Screen Time: How Simulator Golf Became Florida’s Fastest-Growing Game

From Tiger and Rory’s $50 million arena to a strip-mall bay behind a Chick-fil-A, the sim boom is loudest right here.

Jeff Stanislow – Host of Golfers Unite’s Let’s Go Low Radio Show – AM 820 Tampa – Saturday Mornings @ 8:00 AM

Picture two rooms.

In the first, twenty-four of the best golfers on the planet stand inside a purpose-built stadium the size of a football field, firing 300-yard drives into a screen taller than a house while 1,500 fans roar and ESPN beams it to more than 130 countries. In the second, a former Navy ship commander racks raffle tickets on a folding table, a putting green sits next to a kitchenette, and there is a QR code in every bay so you can get a Chick-fil-A sandwich delivered mid-round.

Different budgets. Different zip codes. Same state. Same technology. Same game.

That is the story of simulator golf in 2026, and Florida is sitting right in the middle of it. The sim game is no longer a rainy-day backup or a rich guy’s garage toy. It is one of the fastest-growing corners of the entire sport, and the Sunshine State, of all places, has quietly become ground zero. Let’s break down how we got here, and why it matters for every golfer in Tampa.

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The wave is real, and the numbers back it up

Start with the headline stat, because it reframes everything. In 2025, a record 48.1 million Americans age six and up played golf, on-course and off-course combined, according to the National Golf Foundation. Of that group, 29.1 million played on an actual course. The other 19 million played golf exclusively off-course, at driving ranges, entertainment venues, and, increasingly, indoor simulators.

Read that again. Nearly 40 percent of the country’s golfers in 2025 never set foot on a traditional course. They got their golf on a screen, at a range, or at a venue. The off-course participant base has more than doubled since 2019, and it is now growing several times faster than the green-grass game.

The money is following the players. The global golf simulator market was valued at roughly two billion dollars in 2025 and is projected to keep climbing at a double-digit clip, with most forecasts pointing toward four billion or more within the decade. North America drives close to half of that demand. And here is the part operators love: the NGF found that a majority of golf course operators who added simulators reported a financially positive impact, which is exactly why bays are popping up in strip malls, breweries, hotels, and country clubs all at once.

The old fear was that simulators would pull people off the course. The data says the opposite. Only a tiny slice of sim users report playing fewer real rounds. Far more say the screen made them play more, practice more, and stick with the game through the off-season. Off-course golf has become the sport’s best on-ramp, a low-pressure, weather-proof, come-as-you-are front door that turns curious first-timers into golfers. There are more than 21 million Americans who did not play in 2025 but told researchers they are “very interested” in teeing it up, a pool that has grown 37 percent since 2019. A big chunk of that interest traces straight back to off-course formats.

Translation: the funnel is full, and simulators are the top of it.

Why Florida, of all places

Here is the twist that makes zero sense until it makes perfect sense.

Florida is a place where you can play real golf 365 days a year. Roughly 16,000 courses dot the country, and Florida owns one of the densest concentrations anywhere. So why on earth is a year-round golf state booming with indoor golf?

Three reasons.

First, the weather cuts both ways. Ask anyone who has tried to grind out eighteen holes in Tampa in July. The heat index, the humidity, and the 3 p.m. thunderstorm that shows up on schedule make a climate-controlled bay look pretty sweet from June through September. Indoor golf is not the rainy-day option in Florida. It is the survival option for half the calendar.

Second, the format fits how people actually want to spend time now. Golf has gotten social, fast, and flexible. A sim bay lets a group of four play Pebble Beach in ninety minutes, order food, keep the drinks coming, and leave before dark. That is a night out, not a five-hour commitment. It scratches an entertainment itch that a traditional round simply cannot.

Third, and this is the big one: the biggest name in the entire category planted its flag in Florida on purpose.

The state is now a simulator arms race. Five Iron Golf, the New York-born indoor giant with more than 50 locations and 800-plus Trackman bays worldwide, has leaned hard into Florida, opening a 30,000-square-foot flagship in Coral Gables and lining up rollouts across Orlando, Tampa, Jacksonville, St. Petersburg, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale, and Coconut Grove. X-Golf runs a busy Tampa-area location out in Trinity, right in our backyard. And a fast-scaling franchise called The Back Nine just opened a set of bays in Carrollwood. More on them in a minute.

But the crown jewel, the thing that put Florida on the map as the sport’s tech capital, is TGL.

TGL: the marquee, headquartered right here

If you have watched golf on TV in the last two winters, you have seen it. TGL, which stands for Tomorrow’s Golf League, is the primetime, tech-fused, team-golf league founded by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and sports executive Mike McCarley under their TMRW Sports banner. Six teams of PGA Tour stars, mic’d up, throwing “The Hammer,” playing a hybrid of virtual and live golf in front of a live crowd on ESPN and ABC.

And it all happens in Florida.

TGL’s home is the SoFi Center, a first-of-its-kind indoor golf stadium on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens. The building runs nearly 250,000 square feet, cost an estimated 50 million dollars to build, and seats around 1,500 fans right on top of the action. Players fire full swings into a simulator screen that measures roughly 64 feet by 53 feet, then finish each hole on a wild “GreenZone,” a 41-yard putting surface that physically morphs its topography between holes using hundreds of actuators. It is, by any measure, the most technologically advanced field of play in golf.

