If you’ve done any construction projects around the house lately, you know that finding a contractor who will show up and complete the job on time and on budget is challenging, to say the least.
Real quick story … My brother is in the process of building a house. The roofer he hired took his deposit for materials and then no-showed. In the process of chasing the guy down, he ended up talking to the roofer’s mom.
Don’t’ get me started on my sprinkler guy.
My point is that it’s tough out there and good help is hard to find. So if you’re going to take on an indoor golf project, whether that’s installing four simulator bays in your new HQ, building the signature piece inside your ultimate golfer’s man cave or just finding the right stuff for your DIY installation, it goes without saying that you want to work with someone reliable, trustworthy and efficient.
At an absolute minimum, you shouldn’t need to talk to anybody’s mom (except your own).
The first MGS HQ
A decade ago, when we were planning the first MyGolfSpy HQ – a two-bay testing facility with a medium-sized putting green and a couple of small offices – we thought we had the hard part sorted out. We had recently upgraded to Foresight GC Quad launch monitors, we knew how to run a club test and collect data. The other stuff … mats, screens, projectors and the rest … how hard could it be?
“I learned really quickly that it isn’t easy,” says MyGolfSpy Founder Adam Beach. “If you didn’t work with Foresight or Trackman directly, you basically just better figure it out on your own. There was nothing at Home Depot that you could buy that was for this.
“I still have the folder somewhere. There’s probably 400 pieces of paper in there from printing things off, calling turf companies and getting estimates. I would have loved to have been able to open Chat GPT and type, “How do you build a fucking golf simulator?”
With the help of local contractors who weren’t what you would call experts in simulator and hitting bay installation, we assembled what Beach describes as “the most Frankenstein shit you had ever seen.”
“We came up with a thing that worked but, dude, if you hit a ball to the left-side area and you hit those metal frames … We went through five or six screens a year. The projectors sucked. The bulbs burned out too fast.”
It worked but there were some things in our first installation that could have been done better. We learned a lot from the process and while the emergence of DIY kits has made building a golf simulator a lot easier, the biggest takeaway from our first build was that we’d be better off working with experts on the next one.
Getting acquainted
Several years ago, Beach had a chance encounter with James Laidlaw, owner of In Home Golf, a custom golf simulator installation business based in Toronto. With the rise in popularity of indoor and home golf, Laidlaw’s business was taking off. We hadn’t totally outgrown our first headquarters but the writing was on the wall. Beach kept Laidlaw’s business card close.
By the time Beach met Rene Delgado, owner of The Indoor Golf Shop, we’d moved beyond thinking we might need a new test facility to the early phases of planning for it. Delgado had reached out to ask us to test his new impact screens which he believed were a cut above anything else on the market at the time.
Now, it’s not lost on me that most golfers might consider the impact screen among the least exciting bits of a simulator installation. Nearly every golfer wants a launch monitor and if you can pair it with a projector that delivers crystal clear graphics in stunning 4K, all the better.
But the screen? Does it matter?
In the early days of what has become the indoor golf boom, I took a part-time job at the first indoor golf facility in my area. Having worked with those early impact screens, I can assure you things have come a long way.
Back then, sound dampening wasn’t much of a consideration so when the ball hit the screen, it was almost as loud as when the club hit the ball.
Durability wasn’t much of a concern, either. In the facility where I worked, holes were a frequent occurrence, the screens sagged and mostly we just learned to live with it because that’s just how it was.
As with most anything else, screens have improved significantly in recent years. We’ve found some good ones, but performance – yeah, I know that’s a weird word to describe what in very simple terms is a hanging piece of fabric – from the screens Renee sent was next-level.
They proved to be quiet on impact, durable and they hung better and were less prone to wrinkling than anything we had tested. The projected images looked crisper and cleaner than on any screens we had used.
Getting started
When it came time to get serious about bringing our new testing facility to life, Beach had already decided whom he was going to call.
“I reached out to James and he told me that his company had been bought out by Renee and The Indoor Golf Shop. Rene Delgado believed the indoor golf market was ready to explode and he wanted to do two things. He wanted to both sell and install his products and he wanted to control his own destiny by making as much of the product as he could in-house.”
Said another way, Delgado envisioned The Indoor Golf Shop as the proverbial “one-stop shop” for all things indoor golf.
