Hello, I am Mike Hendrix My guest today is Scott Mingay and we are on the Tech Caddie podcast. Scott, welcome to the show. Thanks Mike, thanks for having us. Absolutely. So we're excited to have you in. You're with the USGA obviously. And we've spoken with Don Rea from the PGA of America. I think it's important to, while we love to talk to operators,

And we certainly like to talk to technologists. It's important occasionally to bring in an association or something, right? To get a little bit of a more of an overview. And so I'm excited to have you on today and to talk about, we're gonna talk about something that you all have developed over the last year, the GS3. But before we do that, talk about the USGA a little bit. Talk about how you came to be at the USGA, what your career path has been. I think people are always interested to know about jobs in the industry.

Yeah, thanks. And you know, certainly, like I said, thanks for having me on the podcast. It's always a you know, a ton of fun to be on these things. USGA it's exciting time. We've got the US Women's Open going on right now. And yesterday was an exciting day. And we have the US Open here in just a couple weeks. And then certainly everything we'll talk about today with Deacon and GS3 and the progress we're making. You know, it's a great phenomenal time to be at the USGA. You know, my path

The golf is interesting, right? Almost everybody I work with, they were born into golf, right? They were born with a golf club in their hand. They've worked in golf or been a part of golf their entire life. And for me, golf didn't really become something to me, actually, until I got to the USGA. So my background was a motorsport background. My whole life, I always wanted to work in professional motorsport, work on cars, grew up working on cars.

I went to Rutgers University and got my degree in mechanical engineering. And it's interesting now, looking back, is Rutgers has got one of the best turf programs in the world. And when I was there, I was on the complete other side of the campus. I had no idea that that world even existed. Now I go back there and I don't go to the engineering side of the campus. I go to the turf side of the campus. But after college, I worked in NASCAR. And then I worked on the Corvette race team for the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

Phenomenal time, learned a ton. And everything we did was very data driven, right? Like lots of sensors, lots of analysis on how things worked. How do we show up to the track, you know, very prepared with a playbook of options and things to do. And that was a great chapter of my life. And then did you, Scott, did you go to high school in New Jersey? Why, why? I did. So I'm in New Jersey, native born and bred. It was born in Jersey city, grew up for a long time, Jersey city.

You know, then moved out to the suburbs a little bit. I went to Rutgers and then moved all around the country. So I'm in Columbus, like a lot of people know, and we're actually in Upper Arlington. But I was four years in New Jersey for high school as well. I had a lot of friends that went through Rutgers before it was in the Big Ten, but now you're up in the Big Ten. So that's it. Yeah.

Even better to have you on the podcast. Yeah, I was, I was a Big East when I was at Rutgers, we were the big East and my freshman year was the upset on Louisville. so that, that's my claim to fame there. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. So, okay. So motor sports, maybe because of your parents, maybe your dad was a motorhead or something. What drew you to that originally? Yeah. I mean, it was, I grew up, my dad owned the contracting company. very much owner operator rate. that's the life I grew up. always grew up.

racing dirt bikes, things like that. And down the shore where my grandparents had a very small cottage before it kind of blew up to become the shore. The Wall Township dirt track was very famous. And so I'd go there every Friday night. And I was a little kid with my grandfather and eventually found my way into the back of it working on cars. And you start by sweeping up a trailer for somebody and eventually they'll let you start working on things. And that was kind of the pathway for me there.

That's excellent. And so, and so you do this stint in motorsports. What drew you to the USGA? So for me, you know, I wanted to move back home, be close to family, something that I'm sure resonates with a lot of people, spend a lot of time on the road, right? You know, when, when I was on a motorsport team, 200 plus nights a year in hotels was very common. So we were just looking to move back, be closer to family, spend a little less time on the road. When I did that, I was like,

I can't take a desk engineering job, right? There's no way after that career, I'm going back and sitting at a desk and drawing parts, you know, 40 hours a week. And so I was like, I really wanted something fun. And Dr. Steve Quinawala was a mentor when I was in college and he happened to work in the equipment standards group at the time at the USGA. And they had a couple of people retire and they had some spots open and they had a spot open for a research engineer. And so he posted it actually in an alumni group.

that we have for the Rutgers team that I was a part of when I was there. And so I was very interested. I was like, this sounds awesome. I get to test sporting equipment. When I was a little kid, Tiger Woods was all the rage. And so like I said, I didn't grow up in golf, but I've grown up a sports person my entire life, right? So huge into sports. I'm like, this sounds like a great job. So I applied, didn't hear anything back.

