Colin Senchuan did not walk on the fairways of the Albany Golf Club, nor did he hang out on the beach on the Monday before the Heroes World Challenge, the Tiger Woods game in the Bahamas. He is 15 miles northwest of the Las Vegas Strip in TPC Summerlin, with Michelle Wie West, Max Homa, Danielle Kang, Harry Higgs, David Duval, Graeme McDowell, and many other PGA Tour and LPGA Tour players.

Caddy Jim "Bones" Mackay was also there. As the master of ceremonies for the first AWS Golf Invitational, the professional amateur match of Amazon Web Services and Deloitte VIP participated in large conferences. All of them will be experimental products for new technologies that may change the way golf fans watch and interact with sports and data in multiple tournaments.

The PGA Tour is the king of the mountain when it collects data on all shots made by players in most tournaments. Using ShotLink, developed in 2003, the tour can provide fans with detailed information about the player's hitting position, all in real-time or near real-time. This is an expensive system that requires a large number of boots to be produced on the ground. Currently, ShotLink is out of reach for the PGA Tour Championship, Korn Ferry International Tour and LPGA Tour.

Colin Senchuan at TPC Summerlin (David Dusec/Golf Weekly)

In order to provide similar data outside the PGA Tour, the PGA Tour is working hard to develop a lighter and cheaper batting tracking and statistics platform for the Korn Ferry International Tour and the Champions Tour, as well as developing the next-generation ShotLink.

Professional players and professional amateur matchmaking guests who joined Amazon Web Services and TPC Summerlin (host of the PGA Tour Shriners Children's Open), all of which represent AWS. They are part of the beta test of the new system, and I am the only reporter on the scene who saw the system for the first time. The system may completely change the way golf fans interact with the sport in multiple tournaments.

This is part of a plan to help the PGA Tour and other tournaments attract new audiences through increased participation. Fans have already tasted it, using a combination of ShotLink and Amazon’s vast computing network, and being used by a new alternative system that is the best possible. Described as ShotLink Lite.

In March, the PGA Tour announced a new partnership with AWS and provided a preview for golf enthusiasts. During the 2021 Players Championship, CDW, another tour partner, helped it collect stadium data, and AWS provided support for Every Shot Live, an OTT platform that allows fans to see every shot of every player in the game. ball. That was more than 32,000 real-time shots, which is a very complex data and calculation task. AWS' powerful cloud-based tools and infrastructure help achieve this goal.

A golfer wearing the new PGA Tour wearable device (David Dusek/Golfweek)

Ken Lovell, senior vice president of golf technology at the PGA Tour, has been thinking about how to reduce the demand for ShotLink and make data collection easier. Ideally, he would like to use fewer people, make the system easier to set up and deliver at a certain cost, which is feasible for organizations without the strong financial resources of the PGA Tour.

In the AWS Golf Invitational Professional Amateur Matching Tournament, every player, including professional players, wears a small black device clipped to a belt or belt. The 3D printed box contains a GPS sensor and other electronic components. Using the data collected by the device and the information collected by the walking scorer and the TrackMan launch monitor, the goal is to see if it is possible to collect TourCast style information.

Every professional player in a Korn Ferry or Champions Tour event needs to wear one of the new sensors for the system to work properly. Will these numbers be as accurate to inches as the ShotLink system on the PGA Tour? Will not. But according to Lovell, the system can determine the player's position within a club length, which is more than the current collection.

The team has used the system to collect data on a small number of Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Champions players. Those small tests went well. This professional/amateur paired test will see if the system can track 90 golfers simultaneously in the form of a competition without the huge infrastructure required for a typical tour event.

Last week I had the opportunity to try out the next generation ShotLink with @david59duval and @HV3_Golf in Las Vegas. Some very cool things are coming soon. pic.twitter.com/h0dwYbNuR9

— David Dusek (@Golfweek_Dusek), December 9, 2021

As the morning progressed, drinks and laughter continued. No one has problems wearing the sensor. Sensors are not a problem for me, but the big winners Duval and Jimmy Walker watched me at the 10th tee (my first hole of the day). I was so nervous that my tee shot exceeded the top. However, I used my wedge to make up for myself. After the system was verified, my putter was very hot.

