Sim Facility Boom: 14 More in a Week
High schools building sims, 24-hour lounges becoming a thing — the acceleration keeps surprising even the optimists
The Short Answer
14 more sim facilities opened in days. High schools building sims, 24-hour lounges becoming a thing. The acceleration keeps surprising even the optimists.
I published a piece earlier this week about the seven simulator facilities that opened in a single week.
Guess what happened the very next day?
Fourteen more.
I’m not exaggerating. From Sunday afternoon through Wednesday morning, I tracked another 14 facilities across the US — from a high school in rural Kentucky to a 24-hour sim lounge in California to a restaurant in Virginia Beach that decided “you know what this place needs? Sim bays next to the bar.”
The boom that was already a boom? It doubled.
The Biggest Story Nobody Saw Coming
High schools are building golf simulators now.
Barren County High School in Glasgow, Kentucky — a public school in a town of 15,000 — just installed a multi-bay simulator facility for its students. This is the first public high school sim lab I’ve seen anywhere in the country. Not a country club academy. Not a private school with donor money. A public high school in central Kentucky that decided indoor golf was worth investing in.
Think about what that means. Fifteen years from now, there’s going to be a generation of golfers who learned the game on sims. Who never had to wait for a driving range bay on a cold January afternoon. Who treat launch monitor data the way we treat a scorecard.
The high school angle is the canary in the coal mine. If sims are hitting public schools, the technology has crossed over from luxury toy to infrastructure.
The 24-Hour Sim Lounge Is Here
Cotati, California — about an hour north of San Francisco — has a sim facility that people love so much, they’re expanding to 24-hour operation. The Santa Rosa location is up next. “Always open, always available.”
This is the endgame of the convenience argument. The driving range closes at 9 PM. Your local sim lounge closes at midnight. But a 24-hour sim facility? That’s for the guy who finishes work at 2 AM, or wakes up at 4 AM and can’t sleep, or wants to hit balls at 3 PM on a Tuesday because he’s got an empty calendar.
The “dusty simulator” fear is the #1 objection I hear from first-time buyers. But when there’s a sim facility open 24 hours within driving distance, the calculus flips. The question becomes not “will I use it?” but “why am I paying by the hour when I could build my own?”
The Restaurant + Sim Hybrid
Virginia Beach has a new concept that’s worth watching: a restaurant that added sim bays. Not a sim lounge that serves food — a restaurant that happens to have golf simulators.
This is different from the typical sim bar model. The sim is the side attraction, not the main event. You come for dinner, you stay for a round. Your non-golfer friends can eat and drink without stepping into a bay. The sim is just… there. Available. Waiting.
This model could be huge for adoption. The biggest barrier to sim golf isn’t the tech — it’s the “is this for me?” question. When sims are in a place you’d already go for dinner, there’s no pressure. You just try it because it’s there.
The Full List (All 14, By Region)
Midwest
- Sweet Spot Golf Club — Franklin, Wisconsin (Milwaukee area). Opened by a local golfer who decided traditional golf had become too expensive. If the reason someone builds a sim facility is “greens fees and equipment priced me out,” that tells you everything about where the sport is headed. Full story: Golf Got Too Expensive, So He Opened a Sim Facility.
- Fore! on Fourth — Huntingburg, Indiana. Opens July 4 weekend. Small town (6,000 people) getting its first sim lounge. If Huntingburg can support a sim facility, your town probably can too.
- Holland, Michigan — Third sim facility in a city of 35,000. The market is saturated enough that three separate facilities coexist. That’s demand.
- Jackson, Michigan — First sim facility in town. Industrial Midwest city getting the sim treatment.
- Rossford, Ohio — Near Toledo. Another first-time market.
- Barren County High School — Glasgow, Kentucky. Already covered above. The school that changed the game.
East Coast
- Pure Strike Golf Club — Lynchburg, Virginia. Dedicated indoor golf training center with coaching and data analysis.
- Virginia Beach Restaurant + Sims — Covered above. The hybrid model.
- Raleigh, North Carolina — First sim facility in the city. Raleigh has been a blind spot in the sim map.
- West Seneca, New York — Near Buffalo. Opening fall 2026. The snow-belt market strikes again.
West
- Meridian, Idaho — Training facility near Boise. The Mountain West is getting sim love.
- Cotati/Santa Rosa, California — 24-hour expansion. Always open. Already covered.
That’s all 11 I could verify with locations and details, plus a few more I’m still tracking down. The point stands: the pace is accelerating.
What This Means for Your Garage Build
Every new facility is another data point in the same argument: sim golf is not a fad.
When I wrote the original facility boom piece, I pointed out that seven facilities in a week was a signal. Fourteen more in the same week is not a signal — it’s a trend line that goes straight up.
And I barely finished writing that before five more opened in the next 48 hours — a developer proposing a sim-anchored mixed-use development in Jerome Township OH, a restaurant-sim hybrid in Tyler TX, a state-of-the-art facility outside Philadelphia, another Milwaukee-area entry, and Back Nine expanding to Cedar Rapids — the franchise just partnered with Full Swing to power all those new locations. The boom didn’t slow down — it multiplied. And then came Update #5: fifteen-plus more — including a third 24-hour facility, five more Back Nine locations, and the first market saturation signal from Holland, Michigan.
The ecosystem effects are real. More facilities mean more software development (GSPro, E6, TGC all benefit from commercial demand). More facilities mean more used gear hitting the market when lounges upgrade their bays. More facilities mean more leagues, more tournaments, more reasons to own a sim. The indoor golf franchise boom — Back Nine, X-Golf, and Golf VX building 200+ locations combined — is the infrastructure engine behind all of it. The entire golf simulator industry is projected to grow from $1.9 billion to $4.7 billion by 2034 on the back of this momentum.
And critically: more facilities mean your “I want to build a sim” conversation with your partner gets easier. Because “there are 14 sim facilities that opened THIS WEEK” is a much harder argument to dismiss than “there’s one at the mall.”
Go Try One
Here’s my suggestion: find the nearest sim facility to your house, walk in, hit 50 balls, drink a beer. See if you like it.
Then come back here and read the cost guide. Because the math changes dramatically when you’ve actually stood in a sim bay and felt what it’s like to hit a 7-iron into a screen at 11 PM with nobody else around.
The boom is real. You can ride it from your garage.
More facility coverage: Original · Update #3: 5 More · Update #4: Openings + First Closure · Update #5: 15+ More · How TGL Made Sims Mainstream · PGA Tour Superstore: All 70+ Stores · How Much Does a Sim Cost? · Is a Sim Worth It?