And I talked to Steve and he's like, well, you know, the USGA is really like a golfer driven community. I'm like, well, I'm getting this job. This sounds fun. So I was home over Easter break and I showed up and requested an interview and 11 years later, I'm still here. Well, good for you. And today, what's your title and what's your role? I'm not sure that the average person knows how deeply you all are involved with, with the Green Section and whatnot, but why don't you talk a little bit about your, your, your title and your role.

before we get into your product here. Yeah, and I think it's important, you know, of how the product even came about. So like I said, I've been at the USGA 11 years. You know, I've moved from our equipment standards group to an innovation group. I spent some time on GHIN I now within the Green Section. So currently, I'm our senior director of our facility product. So my team, we have a bunch of engineers, some product managers, data scientists, and you know, we work on all things.

facility tools. So everything from a stimp meter all the way through GS3, Deacon, and hopefully some other cool technology innovations that you'll see coming out. And that's actually what got my attention because obviously, listen, we're trying to help golf course operators, whether that's the owner or the general manager or the director of golf or whomever, although I will say, I worked in Minnesota a lot.

for in golf and the superintendents in Minnesota tend to be the general managers as well. Right. So we want to include the superintendent also, regardless, you all are, are creating products and, and frankly, creating platforms, that directly work with individual golf courses. And I'm not sure a lot of people, understand that we'll get into Deacon here in a little bit, but I started to see some of the things you all were developing.

frankly, is a way to bring the superintendent and the director of golf closer together and to get them to work as a team more often. And again, we'll get into that. But that's really why you're here because today the USGA is delivering technology product services at the golf course level to help golf courses be better, not just host championships, not just be the stewards of rules, but you are really becoming quite integrated at the golf course level. And so I think that's important to tell that story.

It is and I think it's important to to realize that's the why of what we're doing right. You know when we started this and we'll get into kind of the origin story of you know GS3, Deacon and many of the things that came before it. But a lot of it really came from the USGS focused on golf course sustainability and golfer experience right like those things aren't they can't be mutually exclusive because we can have something that's very sustainable that nobody wants to play. We can also have something that everyone wants to play that isn't very.

sustainable either economically or environmentally. And that's right. And you all I think have been leaders in identifying how important greens are to playing experience. And if playing experience is excellent, it's good for everybody in this industry, right? I mean, that's ultimately what's going to drive everything. So yeah, no, 100%. And like I said, it's all about how do we bring that together and what's the pieces of data that really matter? So there's a little tagline you'll see us run with is the measure what matters, right? Because,

You can measure a lot of different things, but ultimately, what is the things that impact that experience that you have as a golfer? And how do we drive that experience and make it better and better so that more people want to play the game and that the game is sustainable for years to come? Yeah, my friends in baseball, I think, are still trying to figure out what matters. They measure so many things in baseball that sometimes it gets a little confusing as to what trumps what. So, yeah, there's a lot of metrics over there.

Yeah, it can be and you know, it's something I've taken from my motorsport days is, you know, we were the same way we measure tons and tons and tons and tons of stuff, right? At the end of the day came down to what did the stopwatch say? Could the driver drive the car? Right. And, you know, that that always resonates me with me still to this day of like, okay, cool, we can go measure all of these things. Can we do anything about it? Does it actually, you know, does it actually matter? Right. And that's a good way to segue into GS3 because,

I think, and you certainly, you'll let us know for sure, but it's one thing to know how firm a green is, or it's one thing to know how fast a green is, but if the ball is bouncing all over the place, I'm not sure that's included in the story. And that I think is part of the value of GS3. Why don't you talk about this product? And so just to set it up for everyone, we're talking about a physical golf ball.

