The PGA Pro Who Turned Simulators Into a Business

In 2001, indoor golf simulators were a rarity found mostly in high-end country clubs or the offices of the technology companies building them. That was the year Greg Sheffield, a PGA professional, opened his first indoor golf location — a bet that the format golfers now take for granted was still years from becoming an industry.

Twenty-five years later, that bet looks considerably less unusual. The global golf simulator market has grown into a $1.97 billion industry as of 2025, projected to reach $3.35 billion by 2031 at a 9.37% compound annual growth rate, according to Mordor Intelligence’s 2026 report. Sheffield’s company, Your Indoor Golf Solutions (YIGS), now operates as a national consulting and installation business built on top of that early bet — and its own public materials frame the company’s history as tracking almost exactly alongside the industry’s rise from niche to mainstream.

The arc from that first 2001 location to a national operation offers a useful lens on how the simulator industry itself matured — and on what it took to stay relevant through every phase of that growth. It’s also a relevant case study for a market like Greenwood, where golf runs deep in the local sports culture and interest in indoor alternatives is only growing.

A PGA pro’s early bet on technology

According to the company’s public materials, Sheffield’s background as a PGA professional shaped how YIGS approached the business from the start — not purely as a technology reseller, but as an operation grounded in coaching and player development. That distinction has mattered as the launch-monitor technology itself has gotten dramatically more sophisticated over 25 years, moving from rudimentary ball-flight estimation to the kind of granular swing data top instructors now rely on.

YIGS positions itself as having built a deep relationship with Foresight Sports over that period, working with the company’s GCQuad, GC3, and GCHawk launch monitors — systems widely regarded in the industry for precision tracking. That vendor relationship, per the company’s materials, has stayed central to how YIGS approaches both home and commercial installs today.

From single location to national footprint

YIGS’s own description of its business today reflects how far the model has scaled: consulting and installation work across the DFW market, California markets including Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco, and Florida markets including Miami, Orlando, and Tampa, with the company describing itself as trusted nationwide. That geographic spread mirrors the broader industry trend — commercial simulator venues nationally have nearly tripled since 2022 to more than 1,500 locations, per the National Golf Foundation, meaning the market Sheffield entered as a near-pioneer in 2001 has become crowded with competitors who arrived decades later.

What’s stayed constant, according to the company, is the PGA Pro-owned structure — a detail YIGS emphasizes as a differentiator from installers who approach the business purely as low-voltage contractors or AV integrators rather than golf professionals.

What 25 years of installs teaches a consultant

The value of that tenure shows up less in any single install and more in pattern recognition — knowing, across hundreds of projects, which technology tier and space configuration actually serves a given client’s goals versus which one just adds cost. That’s a different skill set than simply knowing how to wire a launch monitor.

It’s also the reason YIGS positions its consulting service as being useful even for customers outside its core install markets — a national perspective built over 25 years travels, even when a truck full of equipment doesn’t always follow.

An industry that finally caught up

For much of Sheffield’s first decade in the business, indoor golf simulators were a hard sell — an expensive, unfamiliar technology in a sport still dominated by outdoor tradition. That’s no longer the environment YIGS operates in. More than 28 million Americans visited a simulator venue in 2024, according to Mordor Intelligence’s 2026 report, and 19 million now play golf exclusively off-course, per the National Golf Foundation — both figures that would have sounded implausible in the industry’s earlier years.

That shift from skeptical market to mainstream demand is, by the company’s account, the backdrop against which YIGS has scaled from a single 2001 location into a national consulting operation — the same fundamental service, offered to a market that finally caught up to the idea.

The industry Greg Sheffield entered in 2001 barely resembles the one YIGS operates in today. What’s remained constant, by the company’s own account, is the same PGA-pro judgment that started it all — the same judgment a Greenwood golfer or business owner would be tapping into with a single phone call.