PGA TOUR’s TOURCAST launching real-time ShotLink Select data for Korn Ferry Tour

Korn Ferry Tour pros have historically kept stats by hand, manually charting their rounds each evening to shed insight into patterns and optimize future practice. While useful for self-improvement, this approach can be a bear amidst the inherent stresses of chasing 30 PGA TOUR cards via the season-long points race.

“After the rounds, we’re pretty tired, and the last thing you want to do is think about all the shots in your round,” said Korn Ferry Tour veteran Dawson Armstrong.

This week, the Korn Ferry Tour enters a new era. Effective at this week’s LECOM Suncoast Classic, the PGA TOUR’s long-standing TOURCAST product will provide real-time ShotLink Select data on the Korn Ferry Tour.

Not only will players have access to the comparative statistics that will best shed light on their games, but also Korn Ferry Tour fans can now follow their favorite players with meaningful context as to distance and proximity, via the live leaderboard on PGATOUR.COM and the PGA TOUR app. The uncertainty of following a Korn Ferry Tour pro via verbiage of “shot one from the tee box; shot two from the fairway” is no more.

The combination of ShotLink Select and TOURCAST technology will add a new layer to the storytelling efforts around the Korn Ferry Tour. It's a win-win for players and those who support them.

“Now instead of comparing stats to the PGA TOUR average, now we’ll be able to compare to our peers,” Armstrong said. “That will be nice to see on a week-to-week basis, because some weeks are firmer, some weeks are a little bit softer. … Things like that will make it a lot more case-by-case oriented, to where guys can actually look at, ‘What do I need to work on specifically for the next week?’ It’s going to be really helpful for us to look at on a daily basis.

“And (for fans), instead of looking at shot two from the fairway or from the rough, they’ll see, ‘Okay, he is 186 (yards) or he’s 122.’ … There’s a big difference from 186 to 122. It will make my family a lot more stressed out, but I’m sure they’ll enjoy it a lot more. It will keep a lot of fans more engaged throughout the round.”

ShotLink makes possible the TOURCAST platform that gives fans 3D insights into every shot struck at a tournament. The PGA TOUR’s ShotLink real-time scoring system is a robust operation that involves dozens of employees and volunteers each week. The manpower necessary to power the revolutionary system was the hurdle that kept it from being implemented on other tours, but innovation has led to a new way to gather the same information without the workforce previously required.

Players on the Korn Ferry Tour will wear transponders, known as “ShotLink Bugs,” that will mark their position each time they address the ball. This small piece of technology, which weighs just 90 grams and measures just 2x3 ½inches, can easily be worn on a belt and will gather the necessary location data to measure a player’s lie and distance to the hole. In order to increase coordinate accuracy on and around the green, volunteers will capture ball locations with a laser.

These location-measuring devices also will make it possible to bring the TOURCAST platform to the Korn Ferry Tour. The current iteration of TOURCAST was debuted on the PGA TOUR in 2020 and offers not only three-dimensional renderings of every hole, but allows fans to track a player’s every shot on the course. This is done in real-time, on-demand as the platform utilizes Amazon Web Services to accelerate the delivery of content.

“The implementation of TOURCAST on the Korn Ferry Tour will bring fans even closer to the action on a swing-by-swing basis,” said Korn Ferry Tour President Alex Baldwin. “TOURCAST has become a staple on the PGA TOUR, and in addition to providing another avenue for fans to connect with our Tour, this enhancement will provide an unprecedented level of data to our players and fans. Whether you’re a fan looking to follow along during the final round, or a swing coach looking to analyze your player’s ball dispersion, the introduction of TOURCAST on the Korn Ferry Tour is another step forward.”

The PGA TOUR’s Golf Technologies team has long investigated ways to provide ShotLink through a more efficient on-site footprint, said Ken Lovell, TOUR Senior Vice President of Golf Technologies. The TOUR’s long-standing ShotLink application maps golf courses within an inch on the green and a foot on the fairways but requires a team of ShotLink-specific volunteers, cameras, lasers and radar. GPS tracking was investigated as a potential new approach, though it involved walking scorers standing directly over the ball to capture data, which was a non-starter, Lovell said.

To accomplish the objective, the long-standing ShotLink software – which matches data to a ball, player, location and so on – was rewritten from scratch. Constraints were relaxed; rather than looking at where the ball is, the hardware would measure a player’s location within a club length.

The result is ShotLink Select, which, after debuting on the Korn Ferry Tour, is slated to begin testing on the PGA TOUR for eventual implementation.

“We were trying to come up with an alternative ShotLink product that allows us to get distance data on all Tours,” Lovell said. “We’ve created a new input device and rewrote all the software. It has been updated since 2003, but this is legitimate ‘delete and start over.’ Rebuild the code base from scratch, rebuild the walking scorer app and scoring administration app. Rebuild every single piece of this – assume nothing existed – all in 12 months.”

The TOUR’s “air force,” as Lovell describes it, began mapping courses in spring 2022 with handheld devices as well as fixed-wing and hovering drones. Using a laser-based LiDAR system, trees are mapped to “every individual tree, branch, leaf.” A method of photogrammetry – “really fancy stitching together of photographs” – builds the 3D model that creates TOURCAST, allowing fans to “navigate around multiple dimensions, multiple places and multiple angles,” Lovell said.

As opposed to a ShotLink volunteer measuring the ball’s location, the walking scorer will use an input device (a cell phone) to identify the player as he addresses the ball, sending a signal to a cloud server which instructs the shot bug to provide corresponding data. Prior to the start of play on each competition day, rules officials will collect course setup information – tee placement and hole location.

Crucially, this allows ShotLink Select to function within the confines of the Korn Ferry Tour’s standard operating procedure.

Data managers at the PGA TOUR’s Global Home will oversee the input procedures across the field of walking scorers, with the ability to fix any errors across the course of competition. The result is not only a substantial boost to the Korn Ferry Tour fan experience but added value for players as well.

“The in-depth stats that we have on TOUR have allowed my coach and I to be able to dive down and narrow up what I need to work on week-in and week-out from that event,” said Austin Smotherman, who graduated from the Korn Ferry Tour in 2021, prior to the introduction of ShotLink Select.

“Sometimes you have that data to prove against what you thought you were doing really well; you see the differences and it’s a whole ‘nother level. (It’s part of why) you see the average age on TOUR dropping every single year. Guys are going to get so much better, that much quicker.”

Smotherman’s grandpa Bill Acquistapace, one of his biggest fans, has long maintained a routine of following rounds hole-by-hole on the PGA TOUR website. During Smotherman’s time on the Korn Ferry Tour, the two had a weekly chat where the grandson would explain a course’s intricacies and provide context clues of how to interpret the “shot 1 from the tee box; shot 2 from the fairway” type of information, without any further details.

That context isn’t needed on TOUR – after earning his card, Smotherman joked that he might need to order his grandpa a new computer, “Get it dialed up to where it refreshes itself.”

Effective this week, the same holds true for his Korn Ferry Tour successors.