🔒Bringing golf indoors: A booming market for golf simulator businesses is keeping players swinging year round

A few years ago, Doreen Albert was a new golfer. In the colder months, she turned to simulated golf: playing indoors using screens with sophisticated systems that turn real swings into virtual balls flying through a digital course. She found the systems a perfect fit as she improved her game.

“You’re not on display,” Albert said. “If you’re on a golf course and you don’t really know how to golf, there are people behind you, and they can get a little antsy.”

One day, while playing with her husband, Todd, and their son in Maine, they hit on the idea of bringing simulator golf to Worcester.

“My husband kind of ran with it,” Albert said. “Here we are two years later. It’s been everything we hoped it would be.”

The Alberts now run Tee-Up Taproom on James Street in Worcester, which, in addition to five golf simulator bays, offers a bar with a small pub menu, darts, and cornhole. The business is just one of more than a dozen stand-alone virtual golf businesses popping up around Central Massachusetts, part of a larger national trend. According to the National Golf Foundation, about 6.2 million Americans used a virtual golf system in 2023, a 73% jump since 2019.

Golf simulators harmonize well with green-grass courses, said Jesse Menachem, executive director and CEO of Mass Golf, an association of golf clubs in the state.

In fact, many clubs have added their own virtual systems, Menachem said. Aside from offering new players a low-stress introduction to the game, they’re a great option for the winter and for rainy or super hot days. They let people who are pressed for time squeeze in a game much more quickly.

“You’re not walking or riding between shots. You’re just waiting for the screen to update,” he said. “An individual could play 18 holes in maybe two hours.”

Appeal to players

Golf simulator businesses appeal to casual players with food, drinks, and even other entertainment to enjoy while waiting for their turn, but other companies are more focused on the serious side of the game. Daniel Boisvert, a golf performance coach and owner of Pin High Golf in North Grafton, said he’s been using the Trackman brand golf simulator with his clients for about 12 years. He can bring it with him to help clients he works with at Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord or people can come to his location to practice. The system tracks details of a players’ movements, allowing Boisvert to work with them on tweaks to improve their performance.

“It puts numbers and degrees behind everything a golfer does,” he said.

That’s especially important for junior golfers who want to show their stuff for colleges. Trackman provides them with combine scores used to evaluate their performances, and the information can be shared with college coaches.

A number of different brands offer golf simulator systems, but all of them provide a realistic experience and a way to quantify a player’s performance.

Like Boisvert, Jason Thomas has been in the golf simulator game for some time, though more on the entertainment side. He and business partners Jim Moses and Dan Moses opened Dr. Greens Indoor Golf Center in Ashland seven years ago after playing in a winter league at a simulator golf place in Westborough.

Then, just over a year ago, they also took over that very Westborough location, FORE! Golf Entertainment, when the previous owners decided they were ready to move on. Both businesses have a full bar and food options, as well as other attractions like big-screen TVs and billiards.

Dr. Greens and FORE! offer the chance for people to play in leagues and provide a space for corporate events and private parties where people can combine golf with food, drink, and conversation.

“It’s trying to create an atmosphere for golfers to keep playing throughout the year,” Thomas said. “It’s really trying to mimic the experience they get outdoors, except indoors. Obviously, it slows down once golf courses open, so there’s a seasonality to it.”

Post-COVID increase

The success of virtual golf over the last five years seems to be an outgrowth of a general jump in enthusiasm for the game while people were social-distancing during the first year of the COVID pandemic, Thomas said.

“Even before Covid, we were seeing pretty consistent growth,” he said. “But then after COVID, the golf industry in general grew, so our business definitely saw a pretty dramatic increase.”

The virtual golf systems offer a range of experiences, Thomas said. They include simulations of famous courses like St. Andrews in Scotland or Pebble Beach Golf Links in California, making a world-class experience available to all. For more casual players, there are just-for-fun games like virtual beer pong played with a golf ball. The businesses have golf clubs for rent, though Thomas said 90% of players bring their own.

Along with stand-alone businesses and golf courses, another market for golf simulators is individual players. Boisvert said some of his clients have installed them at their own homes, which sometimes requires a renovation or the repurposing of a garage.

“The tough thing is having a clearance height with the ceilings,” he said. “But people get pretty creative.”