Golf Too Expensive? He Opened a Sim Facility

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Golf is pricing out its own people.

Not the country club members who treat initiation fees like car payments. The regular guys. The $50-round, carry-your-bag, play-at-dawn-to-get-18-in guys. The ones who love this sport and are starting to wonder if they can afford to keep loving it.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story on July 1 about a guy named Steven who opened Sweet Spot Golf Club in Franklin, Wisconsin. His reason, in his own words: “Golf became too expensive.”

He didn’t say it with a shrug. He said it like a man who’d done the math, looked at his bank account, and decided the only winning move was to stop paying the old game’s prices and build a new one.

So he built a sim facility.

The Math That Broke Him

What happened to golf in the last five years:

Greens fees are up 15-25% since 2021, depending on where you live. Equipment costs are up 20% - a new driver that cost $399 in 2019 is $599 today. Range balls went from $8 a bucket to $14. Club memberships that were $3,000 are now $5,500. And that’s before you factor in gas, food, and the six beers you buy because you’re walking 18 holes in July.

The average golfer spends $2,500-3,500 a year on the sport. That’s a car payment. That’s a vacation. That’s a golf simulator in your garage, paid for in 18 months, that you can use forever without paying another greens fee.

I’m not saying you should quit outdoor golf. I’m saying the math doesn’t lie.

What Sweet Spot Golf Club Is

It’s a sim facility in Franklin, Wisconsin. Indoor bays. Launch monitors. A screen you hit into. The same format that’s been exploding across America — 14 new facilities in a single week in early July, from Michigan to New Jersey to California.

But Sweet Spot is interesting for one specific reason: the founder didn’t open a sim lounge because he was a savvy entrepreneur who saw a gap in the market. He opened it because he literally could not afford to play golf the normal way anymore.

That’s a different origin story than most. And it tells you something about where this industry is headed.

The Crisis Behind the Boom

The sim facility boom isn’t just about technology getting better. It’s about the old model breaking.

Traditional golf has a supply problem. Courses aren’t getting built fast enough to meet demand. The post-COVID golf boom added 3 million new players to a system that was already strained. Tee times that used to be available are now booked three weeks out. Weekend rounds take five and a half hours. The experience is worse and more expensive than it was five years ago, and nobody in the golf industry seems interested in fixing it because the money keeps flowing.

Sim golf is the market’s response. It’s cheaper per hour. It’s available at 10 PM. It doesn’t take five hours. There’s no dress code. You can drink your own beer.

The sim facility boom isn’t a niche trend. It’s the natural outcome of a sport that grew faster than its infrastructure could handle.

What This Means for Your Home Sim

Every time someone walks into Sweet Spot Golf Club and hits a virtual round, two things happen:

1. They pay $30-40 for an hour of sim time
2. They think “I could do this at home”

Facilities like Sweet Spot are the top of the funnel. They’re the test drive. They’re the reason someone who’s never swung a club indoors realizes a $1,999 launch monitor plus $500 for a net equals infinite golf for the cost of two months of outdoor play.

The sim facility boom feeds the home sim market. They’re not competitors — they’re upstream.

Steven in Milwaukee didn’t know he was building a funnel for the home sim industry. He just knew outdoor golf was too expensive and he wanted to keep playing. But that’s exactly what he did.

The Trend That’s Not Slowing Down

Fortune Business Insights puts the global golf simulator market at $1.9 billion in 2025, on track for $4.7 billion by 2034. That’s 10.2% CAGR. Those are analyst numbers, which means they’re usually conservative.

The real signal is what’s happening on the ground. Sweet Spot in Wisconsin. Fore! on Fourth in Indiana. Pure Strike in Virginia. Five facilities in New Jersey. Three in Michigan. A 24-hour sim center in California. High schools building sim labs in Kentucky. And just this week, five more opened in Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Iowa — because the trend isn’t slowing down.

These aren’t corporate expansions from a single chain. This is organic growth from people who love golf and realized the old way wasn’t working anymore.

Steven’s story is the best argument for sim golf I’ve heard all year. Not because of the technology. Not because of the specs. Because golf priced him out, and he built his way back in.

If you’re doing the same math Steven did, start here. The number is smaller than you think. And the winter is coming.

Facility boom coverage: 14+ facilities in a single week → | Industry growth 2026 → | How TGL made sims mainstream →