday nights at Marilyn Bell Park and one that plays Thursday nights at Beaches Disc Golf Course, and every fall for the last four years it has spilled out of the regular season and into a two-night, cross-town competition with real rules, a real trophy, and a genuine question of who's better hanging over both clubs until the next one.
What Is Glow Disc Golf, Anyway?
If you've never heard of disc golf, the sport itself is simple enough: players throw a flying disc, roughly the size and shape of a Frisbee, at a metal basket, trying to land it in the fewest throws, the way you'd play golf with a disc instead of a ball and club. Glow disc golf, sometimes called glowie, is the after-dark version. Courses stay open once the sun goes down, baskets get lit, and players either throw discs made of glow-in-the-dark plastic or place glow-in-the-dark tape onto ordinary discs so they can track them through the night.
Toronto has two established glow disc golf leagues that meet weekly through the season, part of a growing after-dark scene in the city's disc golf community: one at Marilyn Bell Park, on Wednesday nights, and one at Beaches Disc Golf Course, on Thursday nights. Both are free to play and open to anyone who shows up, no experience required. For most of the year, that's where the similarity ends. They're on opposite sides of the city, running on their own schedules, with their own regulars.
Once a year, that changes. The Glow Down Cup, now in its fifth year and presented by ChainLink Disc Golf, brings the two leagues together for a two-night competition: one round at Marilyn Bell Park, one round at Beaches, nine holes each, eighteen holes total. In 2026, that means Wednesday, September 30th at Marilyn Bell Park and Thursday, October 1st at Beaches, both starting at 7:30 PM.
The scoring has more structure to it than the "friendly competition" label suggests. Not every player's round counts toward the team total. To have your score count, you need to have played a minimum of five glow league nights, at either course, since the previous year's Cup, representing whichever club you played more often. Each team also gets one wildcard entry who doesn't need to meet that bar. Because the two leagues rarely field the same number of eligible players on a given night, the format adjusts for it: whichever club has fewer eligible players sets the number that counts from both sides, at 75 percent of that smaller pool, rounded up. Whoever posts the lower combined score across both nights wins the Cup outright, no ace-off required.
Crucially, none of that eligibility math keeps anyone off the course. Every player, qualified or not, is welcome to play both nights for their team. The scoring rule only decides whose round is counted when the final tally is added up.
A Trophy With History
The prize itself is a silver, two-handled cup on a black tiered wooden base, engraved with a laurel wreath and the words GLOW DOWN CUP, PRESENTED BY CHAINLINK DISC GOLF. Four small shield-shaped plates run along the base, each stamped with a team name and a year: Team Beaches, 2022. Team Bell, 2023. Team Bell, 2024. Team Beaches, 2025. There's room left on the base for more, and every fall, whoever wins adds their name to a list that already carries some real history behind it.
It's a proper trophy, not a novelty. As an aside, Jeff MacKeigan, one of the tournament directors who selected it, chose that particular model in part because it's a single sealed vessel with no screws or seams to leak, so the winning team could toast out of it if they wanted to. It's a nice detail about the design, not really the point of the thing. The point is the plaques, and the two names on them that keep trading places.
Why It Exists
The Glow Down Cup wasn't handed down by a governing body. It isn't PDGA sanctioned, and there are no plans to change that. It grew out of something smaller and more familiar: two leagues that kept running into each other and started keeping score in their heads.
"There was a pretty serious rivalry starting to form between the two leagues," Dan Rice, co-captain of Team Bell (Marilyn Bell Park), has said of the Cup's origins, "so we decided to formalize it."
That's the whole premise, and it's a fitting one for a sport built largely on free, community-run leagues rather than paid entry fees and prize purses. The Glow Down Cup didn't need a sanctioning body to matter to the people playing in it. It needed two leagues who already cared, and a reason to put a number on the argument.
The People Who Run It
Every rivalry needs someone tending it on both sides. Team Bell, representing Marilyn Bell Park, is co-captained by Andrew Kavanagh and Dan Rice. Team Beaches is co-captained by Jack Coney and Dave Ruh. Behind them, Jeff MacKeigan and Cara Hovius serve as tournament directors, running the logistics that turn two separate leagues into one competition for two nights a year.
Then there's David Lyall, who doesn't show up on the current captain's list but belongs in the story anyway. Lyall was Team Beaches' original captain, holding the role from the Cup's first year in 2022 through 2024, before handing it to Jack Coney. He's still out there playing for Beaches. Lyall is also the source of the Cup's most quoted line about what actually happens once the disc golf is over. Asked about the awards ceremony and afterparty that caps the second night, held at the Toronto Hydroplane and Sailing Club, steps from Beaches' fourth hole, Lyall called it "the best party of the year."
Getting that party to actually happen the way it does is its own job. Beaches has fire pits on its course, and Sean Lamb, another longtime contributor who isn't a current tournament director but has stuck with the event anyway, is the one who lines up the fire permits and the firewood that make those pits usable on the night of the Cup.
None of this reads like a made-for-TV production, and it isn't meant to. It's a small group of people, some of them team captains, some of them just the ones who know how to get a fire permit, keeping a two-night tradition running because they want to.
Why Show Up
There is no entry fee to a weekly glow league, and there's no velvet rope on Cup night either. Anyone can play both nights, regardless of whether their score counts, which means the event is built to be entered from the bottom, not gatekept from the top. A first-timer who wandered into a Wednesday night at Marilyn Bell Park earlier in the season could, in theory, be standing on the tee at hole 1 in the Glow Down Cup by fall. It's one of the more distinctive glow disc golf events Toronto's after-dark scene puts on each year, and the entry point is just showing up to league night.
What you'd get for showing up is a course lit up at night, discs streaking by in the dark, and a genuinely two-sided rivalry that has swapped the trophy back and forth evenly since it started: two titles for Beaches, two for Bell, heading into 2026. You'd also get, if David Lyall is a reliable narrator, the best party of the year afterward, complete with a bonfire!
And if your team wins, the Cup goes home with your club for the year. Your club's name goes on a plaque that already has some history on it, and stays there for good.
What's Next
The tie sits at two apiece going into the fifth annual Glow Down Cup this September 30th and October 1st, which means 2026 breaks it, one way or the other. Dan Rice, for his part, isn't hedging. "The Glow Down Cup is the most anticipated event on our calendar," he said. "It is top of mind right from the next week following last year's competition. It's a fun and friendly competition that we look forward to every season... but Team Bell will be victorious this year!"
Whether Team Bell backs that up or Team Beaches denies them, the path to being part of it next year is the same for anyone reading this in Toronto: show up on a Wednesday night at Marilyn Bell Park or a Thursday night at Beaches, both free, both open to any skill level, and start logging league nights. Team captains keep the attendance records themselves, so if you want to know where you stand, you ask them directly. There's no app for it, no sign-up portal. Just two leagues, one cup, and a fire pit waiting for whoever's turn it is to build it.