According to Beach, “it took a couple of conversations with Rene but I went, ‘that’s the guy I’m going with’. Really quickly, I had supreme confidence that not only was Indoor Golf going to be able to sell me the gear but with James and his team now part of the company, they were going to be able to install it and it would be better than what we had.”
MyGolfSpy didn’t start completely from scratch with The Indoor Golf Shop. The new building was under construction and we had a rough floor plan that included four hitting bays, an area for a PuttView putting green and significantly more office space.
What Laidlaw and The Indoor Golf Shop team brought to the table was the expertise to help us fill in the gray areas between the ideas that existed on paper and the realities of a brick-and-mortar build.
Very quickly, Laidlaw took our two-dimensional drawings and turned them into 3D renderings. He identified parts of our plan that wouldn’t work while at the same time going above and beyond to find solutions to some of our more unique needs.
For example, the first set of plans called for beams and other structures between each of our hitting bays. In most installations, that would have been fine, if not ideal, but our bays needed to double as a photo and video studio.
Beach envisioned a single line of bays that could be opened up completely, allowing for uninterrupted site lines from one end to the next.
Laidlaw and The Indoor Golf Shop installation team went to work and, using retractable netting, developed the perfect solution.
While there was nothing inherently wrong with the original plan for mounting the projectors, Beach was concerned about how they would look in our videos. Laidlaw promised he’d give it some thought. By the next morning, we had new renderings of what proved to be the perfect solution.
When we said we didn’t want to enclose the ceiling of the hitting bay and instead wanted to make full use of the vertical space, Laidlaw was able to convince us that we’d be unhappy with the result. He’s done enough installations to know that the reality of the idea isn’t always as awesome as the idea itself. Instead, he came up with a solution to open up the space a bit to give us what we were looking for visually without compromising the primary function of the space.
And when the county inspector’s office got overly particular about a couple of details, Laidlaw took care of that, too. “James was my right-hand man,” says Beach. “He was like, ‘I’m going to talk to the county for you. I’ll get rid of the problem.’ Next thing that pops up, ‘Don’t worry about it.’ ”
Sweating the details
Perhaps what was most impressive about MyGolfSpy’s experience with The Indoor Golf Shop is that they sweat details we would never have considered.
Our bays are outfitted with extensive padding and baffling that not only reduce noise but also ensure there aren’t any unprotected areas. That left side of the screen isn’t a problem anymore.
If you played simulator golf at all, you know balls invariably find their way under the screen. At MyGolfSpy HQ, the bottoms of the screens are hidden below turf level. Hidden is a bit of extra structure – a ramp of sorts – that returns balls instead of allowing them to disappear into the abyss.
Likewise, the responsiveness of the hitting screens themselves was tuned at installation to return balls to the hitting area. It’s a small detail, perhaps, but when a single test can be more than 10,000 shots, the convenience is also a quantifiable time saver.
When we mentioned on a follow-up call with Laidlaw that one of the screens wasn’t returning the ball as well as it did during installation, he offered to fly down to fix it.
“Everything is so buttoned up in our facility,” raves Beach. “It’s crazy how clean and neat of a job they did.”
It all comes back to what I mentioned at the beginning. The team at The Indoor Golf Shop, from the sales guys to the design and installation team, was reliable, trustworthy and efficient every step of the way.
Ultimately, that’s the benefit (or at least it should be) of working with a team of experts. They know the trade secrets the contractor down the road probably doesn’t. They helped us dial in and bring our good ideas to life while giving us the confidence to trust them when they told us our ideas weren’t nearly as good as we thought.
And, not for nothing, Laidlaw and The Indoor Golf Shop team executed the build to nothing less than perfection – and we didn’t have to call anybody’s mom.
“I’ve owned a business for 25 years and it’s the simplest project we’ve ever had,” says Beach. “They give you confidence.”
Your one-stop shop
It’s not lost on me that most of you will never build an indoor golf facility but some of you will build a showpiece in-home simulator while others will look for a DIY solution for the basement, garage or spare room.
Whatever the scale of your project, the team at The Indoor Golf Shop can help you find the right equipment and support you during the build project. Whether that’s just a mat and net or a full simulator enclosure, they’re ready to help.
