Q&A: Full Swing VP thrilled by TGL start, expects players to continue to ‘settle in’ with tech
Three weeks into TGL, the league’s technology partner, Full Swing Golf, couldn’t be more encouraged by the results.
Evan El-Saden, Full Swing’s vice president of product innovation and program management, said as much during the PGA Merchandise Show in Orlando, Florida, where Full Swing is among the many exhibitors.
“We have to be honest with ourselves,” El-Saden said. “And I think from our standpoint, it’s been an overwhelming success for our company. I think it’s overall gone over really well.”
While Full Swing has for over a decade produced top-of-line simulators that use cameras and infrared technology, it’s the company’s radar-based launch monitor, the Full Swing Kit, that has powered TGL.
The Full Swing Kit, which measures 16 data points, debuted a few years ago and currently retails at a reasonable price point, especially for launch monitors, at $4,999. TGL uses 18 Full Swing Kits that are strategically placed inside the SoFi Center, and for each shot, they measure data such as spin rate and ball speed, which is then communicated to Toptracer technology to produce the ball flight characterization that viewers see on the screen.
GolfChannel.com spent a few minutes talking with El-Saden about what we’ve seen so far from TGL. Here’s that conversation, which has been edited slightly for clarity:
Have you received a TGL boost from a business standpoint?
EL-SADEN: Absolutely. From the industry, a lot of people reached out having seen kind of our presence there and it was, you know, to be a tech provider of a tech infused golf league is just a level of credibility that is humbling, and we appreciate it and we’re excited to be a part of it.
And on the consumer level, you know, when you see interests go up, conversions go up for the business, it’s just the benefit or the byproduct of being a part of it, and that’s part of why we did it because we wanted to be on the forefront of that, but ultimately we’re hoping to see an interest in a new demo, watching and being enthused to play golf, and if I was young and had things like this to play golf in, I would have gotten into it much, much younger. We were members of country clubs, but I had nothing as engaging as this. So, hopefully they can see this, say that’s pretty cool, it’s like an e-gaming type of mixed reality experience. And as soon as you know they get a few more reps under their belt, having a new audience come in is just going to grow the game, inherently grow sales, and everyone benefits that way.
With TGL, the technology is different than if you were to have this installed in your house because it uses the Kits. What’s the difference that people should understand? Like this isn’t what you’re buying to put in your house?
EL-SADEN: With TGL, basically the challenge was stadium golf, there’s a lot of – they were hitting from 21 and 35 yards from the screen, which was in the zone of a launch monitor being able to track enough ball flight to help provide the pre-shot [data]. So, for the tracking side, using launch monitors in conjunction with Toptracer providing the ball flight.
We developed the game, so using our designers on our game side – of course we’re usually building for 16×9. Then they said, hey, we basically want to go to an IMAX screen, and that was its own custom development. We worked with their architects like the Nicklaus Group, Agustin Piza, Beau Welling. They brought the strategy of the hole on paper, and then our 3D designers designed it in this unity game engine for TGL. It was built outside of our gaming platform because they wanted to make it agnostic to traditional-like game logic and configuration, partly because they didn’t have the format to find yet. So, they made the game dumb, so to speak, made the graphics, made the ball fly, but we created a separate controller for them to say like which team should go next and so on and so forth.
So, we’ve got the tracking, we’ve got the game, and then we’ve got the virtual green technology that drives the green, and that was really born from the fact that the stadium doesn’t give you the same real estate as a golf course. How do you make it tough for players hole over a hole? So, each hole that we built for them has its own set of coordinates that we send to the turntable to rotate and then to the green to undulate. So that creates a uniqueness over 125 feet in diameter. You can basically make endless possibilities for landscapes, which makes it tricky for the players to read, you know, and you kind of saw it, but I think the more that these guys practice, the more they have to kind of understand it’s not like going and playing a familiar hole at a course where you know the breaks.
