Back Nine: 5 New Jersey Sim Locations

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Back Nine Golf is doubling down on New Jersey.

The indoor simulator chain, which already runs five facilities across the state, announced plans to open five more in Cranford, Englewood, Sayreville, Vineland, and Watchung. That’s a 100 percent expansion in a single wave.

The new locations break down like this:

• Sayreville — 2909 Washington Road in Parlin
• Watchung — 1701 Route 22
• Cranford — 126 South Ave. East
• Vineland — 301 S. Main Road
• Englewood — 32-40 North Dean Street

The Model

Back Nine runs on a simple pitch: indoor simulator bays, climate-controlled, book by the hour, no membership required. You walk in, you play. That’s it.

They also sell individual and corporate memberships for the regulars — 24/7 access, unlimited tee times, guest passes, merchandise discounts. Corporate packages let businesses build custom plans for client entertainment or employee perks. But the core offering is pay-per-play, which is smart because it eliminates the biggest barrier to entry for casual golfers.

Most people don’t want to commit to a $200/month membership at an indoor golf facility. They want to show up on a rainy Saturday, hit balls for an hour, and leave. Back Nine lets them do that.

The Bigger Pattern

This is not an isolated story. I’ve written about indoor simulator facilities opening in Lynchburg (Pure Strike Golf Club), Milwaukee, League City, Berlin CT, and Tyler TX in just the last month. The Back Nine New Jersey expansion is the largest single-announcement push I’ve seen outside of the GolfZone and Five Iron chains.

New Jersey specifically is interesting because it’s an indoor sim sweet spot. You’ve got a dense population, cold winters, and enough affluent suburbs to support premium pricing. Five Iron Golf launched in Norwalk, Connecticut earlier this year and has been expanding aggressively. Back Nine is doing the same thing in the Garden State.

The addressable market for indoor sim facilities is still underrated. Most of these places run at 60-70 percent capacity during peak hours and 30-40 percent during off-peak. The math works at those utilization rates because the marginal cost of an additional bay-hour is almost zero — you’re paying rent, utilities, and a front desk person regardless of whether the bays are full.

The challenge is capital. Each location costs probably $200,000 to $400,000 to build out depending on the size and quality of the sim hardware. Back Nine isn’t publicly disclosing their funding, but five simultaneous builds suggests they have either strong cash flow, a good banking relationship, or outside investment.

What Works About This

The no-membership model is the right call for 2026. The indoor sim facility market has bifurcated into two camps: the membership-heavy models (think country club lite) and the pay-per-play models (think bowling alley with better technology). Back Nine is firmly in the second camp, and that’s where the growth is.

Casual golfers don’t want another monthly bill. They want to warm up before a round, or scratch the itch when it’s 20 degrees outside, or take a date somewhere that isn’t Topgolf. Pay-per-play captures all of those use cases without the friction of a commitment.

The 24/7 access for members is also smart. Night owls, shift workers, and parents who can only play after the kids go to bed — these are real demographics that traditional golf courses ignore. Indoor sims that offer round-the-clock access tap into a market that has nowhere else to go.

What I’d Watch

The risk for Back Nine is the same risk every indoor sim chain faces: competition from Five Iron, from Topgolf’s new Swing Suite expansion, from standalone sim bars, and from the guy who decides to build a sim in his own garage and never leaves home again.

Five locations to ten is a big jump. Managing quality across ten facilities is harder than managing five. Staffing, maintenance, software updates, course library management — these all get harder at scale.

But for now, the momentum is real. Five new locations in New Jersey means more golfers hitting balls indoors, more people learning that sim golf is a real thing, and more data points for the thesis that indoor golf isn’t a trend — it’s a category.

If you’re in North Jersey and want to hit balls without freezing, you’ve got options. And those options just got a lot closer.

— Ace