The 19-foot birdie putt helped the author overcome the humiliating kick-off. (PGA Tour)

As with most Beta tests, there will be some minor issues and problems throughout the day, but Lovell and his team are satisfied with how things are going.

The PGA Tour hopes to make the wearable sensor smaller and let the system be fully operational and put into use on the Korn Ferry International Tour and the PGA Tour Championship before midsummer. This means that for the first time, the statistics of these tournaments have exceeded the calculation scope of indicators such as fairway shots, green rules, and average putting levels.

If Lovell and his team can complete this work, they may also be about to enable a tour like the LPGA to provide players and fans with statistics and shot tracking.

The ShotLink system for the PGA Tour was created in the early 2000s. (Chris Cox/Getty Images)

As for the future of ShotLink on the PGA Tour, this should be the most exciting place for PGA Tour fans.

The current ShotLink system was developed nearly 20 years ago. Although some improvements have been made, the technological world has evolved and fan expectations have also changed. Golf enthusiasts need real-time video, statistics and control.

As Lovell said, the challenge is that he and his team must create the next ShotLink system that can provide all of this while maintaining the current system. This is similar to building an airplane in flight, rather than modifying a system that has been serving fans since its creation.

The goal is to make the Every Shot Live experience that golf enthusiasts experience during the 2021 Players Championship become the standard. Currently, ShotLink only captures data for one course during a multi-course tournament, but the tour hopes to collect data for each course in events such as the AT&T Pebble Beach Professional Amateur Matching Tournament and the Farmers Insurance Open. All of this requires simplified logistics, enhanced software and telecommunications networks, as well as more cameras, new sensors, and a lot of expensive high-tech equipment.

Francessca Vasquez is the vice president of technology at AWS. Her company's machine learning capabilities and analysis tools are used by multiple sports leagues, including Formula One and the National Football League, which uses AWS to develop next-generation statistics, such as data in company advertisements.

"As for how the content is created, how it is distributed, and what the experience is like, we are now in the development stage," Vasquez said. Not only does she play golf, she is also happy to tell you that she uses the pink Ping driver and Bubba Watson used the same. "I think for the PGA Tour, they are trying to bring this experience to their existing fan base, but now there is a large group of people who are not in the fan base and they want to go out and get it.

"For me, this is not a pillar of our focus. We focus on participation and the people we have today, but we are also looking at how to make the fan experience more enhanced, and in the process, how we can attract and get more Fans who may not traditionally play golf."

To this end, AWS and the PGA Tour are creating a huge data repository containing petabytes of previous shots and data. To provide some reference for this number, modern smartphones may have 128 or 256 GB of storage space, enough to hold about 50 Hollywood movies. It takes 1,000 GB to create 1 TB, and 1,000 TB equals 1 PB. Together, these are years of video, audio, and other data.

When it is categorized and added to the system to make it accessible to all AWS systems and tools, the PGA Tour can begin to use it in new and better ways, with the goal of letting it flow into the system. This will allow the Tour to focus on developing new fan-centric ways of watching games.

For example, in the near future, the tour can use AWS facial recognition tools to help cameras identify players. Therefore, whenever the camera discovers Jordan Spieth, the AWS-enabled system can add the lens to Spieth's content collection, tag it with location and searchable keywords, and then provide it to fans. Want to see all of Spieth's putters within 10 to 15 feet? Simple. Are all his tee shots par three holes? no problem. Every eagle, you are here. All of this can be done faster and with fewer people involved in the process.

The system does not yet exist, but according to Vasquez and Lovell, these are exactly what AWS and the PGA Tour want to provide.

"I think the biggest area the tour wants to focus on is the all-round experience," Vasquez said. "Things like StatCast and leaderboards will have new features, but the real value is not just data, but to create an experience that makes the end user feel like they are there."

Therefore, while the PGA Tour is committed to bringing data collection and more statistics to more tours in the coming weeks and months, the future of how golf fans experience the game looks brighter.

(Editor's note: This article has been updated to better illustrate the relationship between travel partner CDW and AWS.)

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