In all three phases, to our credit, we were the right partners because we do all of these things on our consumer level, and that challenge was, can you do it at scale, robust, meaning it’s live, like you can’t fail, so we have failover mechanisms, things like that. But then create an ecosystem where we’re sending messages from one of these things to the game to the green to rotate. It’s that architecture that we built kind of underneath that makes the whole thing run, so we were involved in every aspect of what they’re doing and it was I mean it’s been a grind getting it to market, but to see it come to life has been pretty special, and the only thing that really differs from what we do on the consumer level is the sheer scale and the reliability that you need to have on live television.
What’s been the biggest challenge so far in getting this to where it was ready to go?
EL-SADEN: It’s the true definition of innovation in its purest form in the sense that you’re not just iterating on something that there’s precedent set. You don’t know, and one good example is we had to build a game agnostic of logic in there because they didn’t have the rules to find it, so a big challenge was parallel pathing development and also the format for the league because if that was there, we could have built it into the game, so you know which team is going to go next, this and that, and then they have things like hammers and alternate shot. Some holes are just singles and one versus the other, so I think one of the biggest challenges was outside of the tech working at scale was having to build the tech without truly knowing what the format was going to be in the league, like what they wanted to do from a competition standpoint.
What feedback have you gotten, whether on social media or directly, that might need some clarification?
EL-SADEN: Some of the feedback that I’ve seen – and I can totally understand it – is when these players come in and they’re hitting shots and they look, you know, maybe disgruntled with the output, they have not had the opportunity to adjust to just the difference this experience is from an outdoor experience. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but they have to adapt, and I think some players are adapting – like we saw JT last night. He seemed very comfortable in the environment. Other players are, you know, maybe unwilling to adapt because they know they know their shots and they’re seeing a distance. They’re like, well, this shot should yield that result, but simulation golf has kind of different physics sometimes and it’s an adjustment. Some players are adjusting phenomenally well.
I will say the teams who have been practicing have performed and posted the results. That’s just the way it is. The teams that have had the time to go in and really get comfortable with it, you see a correlation with performance and it’s just a matter of time before all teams do. But I think a lot of the from a consumer’s perspective, they’re reading the emotions from the golfers and again the golfers are now in a stadium with fans and lights and they’re kind of in shell shock, too. So, I think they’re juicing shots as well because you know it’s a lot of pressure. It’s different, it’s new, but again, they’ll all settle in.
The green speeds, fairway speed, wind, can that all be controlled?
EL-SADEN: That’s all a configuration option. I don’t think they’ve used wind yet, but they have that ability and that’s another element of this, right? So it’s a sensory thing that those guys feel and then they adapt, but when you don’t feel it, if they just put in wind as a friction force, the guys, it might not translate – again, might see them saying, Well, that shot should have done this or that, so I think it’s a graduation, but we’ve built it so that you can introduce those variables in due time.
Can you diagnose the Tiger wedge shot?
(During Week 2, Tiger Woods had a 101-yard wedge shot that he ended up hitting 131 yards. Golf.com’s Luke Kerr-Dineen, in talking with players, blamed such errors on depth perception, writing that “They don’t have a visual gauge of the distance they’re trying to hit on shots where they rely almost solely on getting a visual gauge for the shot.”)
EL-SADEN: I would attribute the wedge shot to the players [not] being comfortable hitting in this space and the lies that they’re taking. So, you know, you hit a ball as it lies outdoors, and these guys are able to place their balls. I will never say that Tiger’s wrong in what he believes, and I can’t comment on that particular shot, but I can tell you that there’s a lot of other guys that have been playing extremely well. Is it a question of adaptation, right? And again, we’re the majority of the tech, but a lot of the ball flight tech does come from Toptracer that we trace in the game. … I just think all players need to get comfortable with it and you’ll start to see guys throwing darts, which last night those teams seemed to be pretty comfortable, and I know that the Atlanta team specifically had made it a point after seeing how things unfolded to get in there and practice.
If you practice in there and these guys are so good. They’ll adapt. Are they willing to adapt? I don’t even think it’s a conscious thing. I think they’ve got to really make a concerted effort to understand maybe what they need to do to be successful because those holes are much different strategically than what they play on Tour, right? So where do you lay up, you know, when do you go for it? What are the risks? It’s all computations that they’re having to learn.