Built from the grass up: How and why TGL is playing off real turf

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – It would have been an innocuous compliment to anyone else. To Tanner Coffman, there were no two words he’d rather hear.

Rory McIlroy was in town last summer to check on the progress of TGL presented by SoFi, the new tech-infused golf league in which McIlroy holds a direct ownership stake, and there was plenty still in flux. The league’s arena, SoFi Center, was not yet finished. The schedule was not finalized. The intricacies of the broadcast and competition were in place, but how it would all mesh remained hypothetical.

One thing was clearly ready. McIlroy felt it in his feet and with his clubface.

“Nice grass!” McIlroy exclaimed to Coffman, TGL’s director of turf management. The Northern Irishman needed just a few shots in the league’s testing center to know.

In Coffman’s line of work, no feedback is usually good, but he’ll gladly take the occasional compliment, especially from one of the best golfers of his lifetime. It’s just grass, yes, but it’s been a process 36 months in the making to get the turf ready for the TGL’s debut season, which kicks off Tuesday.

Yes, that’s right. TGL, an indoor league that promises to infuse new technology into a grand old game, will be played on the same surfaces on which golf was founded. Players will hit full shots off grass and play out of sand when shots go awry.

TGL features a giant screen for players to hit into, a shot clock that will force them to keep pace and live microphones that allow them to speak directly to television hosts. The whole premise of the league is based on innovation. It’s introducing a way to play golf indoors. But there’s one thing the league is trying desperately to keep the same: the ground.

TGL competition will be played on real grass, a special Tahoma 31 Bermuda blend grown just outside the stadium. It’s an integral part of TGL’s model. They want to be different from traditional pro golf but don’t want to stray too far away. What better way to ground themselves than with the ground itself?

All shots outside about 50 yards will be played off real fairway grass or a thick cut of rough. So while everything surrounding the player screams non-traditional, the clubface will sing a different, welcome tune as it slides familiarly through the turf.

“The first one or two shots they take off the grass, you can kind of see it in their face. It's like they can't hide the grin,” Coffman said.

Players will start by hitting tee shots off the fairway cut. Depending on where their ball settles on the hole, they will place their ball in a fairway cut of grass (0.5 inches), a rough cut (3 inches) or sand. The bunkers are even filled with the same white sand Augusta National uses to fill its distinctive bunkers.

Inside 50 yards, players move to the “GreenZone,” an engineered artificial turf area that Armstrong contends reacts more realistically to spin and rollout than any grass they attempted to install. It also lets TGL rotate the playing surface. The 3,800-square-foot putting surface and three sand bunkers sit on a 41-yard-wide turntable that rotates 360 degrees. The green itself features nearly 600 actuators embedded under the putting surface to change the slope of the green, creating hole-to-hole variations, a critical component to keeping each hole fresh.

“It's not real golf on a golf course, but I think to get the best result with the best players, I think having those kinds of variables is a really good thing,” said Adam Scott, one of 24 TOUR players competing in TGL’s inaugural season. The Australian plays on Boston Common Golf Club alongside McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama and Keegan Bradley.

The debate about using real or synthetic turf dates back nearly as far as the idea of TGL. The general premise of a league that offers indoor simulator golf on steroids took hold in September 2022. Conversations about potential playing surfaces began shortly after. Real grass was the goal, adding another differentiator from the AstroTurf that was commonplace in the simulator world. But nobody knew how realistic the grass would be.

When TGL was weighing its options, Scott Armstrong, TGL’s vice president of competition technology and operations, sought the advice of Dr. Trey Rogers, a professor of turfgrass management at Michigan State. Rogers, who oversaw the growing indoor grass at Detroit’s Silverdome for the 1994 FIFA World Cup, assured Armstrong it was feasible.

“He called it one of the most cutting-edge things he's seen in a long time, so that was good and bad knowing that we were doing something that hadn't been done before necessarily. But he never pumped the brakes,” Armstrong said. “He always supported the idea that it was possible that we could do anything we wanted with time and money and resources.”

