golf simulator | Shooting 90

I love living in northern Wisconsin. I enjoy the four seasons, even the beautiful white, cold winters we experience. The winters can be long however, up to six months in length. It can be a struggle to work on your golf game. Golf vacations are costly, out of the reach of many golfers, and they only last a few weeks at best out of the long winter.

My solution for many years was a DIY Indoor Golf Net in my basement paired with a SkyGolf SkyPro Bluetooth Golf Swing Analyzer.

This setup worked incredibly well but it had a few drawbacks.

While I’m happy I have an eight-foot ceiling in my basement and not anything shorter, it restricted me to hitting irons. I could not hit drivers, woods, or hybrids. The swing analyzer tracked a large amount of data but lacked a few data points I really wanted. It didn’t record swing path or clubface angle at impact, which was surprising since it did record clubface angle at several other swing positions.

When my son was in eighth grade and working hard on his game to play on the high school golf team when he got there, we would drive one and a half to two hours south to rent time on an indoor golf simulator. The time and money it takes for a four hour round trip by car limited us to three or four times at best during the winter.

Then everything changed. Our local bowling alley ten miles away installed a golf simulator. Only a year later, Lakeland Fitness and Golf, where we golf now in the winter, opened a room with four simulators!

Whether you are practicing on the range or playing the simulated real-life course you’ve always dreamed of, a golf simulator provides an incredible amount of data about your swing. This allows you to feel much more easily what your club is doing in the swing. You can then build more self-awareness of your swing, giving you greater control of it.

Still, golf simulators are not the real thing. The biggest difference is you are hitting off a mat, with it serving up a perfect, level lie for every shot. To make matters worse, while playing a course on the simulator, you’ll get this same, perfect, level lie whether you’re on a hill, in the rough, or in a bunker. There is a Terrain Penalty setting you can enable on the TruGolf E6 Connect simulator I play on. Like real life, it penalizes you for missing the fairway. The power and spin of your shot will be reduced to varying degrees for lies off the fairway. You must make a judgement if and how much you’ll have to club up.

Here’s the funny thing. I have yet to see anyone besides myself have the terrain penalty setting enabled.

Also, most people do not like to putt on simulators, so they either let the computer decide how many putts they take as a score on the hole, or they have it set for ten-foot or even larger gimmies. “Reading” the greens, if you can call it that, is not realistic on golf simulators. I do, however, find the distance accuracy to be good. I enjoy working on my putting stance, stroke, and distance control while playing on the simulator and find it beneficial to my game, so I set the putting to five-foot gimmies.

One last observation I have noticed on the TruGolf E6 Connect simulators I play on is that my shots off the tee with my driver are twenty to thirty yards longer on many occasions. Given this, I play the back tees so that my approach shots are most like what they are on outside golf courses. I do not want to regularly be hitting wedges into greens on a simulator when I’m hitting 7 or 8 irons on the course. Be aware of any anomalies like this on the simulators you play on.

Adjust the settings of the simulator you play to best mimic what you see on an actual golf course. The goal is to get the simulation as much like real life as possible. This means you will not score as low but you’ll be better prepared when golf season comes around and it counts.

We have numerous opportunities every day out in the world to exercise our faith. Do not take the easy route. Go out of your way to serve others and tell them about Jesus. By taking advantage of every opportunity to show our faith and tell others of Jesus, we are building our faith.

Paul instructs Timothy in 1 Timothy 4:13-15 to exercise the gifts that God has given him so all may see his progress.

1 Timothy 4:13-15

Until I come, pay attention to reading, to exhortation, and to teaching.

Don’t neglect the gift that is in you, which was given to you by prophecy with the laying on of the hands of the elders.

Be diligent in these things. Give yourself wholly to them, that your progress may be revealed to all.

The winters ~~can be~~ are long here in northern Wisconsin. Courses are closed by the third weekend in October and will not open until April. Those of us who want to improve our games the quickest must move our practice indoors.

I’ve already written about my visit to Inside Edge Golf. What an awesome facility. Unfortunately I live almost a four hour drive from Inside Edge in the Twin Cities area.

We currently utilize Premier Sports Academy just outside Wausau, WI for access to a golf simulator. They are primarily an indoor baseball facility, with some soccer and golf. They have a very nice room with an aboutGolf simulator, the same simulators that can be found at Inside Edge Golf.

The golf at Premier Sports Academy is in it’s own room, completely separated from any other activities there. I love that, especially for instruction. My son is getting instruction there over the winter, gearing up for freshman high school golf in the spring.

I could also get used to being in a more open environment, such as in your own stall at Inside Edge Golf. That setup does have its advantages, such as when playing in a league, which would be much more social at a bigger, more open facility.

My son and I play 18 holes on the simulator after his instruction. Playing on a simulator is great but it is not a replacement for the real thing. If our winters were 40 degree Fahrenheit weather so our courses could remain open, I’d be at the course practicing and playing, never once going to the simulator. Simulators are fantastic for full swing, even half and three quarter swing work, but the realism drops off dramatically for pitching, chipping and putting. Here’s the number one problem with simulators. It’s the same problem that the practice range presents you. A golf simulator serves up a perfect lie on every shot. There is just no simulation for real ground on a real course. You can simulate wind on a simulator, it’s just difficult to simulate rough and angled lies. You should be scoring lower on a simulator, just for this reason.

So before a few places in Wausau figured out how to make simulators financially viable for them, it would have been a 3 hour drive for us to get simulator time. Even the hour and a half drive we do now could not be possible for some of you. I get that.

The next best option is to build your own indoor golf net.

Ideally, you would have a spot for the net in your basement or in a heated garage or shed. Our net is in the unfinished side of our basement. Those without a spot in their house could look nearby for possibilities. I know I could get access to the gym in our community center. The indoor golf net we have built is not easily portable although I wonder if I could leave the net there and allow others to use it.

Of course, rarely is any solution perfect. Our basement height only allows us to swing irons. There is not enough clearance for us to swing drivers. An inconvenience for sure, but definitely not a deal breaker. Most swing concepts are the same for irons and drivers, and we just work on driver a bit more when we get back outside.

My point here is that a DIY indoor golf net is an option for many of us.

It is important to practice your full swing year round. It is also more important to practice your short game and putting year round, and in an upcoming post we’ll look into easy ways to do that.

By Scott Messner

By Shooting 90