ON THE RANGE
by Tom Cunneff
Did you know that more people played golf indoors than outdoors in 2024 – 36 million vs. 28 million? A big cross section (17 million) did both, according to the National Golf Foundation, but no doubt the number of indoor rounds has only increased since then with more options popping up in the Met Area all the time. Leading the way is GOLFZON, an MGA partner that started in Korea in 2000. Golfers have played close to 100 million rounds on more than 15,000 facilities around the world, nearly 11,000 of which are commercial. Since the company’s expansion to the U.S. in 2016, the Northeast has been a key linchpin in its growth strategy because of the sport’s seasonality here. The Met Area now has 40 GOLFZON facilities, including two GOLFZON Socials, which have 16 simulators and a full kitchen and bar; GOLFZON Range by Leadbetter, where golfers can go to work on their game in Little Ferry, N.J., and Westbury, N.Y.; and ZSTRICT at Chelsea Piers in Manhattan and Stamford, Conn., its most sophisticated and realistic system with a hydraulic swing plate and auto-tee. After 16 years at the LPGA, Sean Pyun became the CEO of GOLFZON America in January 2024, overseeing the launch of the TwoVisionNX and GDR MAX simulators and the rollout of the GOLFZON Tour, a real-time competitive platform connecting thousands of players globally.
I think it’s because people accept that indoor golf is an acceptable form of golf. In the U.S., the technology was born out of the need to learn your metrics on the driving range, but now people are using the technology to play golf, not necessarily to learn their ball and swing data.
Accessibility. We take pride in bringing more people into the game of golf through our facilities. If you’re a beginner, we can put up guardrails, so even if you slice it 30 yards right, we give you 75 yards of rough to keep you in play. We want to make it fun, not embarrassing. But we can also provide the most realistic golf experience. We have three different playing surfaces – fairway, rough, and sand – and our motion plate moves in 64 directions to replicate 56,000 different lies. When we map a course, we map every inch of the property, so we get the right topography setting for our motion play. It’s an extensive – and expensive – process, but that is the mission of our founder and chairman, Kim Young-Chan. He doesn’t cut corners. When I first arrived at GOLFZON, I said, “We don’t have to map it to this extent. Our competitors spend 1/10 of what we’re spending on that,” and he just wouldn’t have that conversation. We also have network play, where we can connect thousands of simulators worldwide in real time. We run about 400 tournaments a day globally.
Let’s say you own a GOLFZON facility with three GOLFZON simulators, you essentially become a team within the Tour. Anybody can try to qualify starting in September. The top four qualifiers make up the team. We started with 12 teams and $150,000 purse in 2024. Last year, we had 72 teams with a $300,000 purse. And this year, we’re expecting over 120 facilities from 11 different countries playing for $300,000 and entry into a couple of GOLFZON Global tournaments. For example, at the City Golf Open in China, which takes place in this massive 18-hole sim facility, we’ll be playing for a nearly $4 million purse in October.
I had the privilege to work with Mike Whan, the CEO at the USGA, and John Podany, the USGA’s chief commercial officer, at the LPGA, and last October, GOLFZON became the Official Indoor Simulator of the U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open, where fans will be able to test their skills on-site, starting with the U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera in June. But we have bigger aspirations with the USGA, and that is to create a USGA indoor simulator Open down the road. We had U.S. Open and U.S. Women’s Open challenges throughout the country in April and May with winners receiving VIP access at Riviera and Shinnecock, the site of the 2026 U.S Open. We will have Rivera on our simulators exclusively onsite at the U.S. Women’s Open, and we are also launching Shinnecock on our simulator the same week as the U.S. Open, so we’re pretty excited about that.
First, it’s important to understand that indoor is never going to be 100% same as outdoor. You will never replace outdoor golf, but at the same time, we understand the concerns from the serious golfer that when you’re in a bunker, you want to feel like you’re hitting out of the bunker. That’s why we have a bunker mat in our system. We even have a greenside bunker mat, where the ball sits down a little bit lower. It’s why we have a moving plate. The future of indoor golf isn’t tech driven or AI. Those are all very important, but it’s really about, how do you bring those outdoor components inside? How do you make it more realistic? How do you get people to play with everybody else and not play alone? It’s recreating the camaraderie and the fun, not just the technology and how accurate my data is.
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