certainly not a ball that we would hit with a club. You can show it. Not a ball you would hit with a club, but a golf ball that gives us a lot of data about the putting surface. Explain that if you would, and let's maybe get into how the heck you guys even built this thing. Yeah, so the GS3 came out, it really came out the past years when general availability came. So it's the same size and weight as a golf ball. Like I said, you can't hit it with a club. We always like to say, you can hit it once with a club, but

That'll be the last time you do that. And that might be a little expensive. But when you can roll the ball, it'll give you green speed. It'll also give you smoothness and trueness, which we'll get into, which is basically how bumpy the green is and how well the ball follows that pathway. And then you can put it in a drop fixture, and you'll also get a firmness reading, which gives you how firm the green is, essentially how receptive your shot is into that green.

product, the ball, it's really not intended for individual golfers as I see it. It's intended for people that are running golf courses, certainly maybe tours, people that are conducting a high level tournaments would could be a customer as well. One question I have about it is how many different places on a single green are do you all recommend to use the ball to get the you know, your data for the day, so to speak? Yeah.

The way we look at it is there's two areas when you're doing a speed or smoothness that you can collect data on. So a lot of times, the spot that you're going to collect green speed is not a great spot to collect smoothness data, right? Because what we're really interested in, and we'll talk about a bit later, is how does foot traffic over the course of a day, or how does maintenance practices impact that smoothness, and how much does that actually change over the course of a day?

We want to collect those pieces of measurements where that's happening. So around the hole is really important. When we're doing that, we like to collect eight rolls. After eight rolls, we feel that you can properly characterize the smoothness of a playing surface. When we're doing green speed, we really do need a pretty flat spot. And so that's not always going to be where we put a whole location. So a lot of times those are tested on the fringes. But what Deacon allows us to do, which is the software that

that the GS3 connects to, it allows us to separate those, right? We can take a speed reading on the side, get that green speed in a good spot to take that reading, and then go over by where the hole's cut and get our smoothness readings to look at, you know, what is the smoothness values and how do those values change over the course of a day? And if a superintendent is consistently seeing that the green is not smooth, typically, what are they gonna do about that?

Yeah, I mean that's you're gonna get a little over my head right? I don't have the agronomic background But I think that's a great integration part of what the USGA has to offer rate is we have the course consulting program with our agronomist and our education program in a research program that delivers a lot of information so You know, there's things that you know through consultation with your local agronomist that you can learn you know find areas to make improvements things like that the

The other area that we're seeing superintendents use this kind of day in, day out is to judge how those maintenance practices are progressing. So when we take something like, let's talk about a controversial maybe and a very disruptive practice, which is aeration. Nobody likes aeration. Superintendents don't like it. Golfers don't like it. Nobody likes it. But it's one of those things that has to get done. The way we're seeing the GS3 used is they'll roll the GS3 the day before aeration.

And then we can get our smoothness reading and see what that number is. And then they'll roll it the day after aeration and every day after that. And what that's going to do is it gives us how quickly do the greens recover. And so now we have a lot more data around when do we time aeration, how long does it take to recover, did we recover. The same thing can be done for a lot of the different maintenance practices. Something that I've learned a lot about lately is mower setup.

You know, we talk a lot about height of cuts and we talk a lot about green speed and we talk a lot about, you know, rolling greens. But mower set up, you know, has some of the largest impacts on how a green performs, making sure that the reels are sharp and that they're true to their rollers and their pivot bolts. So all of that data is being used. Let's go back to aeration because I think aeration is one of these places where we do, where we can bring the director of golf together with the superintendent. And it actually gets into a field that's been

close to me and that's pricing. So today we know there are thousands of golf courses that at least have the technology to adjust their pricing very quickly because their golfers are purchasing online and or the price comes up in the the tee sheet when they're taking a phone reservation. Pricing absolutely can be impacted daily by how quickly that green recovers from airfication and so you start to put these pieces together.

