BRUNSWICK — Walking down the fairway Saturday morning, Josh Connell of Auburn explains how to master “The Beast.” Appropriately named, No. 14 at Enman Field in Brunswick is a narrow 666-foot-long corridor through the woods, sloping downhill and cutting off to the right at the end.

“The temptation is to throw as far as you can, when maybe you’d be better off taking a little off and just keeping it in the middle,” Connell said.

If it doesn’t sound like he’s talking about golf, it’s because he isn’t — not exactly, anyway. Connell is a top athlete in an obscure but growing sport, a member of the small family of men and women who can claim to be professional disc golfers.

The game, also known as Frisbee golf, has existed as an organized sport since the early 1970s. It follows the basic rules of regular golf but substitutes a flying disc — smaller and heavier than a typical beach Frisbee — for a ball and clubs and chain-link baskets for holes in the ground. Disc golf courses usually wind through the woods rather than the wide-open fairways of standard golf courses.

And greens fees are an awful lot less — about $5 a round at most disc golf courses. The inexpensive nature of the sport explains much of its growth over the past decade, Connell said. Where Enman Field was about the only course of its kind 10 years ago, there are now more than 25 courses open for play in places across the state, including Auburn, Turner, Sabattus and South Paris.

“You can buy one disc” — they cost about $15 — “and go play no matter what the weather is like, any day of the year,” Connell said.

Connell, ranked the No. 4 disc golf player in Maine on the Professional Disc Golf Association’s website, began playing 13 years ago during his freshman year of college. While home on Christmas vacation, he entered a tournament in New Hampshire with his father and uncle.

“I had never thrown a disc before,” he said. But he liked the game well enough to play again before returning to school, and once he did, he learned that his college had its own nine-hole disc golf course. Connell turned pro in 2005 and now enters 25 to 50 tournaments a year, traveling as far as Texas and Florida to compete.

It’s not a glamorous sport — at most courses, the trash cans next to the concrete pads that act as tees are filled with beer cans and cigarette butts — and spectators are rare, Connell said. Even elite professionals on the PDGA tour earn only $30,000 to $40,000 a year.

To pay the bills, Connell works as shop manager at Dragan Field, a disc golf course on Foster Road in Auburn. But “at a certain level, you’ll break even. In a given year, I’ll pay a few hundred dollars in entry fees, and I’ll win a few hundred dollars.”

Connell said he enjoys the sport, even when he’s having a bad round.

“It’s a good excuse to go out and walk in the woods,” he said.