NEW YORK — For the golf course of the future to be smart, it’s going to enable golfers to instantaneously use video replay to break down their swings. That’s what sports technology company PlaySight sees, and investor Greg Norman can envision it, too.
“You can do it on your phone nowadays, so making it even more technically savvy and more user-friendly — the UX experience — is where it’s all headed,” Norman said of instant video replay. “So the more we can deliver on an easier platform, it’s going to be better for everyone.”
Norman, the former golfing great on the PGA Tour, is a businessman these days with designs on changing the experience on the course. Earlier this month, he unveiled the “Shark Experience,” a connected golf cart enabling golfers to stream music and watch live sports that would be rolled out in 2018. Separately, Norman along with business partner David Chessler and Verizon Ventures are investing in PlaySight and looking to help create a smart hole.
“I believe we saw a lot of sports technology around golf in the training platform, but that will be probably one of the first times that technology is being taken actually to the golf course,” PlaySight CEO Chen Shachar said in June. “And what we have in mind is to do the same concept that we have in tennis, which means to position the camera is strategic places around the golf hole kind of to create a smart hole within the golf course where players will be able to have instant video replay of their shot and some kind of analytics around the shot, whether it will be with integration to sensors that will be attached to the club or some image processing that we will conduct from the ball.”
For PlaySight, it’s an opportunity to extend its reach after creating the SmartCourt for tennis and basketball and SmartField for soccer to bring video streams, replays and analytics. Norman thought the golf course was a space that could use that technology.
“When we approached them, they were looking for other investors to come in, and we structured a partnership,” Norman said. “It was really as simple as that, quite honestly, because they needed to grow their business. They were staying in this tennis space, but we saw there were opportunities outside of tennis.”
Shachar was happy with the $11 million investment round.
“Greg Norman is a legend and we are honored and privileged to be able to work with him,” he said. “I think Greg on top of being such a former great athlete is a visionary. I think we share the same vision of connecting the players, connecting the physical activities in the digital world, and to be able to do it together in golf is really exciting for us.
Said Norman: “That’s where the world’s headed, right? That’s exactly where it’s headed. So we believe cities are going to be connected, cars are connected, aeroplanes are going to be connected. So we see a lot of advantage in bringing technology into the game.”