Collin Morikawa was not walking the fairways at the Albany Golf Club or hanging out at the beach the Monday before the Hero World Challenge, Tiger Woods’ event in the Bahamas. He was 15 miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip at TPC Summerlin, along with Michelle Wie West, Max Homa, Danielle Kang, Harry Higgs, David Duval, Graeme McDowell and a host of other PGA Tour and LPGA Tour players.
Caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay was there, too, as the emcee of the first AWS Golf Invitational, a corporate pro-am for Amazon Web Services and Deloitte VIPs in town for a massive conference. And all of them were about to become guinea pigs for new technology that potentially could change how golf fans watch and interact with the sport and data on multiple tours.
The PGA Tour is king of the mountain when it comes to collecting data from all the shots players hit during most Tour events. Using ShotLink, developed in 2003, the Tour can provide fans with detailed information about where players hit the ball, all in or close to real time. It’s an expensive system that requires a lot of boots on the ground to produce, and currently ShotLink is out of reach for the PGA Tour Champions, Korn Ferry Tour and the LPGA Tour.
To make similar data available beyond the PGA Tour, the Tour and its partners are working to develop a lighter, less-expensive shot-tracking and statistics platform for the Korn Ferry Tour and Champions Tour while simultaneously developing the next generation of ShotLink.
Enter Amazon Web Services and all those pros and pro-am guests at TPC Summerlin, site of the PGA Tour’s Shriners Children’s Open. They were part of a beta test of the new system, and I was the only reporter onsite to get a first look at a system that might revolutionize how golf fans are able to interact with the sport on multiple tours.
It’s all part of a plan to help the PGA Tour and other tours attract new viewers with enhanced engagement, either through a better, modernized ShotLink that utilizes Amazon’s vast computing network, or through a new alternative system that might best be described as ShotLink Lite. And fans already have been given a taste.
In March the PGA Tour announced it was entering a new partnership with AWS and gave golf lovers a preview. During the 2021 Players Championship – while another Tour partner, CDW, helped it gather data on the course – AWS powered Every Shot Live, an app that gave fans the ability to see every shot hit by each player in a tournament. That was more than 32,000 shots in real time, a massively complex data and computing job. AWS’ powerful cloud-based tools and infrastructure helped make it possible.