That spurred initial hopes of a fully grassed playing surface from the tee boxes through the green site, though that was ultimately discarded for the current setup of a mix between real grass and artificial turf.

Still, there was an issue of how to source and grow the grass effectively, which led Armstrong to Chad Price’s Carolina Green, a company that specializes in growing turf on plastic. And that’s when Coffman got involved.

He had worked on golf courses previously but had spent the last few years growing and maintaining soccer fields for MLS teams building new stadiums. TGL was far from his radar until he got a message from a recruiter.

“I probably read the email five or six times and I'm just like, ‘I don't get it.’ They're throwing these keywords at me like ‘Tiger’ and ‘Rory’ and ‘stadium golf,’ and it wasn't clicking,” Coffman said. “I was like, ‘Oh, y'all don't really need a groundskeeper.’ But as I learned more about the strategy and what we're actually trying to do here, I was like, ‘Oh, this is something that no one in the world has done yet.’”

To prepare for the league’s inception, Coffman needed to grow pallets of grass outside in Florida that could then be seamlessly transported indoors. Once in the SoFi Center, the grass needed to survive cooler temperatures, harsh lighting and the wear and tear of a golf match. Growing the grass in plastic quickly became the lynchpin to success.

“Because it's actually growing on plastic, you can just roll it up,” Coffman said. “So all of the roots are perfectly intact. You're not stressing the plant by chopping off its root system, which is its life support. Having all of those roots kind of twisted up and curled up at the top actually gives it a nice dirty footing and stance.”

A nursery of 1,000 square feet of grass sits about 100 yards from the SoFi Center. It’s split into individual 7x7-foot pallets that each weigh 2,200 pounds. A few days before a match, Coffman’s team will bring a gameday’s worth of pallets inside the stadium to allow it to adjust to the climate. LED grow lights keep the grass healthy for the final 72 hours before it’s transported into the arena via a trolley system that “acts like a monorail” and places it onto the playing surface. One pallet will be used for warmups and another will be used for that night’s match. Coffman’s team will repair each pallet, expecting it to be ready for use again three or four weeks later.

Early player feedback has been remarkably positive, Coffman said.

Billy Horschel likened the feel of the turf to TPC Sawgrass.

“The club can dig a little bit, and you hit one a little heavy it's going to be really heavy, the way the ball sits in that little bit of rough we have. Very similar to what I expect at home right now practicing,” said Horschel, a member of Atlanta Drive alongside Patrick Cantlay, Justin Thomas and Lucas Glover.

It’s been a tougher transition getting used to the GreenZone. The green surrounds can play into or down grain depending on where a shot ends up. The downgrain shots react mostly how players expect. The into-the-grain shots have been much more challenging.

“Sometimes it comes out really hot, sometimes it comes out dead,” said Wyndham Clark, who tested out the grass during the TGL’s media day in December. “That's something that I think all of us have to practice, and I think using your 60 (60-degree wedge), you probably won't, but that's similar to what you would have into the grain on normal grass.”

Then there’s the unique challenge of putting. On longer putts, most of the world’s top players identify a spot just a foot or two in front of them, which they plan to roll the ball over. It’s often a slight imperfection or discoloration in the green. There are none of those on the TGL green. The artificial surface is almost too pure. Then there’s the lighting. With stadium lights shining down on the golfers, it’s much harder to read putts, with light flattening how the green looks to the naked eye. With a 40-second shot clock bearing down on players, there won’t be any time to spare for AimPoint or in-depth reads.

All those variables coalesce into a product that TGL is hopeful will resonate.

“When someone hears about us being simulator golf, maybe a little gimmicky, and it's not that,” said Horschel. “We're hitting off real grass, we're hitting real shots. We're playing on some artificial surface, but there's a lot of technology that's gone into this.”