ShotLink 2.0 Brings Myriad Big Data And Cloud Efficiencies To The PGA Tour In 2023

Getting a PGA Tour venue ShotLink ready for real-time data capture of every shot hit is a massive undertaking that goes well beyond granular course mapping. It takes crews eleven days from buildout to breakdown to run twenty miles of fiber in the ground, bury it around greens and leave no trace behind. While that alone is a major feat, it’s only half the challenge.

The CDWCDW
powered scoring and statistics generating solution the PGA Tour uses to keep tabs on every ball struck during a tournament and disseminate that data to broadcasters, fans and sports betting operators alike has been in operation for two decades.

The system has had many incremental upgrades over the years but over the past 18 months it has been completely rebuilt from scratch for the first time. Electronic scoreboards first went up on tour in 1983 and would soon be able to collect data wirelessly and revolutionize golf record keeping. Rudimentary stat tracking capabilities took a quantum leap forward when ShotLink was first implemented in the early 2000s making digital experiences like the PGA Tour app and TourCast possible.

For years, the data collection and dissemination pieces of the puzzle have been a labor-intensive logistic symphony, necessitating an army of volunteers shooting handheld lasers at every single ball’s landing point during tournament rounds. A battery of unmanned cameras tracking the flight data of all those soaring Titlelist and Taylormade spheres strafing the sky augment the utility of the readings. Lastly, a small fleet of on-site trucks, acting as data management hubs and mobile servers would compute and spit out all the resulting statistical nuggets gleaned to the right places.

The revamped system accelerates the software’s pace of play while streamlining efficiencies thanks to new sensors and upgraded radar capabilities and course mapping down to the centimeter.

“We went from the TrackMan that you can buy to something that we affectionately call the ‘Mega TrackMan.’ It is literally a missile tracking system—that’s what it can do. And we have outbound as well as inbound radar with units around the greens as well,” Ken Lovell, PGA Tour SVP of golf technology, says.

While people will still be involved at every step of the operation, there will be less manpower needed thanks to an enhanced layer of automation behind the course-to-cloud infrastructure. Working alongside the aforementioned beefed-up TrackMans focused on the air are 4K cams from Bolt6 on the ground positioned tee-to-green with CDW’s AI helping to steer the ship and the AWS Cloud chipping in with process and delivery solutions.

“Radar catches the ball. It then talks to the ShotLink software side and says ‘hey this ball came from here, it’s moving at this rate, here’s where it’s going to go’ and we can then become predictive on where it’s going to end up. That tells the camera where to look inside its frame, cutting down on the number of computing cycles,” Lovell explains.

The resulting metrics gleaned go well beyond serving up the beginning point and end point of a shot, with reams of ball in motion data telling a much more detailed story.

“We are not just painting a line on the screen any more. We are actually taking that shot and making it into a piece of data. Every single shot is defined as a mathematical equation. It’s defined as a polynomial and that means that whether you can see the ball or not, we know where it is because we have translated everything from that two-dimensional camera image into a three-dimensional grid,” Lovell says.

The extra information captured will create new opportunities to produce data sets on flight path, bounce and roll leading to new points of comparison between shots which will also be a boon to the guys trying to climb the leaderboard.

“The players will benefit from this a lot. They don’t all fully understand that yet because they tend to consume things once they’re available and in production but the ones that know about it understand and are fully behind it,” Lovell says.

Course-To-Cloud

Wholly moving to the cloud also replaces servers on the ground with network switches that will move data more quickly while simultaneously streamlining the production system. Currently five onsite production and network operations trucks are required to make the system work and the goal is to cut that number down to two to three.

“People think of producers in a TV world, well we also have them in a scoring world. No matter how well we cover the golf course, people hit the ball in the darndest places, even when they’re really, really good at it,” Lovell explains.

Today, those blind-spots can create errors in the system and a team of producers fluent in ShotLink technology, the rules of golf and how the sensors work, must then make corrections on the fly. In the new system there will be a lot fewer of those instances and when they do arise, they’ll be identified far quicker and be able to be handled remotely.

“Right now we have a production truck onsite, a network operations truck onsite—we actually move the system in five trucks. This allows us to go to fully remote production which just makes the system more robust,” Lovell says.

Beta tested earlier this month at the AWS Re:Invent ProAm at TPC Summerlin, the new system, which will run concurrently alongside the legacy system while it completes further testing, will begin to be rolled out throughout 2023. While ShotLink is used in the vast majority of tour events, there are still a few dates on the schedule where it isn’t currently utilized and the gameplan is to continue to increase capacity and feature the technology at even more events.

“Cloud-native services on AWS are fundamental to the modernization of ShotLink and help overcome the logistical challenges posed by running a sensor-automated tracking solution spread out over 150-to-250 acres on a weekly basis. The improved operational efficiency also has potential to impact tournaments for which the current setup is too time consuming and costly,” AWS’s VP of technology Francessca Vasquez, says.