You think about a company and I think you're familiar with some other companies that think about a company like Playbooks, right? Where Playbooks wants to let golfers know the conditions of the golf course each and every day. Well, if you start to think about GS3 three working kind of in conjunction with a course that's using Playbooks and the director of golf is privy to that. And then they're using that information to adjust the pricing of their tee times, maybe on Monday, on Tuesday, on Wednesday, on Thursday, as they get back to completely healed.

That's where all this stuff can start to gel together and make a lot of sense and frankly, make sense to the golfer. Hey, we have data that supports why we've gotten back to full rate. And we're happy to share that with you, Mr. Golfer. Yeah, and we're starting to see that happen actually a little bit. Some very big resort courses are adopting GS3 for that exact reason. What we see is that in many cases courses recover quicker.

to aeration than meets the eye. We still see a little bit of that hole. We still see a little bit of that sand and filth as a golfer. And so we say, well, this must be having an impact. And the reality is, in many cases, it's not. But we've never had data to show that. And I think that's a very powerful aspect of this tool. The other is, like you said, when we get the pricing is, is somebody saying, is a golfer complaining that the greens weren't great because the greens weren't great?

or they complain that the greens weren't great because they had a bad day and they shot a bad score, right? And we've done a little bit of that research ourselves. We have some tie -ins on golfer experience to the GHIN that we've done in some target markets. And there is a lot of tie -in to somebody's subjective rating of a golf course relative to how well they shot that day. And the GS3 can take that subjectivity out, right? Because it's going to tell us, well, here was our smoothness each and every single day this past month.

and how well does that line up to what, you know, our members are saying or our guests are saying or resort place? Yeah, it's, it's really cool data because I'm just thinking about then trying to create traffic, say on a golf course website, when you start to have some data that nobody else has, and clearly there's a bunch of golf geeks out there that really get drawn into that stuff. It's just a, it's an interesting read before we get into Deacon, let's stay on the ball for a second. So clearly the ball is great at measuring.

smoothness. But talk about the evolution of the ball and how like now the ball is really good at measuring firmness when you had something else that you used to use to measure firmness. Talk about how the ball works in conjunction with the stimp meter. Because I want people to understand this ball has really started to, is it fair to say consolidate other tools that maybe people were using? It does. And I think, you know, we'll take a little step back as to, you know, how did we even get to GS3? Like where did this thing come from? So,

If you go back to the early 2000s, Dr. Matt Pringle, who's my boss who heads up the Green Section, he was in equipment standards and we're messing around a lot with clubhead CT, so how hot were drivers? And that technology is very similar to what was then put into the TrueFirm. And so what the TrueFirm did, and the first time it was used was in 2004.

was measure that. Exactly. Yep, measure the firmness of a putting green and we all kind of cared a little bit back then. But no one really cared until you know, the US Open at at Shinnecock Hills and all of a sudden we really cared and the true firm really, you know, took off at that point. And so we had that device for quite a long time. And it was in 2015 was the US Open at Chambers Bay and a bunch of us were there and really those true firms are starting to get a bit old.

and we knew we needed replacements and then, you know, it's a Chambers Bay and the ball is going to bounce in all over the place. Greens looked a little different on television. it's, it's where, DJ kind of faltered at the end and, and Spieth won. and, and Chambers Bay is up in the Northwest part of the country where you don't see a ton of major, major championships contested. So it was, it was different. It was different. It was. And.

We left there and a couple of us sat around and said, man, wouldn't it be awesome if we could actually measure smoothness of a putting green? And then we said, you know what would be really cool? If you could just take a ball and just drop it and it replaced the true firm, and then you just roll it and it gives you the speed and smoothness. So that's really where that idea was born for us internally. Then took about five years of development and then another two years of infield testing with our team.

before we ever really kind of rolled it out across our championship. So it's quite a history. Let me so people didn't hear that and especially for the entrepreneurs that have these startup companies that watch five years of development, right? I mean, nothing, nothing great happens overnight. So five years of development and then what two years of R &D? You know, another two years of R &D in the hands of you know, all of our, you know, biggest agronomists.

