Virtual golf booming in Manitoba during wicked weather

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This article was published 10/01/2022 (1730 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Living in Winterpeg doesn’t mean you have to store your golf clubs away until the snow melts.

The golf industry in Manitoba has been booming since the pandemic began and the sport’s momentum has carried into the winter thanks to virtual golf.

With COVID-19 erasing a long list of entertainment options and adding complications to travelling south, local golf clubs are starting to put a stronger emphasis on teeing off indoors when the weather outside is frightful.

“We were one of the first to have it, but so many clubs have followed suit in the last two years,” said Kris Ehnes, the head pro at Breezy Bend Country Club. Breezy Bend has had two indoor golf bays for the past four years and offers a league to its members.

“I know Glenwood, Southwood, and St. Charles all put them in last year I believe… (Last year) once we opened for people to play simulator golf, we could barely even book lessons or fittings because it was booking up so fast. It was by far the craziest we’ve seen it when we opened the cage doors to all the golfers at the beginning of March and allowed them to come out and have something to do. At the time, it was one of the very few things that they could do. Being so close to golf season, there was a crazy amount of hype and it was a dogfight to get a tee time and again this year, it’s been really busy.”

Over at Rossmere Golf & Country Club, you have to book a bay nearly a week in advance. However, the variant has led to some golfers taking a break. It’s the same story at Breezy Bend where they’re finding some of their teams (which consist of two players) in their league play have dropped out as they’d prefer to book private tee times in order to avoid playing with others and having more close contacts.

“We had 125 teams playing in our league. It was a slower start because a lot of people played a lot of golf all summer, but it was going pretty strong until December when Omicron hit,” said Scott Parker, Rossmere’s general manager.

“People are being extra cautious at this time so we’ve had quite a few cancellations. We try our best to limit the amount of people that can go into our bays and created some safety precautions so players can feel safe while playing.”

Rossmere has three separate stations where golfers have 140 different golf courses from around the world to choose from. They use TrackMan’s golf simulator system that can pinpoint the landing spot of your shot with an accuracy of one foot.

So essentially, if you slice a tee shot into the bushes, you can’t blame the machine, that’s all on you.

Simulators are also becoming more popular in people’s homes, but they come with a hefty price tag. A TrackMan simulator, which includes the screen, computer, projector, software, and everything else, costs between $60,000-$80,000.

“We’ve been growing in Canada exponentially. From 2019 to 2020 to 2021, we’ve grown about 75 per cent each year,” said TrackMan Canada’s sales director Cody Miller.

“Some of that is definitely related to COVID as we’ve seen an influx in focus on indoor golf, but I also think it was a market trend that was headed in that direction anyways and then COVID accelerated it.”

There are indoor golf businesses such as GolfZon, a facility in Oak Bluff, that are beginning to pop up around town, but Ehnes believes golf courses have only scratched the surface when it comes to this technology. He anticipates that it’s going to become a much bigger part of the business moving forward.

“Currently ours is seasonal, but when a club is ready to really invest in something like this, which you’ll probably see a lot going forward, it’s going to be the future in the next few years where clubs are building a standalone building where they can go year round so on rainy days you can hold a tournament, do putter fittings, lessons and all that stuff year round and never cancel due to weather,” Ehnes said.

This also has the potential to change the way people golf outdoors. TrackMan is working with courses across the globe, including Winnipeg, about installing their tracking technology on outdoor driving ranges. It’ll make grabbing a bucket of balls and hitting the range a whole new experience.

“As you’re hitting balls at the range, you’d have your smartphone connected to our application that you can download and connect to a network on that range and the range is lit up by TrackMan technology. So, every ball you hit on the range, it gets measured and the data gets sent to your phone in realtime. On your device, you’d be able to see an overhead view of the driving range, like an exact replica of the range you’re hitting on, and be able to see where your ball is landing within half of foot of where it’s lying, see your ball speed and stuff like that,” Miller said.

“And if you wanted to transition from practice, you could actually play a round of virtual golf where the course would be showing up on your device. You’d be hitting shots out onto the range and it’d be related to the virtual environment in real time.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31