Why Palm Beach Gardens? Because that is home. Woods lives about fifteen miles north on Jupiter Island, McIlroy lives roughly eight miles up the road in Jupiter, and, as McCarley has put it, Palm Beach County is where the vast majority of the Tour’s players actually live. The league was built in its founders’ backyard, which happens to be ours too.

Season two wrapped this past March, with Los Angeles Golf Club beating Tiger’s Jupiter Links squad to lift the 2026 SoFi Cup. The league drew stars from Rory and Justin Thomas to Collin Morikawa and Tommy Fleetwood, proved out its format, and even survived Tiger missing the start of the season while recovering from back surgery. Two seasons in, the thing that skeptics called a gimmick looks a lot more like a fixture.

Now here is the detail that ties this whole story together, and it is the one most people miss.

The Full Swing throughline

The technology powering Tiger’s stadium is not some exotic, one-off, Willy-Wonka machine you will never touch. It is Full Swing, the Official Licensee of the PGA Tour in the golf simulator category and Tiger’s personal simulator of choice. Full Swing built the launch monitors, the virtual holes, the software architecture, and the morphing green that run the TGL show. Eighteen launch monitors, four Toptracer camera systems, the works.

And the exact same brand that runs the biggest indoor arena on the planet is now sitting in a strip mall in Carrollwood.

That is the quiet magic of this moment. The gap between what the pros use and what you can walk in and play has basically closed. The data points Tiger and Rory rely on inside a 50-million-dollar building are the same data points a regular Tampa golfer gets on a Tuesday night after work. Ten years ago that sentence would have been science fiction. Today it is a booking on your phone.

Which brings us to the Tampa part of the story.

From commanding a Navy ship to a bay behind the Chick-fil-A

We recently sat down with David Snee, the man behind the new Back Nine location in Carrollwood, tucked in behind the Chick-fil-A at the corner of Bearss and Dale Mabry. His path to golf entrepreneur is not the usual one. Snee spent his career in the Navy commanding ships. Building and opening a golf facility, he told us, has been a steep learning curve, going from the project management of a military command to the sales and marketing hustle of a small business owner overnight.

Watch the interview with Dave from his time with The Let’s Go Low Show

His sales philosophy, though, sounds a lot like everything the NGF data is pointing at. Snee does not want to hard-sell anybody. He wants to share the experience and let people figure out for themselves whether sim golf fits their life. Come hit a few, see how it feels, and if it clicks, you are in. Low pressure, high welcome. That is the off-course on-ramp in action.

The brand he chose has a fitting origin story. The Back Nine was started around 2020 in St. George, Utah, by an attorney named Wil Bangerter, who set up a couple of simulators, more or less as a way to pay for his own setup and get away from the day job. Business exploded during the pandemic, franchising took off, and the concept has since become one of the fastest-growing indoor golf franchises in the country. Snee, who says he was roughly the 120th franchise owner and has already expanded into a second territory, told us the network has grown to hundreds of locations open or in the works nationally, with the brand pushing into international markets too.

The Carrollwood build reflects exactly where the category is headed. Snee merged two units to carve out a dedicated lobby with a kitchenette, TVs, and a putting green so people can actually hang out, not just hit and leave. The space handles private parties of 30 to 40. There are three simulator bays running Full Swing, that same TGL-caliber tech, loaded with 75-plus licensed courses. And in a very 2026 touch, there is a QR code in every bay wired up to the neighboring Chick-fil-A, so your food shows up at your bay without you missing a shot.

The grand opening in June leaned all the way into community. A closest-to-the-pin contest, a long-drive competition, food from local favorites, a ribbon-cutting with the Carolwood Area Business Association, door prizes, and raffle tickets you could earn just by showing up, hitting a ball, or leaving a review. Snee said he had already logged more than 60 RSVPs before the doors opened.

But the part that got us fired up is what comes next. Snee wants to invite local high school golf teams, Gaither, Steinbrenner, Carrollwood Day School, Berkeley Prep, into the facility for off-season, TGL-style, head-to-head team matches. Think about that. A Navy vet running a small business is about to give Tampa kids their own version of Tiger and Rory’s league, on the same technology, forty minutes from home, in the dead of the Florida summer. That is not a backup to golf. That is a growth engine for it.

Why this matters for every golfer in Tampa

Zoom out and the picture is clear. Simulator golf is not a fad, it is a structural shift in how the game gets played, and the whole thing is stacking up right here in Florida. You have the glossy top of the funnel, TGL, drawing eyeballs and legitimizing screen golf as real competition on national TV. You have the national chains, Five Iron and X-Golf, racing to plant flags in every major Florida market. And you have the grassroots, an operator like David Snee turning a couple of strip-mall units into a neighborhood clubhouse where a kid can chase a scratch handicap and a foursome can play Pebble in the AC.

Different rooms. Same game. And the thread running through all of it is the thing we care about most: access. Sim golf lowers the barrier to entry, beats the heat, fits a busy schedule, and gives everybody, tour pro to first-timer, a way in. That is a very good thing for golf, and a very good thing for Tampa.

At Golfers Unite, that is the whole point. More golfers, more places to play, more community, more wins to go around. When the game grows, everybody wins.

So next time an August storm rolls in off the Gulf and blows out your tee time, you have got options. The screen is on, the courses are loaded, the door is always open, and the tech is the same stuff Tiger trusts.

Get in. Play more. And as always, let’s go low.