And then we put it out to the public. And I mean, to this day, we're constantly working on this thing, right? Like we're working on version two of it that has enhancements for things that we're seeing. The work never stops. And you do roll it to the, well, you tell me, you roll it to the from a stimp meter at times, right? Isn't that in my - You do, yep. Yes. So we've consolidated, right? We introduced two new things to smoothness and trueness metric.

We consolidate you no longer need a tape measure right to get a stimp reading and then you can use that same device to do firmness So our agronomists now use this instead of their old true firms. yeah Stimp meter aspect raised. We just want to get a consistent roll is really what we want to do We're getting close to you can just kind of roll it by hand But you know, we find too many people still skip it So it's it's kind of skidding across the surface as it's rolling. That's what we need to really avoid

But you roll it off a stimp meter, and there's a bunch of sensors inside of that ball. And then what happens is, as that ball's rolling, those sensors are collecting all of that data, accelerations, gyroscopes, all of that stuff. And then we send that back to the phone. To get the green speed reading, historically, you would pull a tape measure, and you would measure that distance. The issue with that, though, is that it's a very user -dependent metric. We have a great article that Wesley Stewart

a data scientist on my team published, which is the variability of operator to operator. For those that have used a stimp meter, you know, you lift it up, it's got a little notch, and then the ball starts rolling. Well, if you keep lifting, that ball's going to roll further. If you drop it, it's going to roll shorter. And there's a lot of variance in users. The GS3 doesn't care, because what the GS3 is doing is it's looking at how fast that ball is slowing down. And we're able to correlate that to an ideal perfect stimp

you know, meter usage. And so we get a very repeatable number. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So it's a very repeatable number, takes the operator dependence out of the equation, right? And so if you and I are both doing these measurements on a green, historically, we would get different numbers just because we're both gonna like we can't hold the stimp meter perfectly still, right? And we're both gonna have that little bit of difference between. I've always felt the stimp meter needed some kind of hydraulic function in a depth.

on its own would raise itself and no one to stop. But then all of a sudden the stimp meter is $15 ,000 or something. It gets crazy and there's still all kinds of issues. So yeah, the ball goes through all that data, big normalization algorithm, and we're able to take a ton of factors out. We're even able to take slope out of the equation a little bit, not as much as we would like just yet. Go ahead, go ahead.

I say no one does it'll calculate the smoothness and trueness. So the way those metrics work. And today, like at Pinehurst, would you be measuring this every day right now? Like, you know, as you get really, really close or? Yeah, I mean, John Jeffries and team over there on the number two course, they've had a ball for a couple of years. I mean, they religiously like measure data every single day on that course. They've even done a pre -run through of US Open conditions.

last year at this time, right? So they have that playbook of here's how the course is going to react. Here's how we're going to set it up. They do all of that a year plus out. When you think in terms of major championships, is it conceivable that caddies would be provided speeds of all 18 greens before they tee off? I don't know. You're really our goal.

especially at major championships, we don't have a speed goal, right? We have a set up goal. And there's gonna be a compromise between speed, firmness, smoothness, and whole location. And I think that's something really important for a lot of people to take away. And Thomas Bastis, a tour grounder, he talked about this a lot on another podcast recently. Too often we're chasing speed.

And that's not a healthy place to be. And I think many golfers would be very surprised to see what the speeds are at some of these tournaments. On the tour at a major at a US Open, for example. As we chase speed, we lose a lot of really great hole locations on a putting green, just because they become unplayable. And at the end of the day, it's not the speed that we care about. We care about the greens being smooth and true.

Right? Like if we read the line and we hit the putt at the right speed on the right line, we expect that ball to drop. And when it does, that's what I've always said about Muirfield Village. I've never played in a place that Muirfield better than Muirfield in terms of you get exactly what you did when you putt at Muirfield Village. and that's an amazing thing. We don't, we're really fortunate in Columbus. We, we have Scioto down the road and we have Muirfield Village down, you know, we're very fortunate.

Scioto at different times has gone through, you know, where Poa gets too worked into the green, they've gone through the process of everyone has to wash their shoes before they can, you know, the whole deal, right? At Muirfield Village, they don't miss a beat when it comes to this, the ball's gonna go exactly where you putted it. And there will not be any outside forces on that. Yeah, exactly. And that's, I mean, that's really our goal at championships. And our goal is we talk to superintendents and users that are adopting the trade. Like,

That's what we're chasing. We are chasing that we are providing a great playing surface, not that we're providing a fast playing surface. And something that we're seeing a lot as we get into numbers of this is a lot of times as greens speed up, the smoothness gets worse. So the greens get much bumpier as we go up. And it makes a lot of sense. We're doing that by dropping height of cut. And if we get kind of techy geeky here for a second, right?

Essentially, you're losing a dampening effect. Since the leaf structure and the grass structure are so short, it doesn't absorb a bump. It's hitting a bump and it's going. And so there is a trade -off there between speed and smoothness. And a lot of our early adopters are getting into those questions of, hey, actually, where do we want to be not to optimize one metric, but to get to a point, like you said, where

It's just performing the way we want day in, day out. That's what we're all. I guess my thought with a professional player is not that they want this or want that, but those players are so good. Just tell them what it is and they'll figure out a way to perform. Right. And so that was, you know, that was my thought. So, well, listen, not.

Are there benchmarks yet? Do you know like what's perfect smoothness or what, you know, like if you got into a place where you guys know the number that you're looking for. Yeah. So there's a wide, wide range. So the way this smoothness metric works is zero would be perfect, right? That's not achievable on a golf course. That's a billiards table, right? Would have perfect felt mat. That would be a zero. If we were to core aerate we would see 13 to say 15 the day after. Okay.

For typical daily play, three to five, we would say, is good to very good. When you're getting into the twos on smoothness, that's exceptional. That's not achievable on all types of grass. And then anywhere, I would say, from four to seven, depending on type of grass, time of year, type of setup on the course, traffic on the course, again, would be very good numbers. When you start getting in that,

seven, eight, nine range. That's when you're going to start to say the green's a bit bumpy. Got it. that's great. And again, from a marketing perspective, I just see all these things where the golf course now can share, you know, here's our number and here's where we were for the month of May or whatever. Again, because listen, I believe ultimately these golf courses are great American small businesses, great Canadian small businesses, right? Like,

They employ people. I always say about golf courses, they'll hire people from 16 to 66 and they'll hire everybody in between that age too. Right. And so I really think that that's amazing. And they, they're going to sponsor kids in different youth events and they're gonna, they're amazing stewards of, of, of, of property. And so I want them to make more money. Right. I want them to be more profitable. And this, if this is ultimately a way that they can communicate how well they take care of their golf course.

I can see an avenue to charge anymore. And so that would be exciting. There's a lot of other people that would say to me, Mike, don't charge the golfer out of the game. And I totally get that. But I also understand that Harry that owns a golf course down the road is trying to put his kids through college. And that's pretty important. So the GS3 ball, before we go to Deacon, which is what the ball kind of interfaces to, if you will, for people.

Talk about price. I don't find this thing to be exorbitantly expensive. Talk about price and what a general manager of a public golf course when his superintendent or her superintendent comes to them and says, this is what I need to get going here. What are we looking at? Yeah, it's the total package for year one is $2,750. That'll include your ball, charger, a new stimp meter, the drop fixture, and your Deacon subscription.

And then every year after that, it's $1,250 for your yearly subscription to Deacon. We'll get into a Deacon, but it includes a bunch of tools. And so we think it's a great value. And one thing that we're constantly trying to do here at the USGA is we want to make these tools accessible, not just to the Pinehurst and the Pebble Beaches of the world, but like I said, to the municipal courses, the mom and pop courses all around this country so that they can leverage all of the great tools that we use at a US Open at their course every day.

We're talking about 10 foursomes or something for the year, maybe five, depending on the golf course. And we know that, yeah. So anyway, I don't want to get into trade and barter, but it's five or 10 tee time, right? I think it's, I find it to be doable. Okay. Now this is where I think it can, it can get a little dicey. It's going to be interesting to see how the USGA goes about doing some of these things, but.

the ball interfaces to essentially a data platform or a data host that you all call Deacon. Why don't you introduce Deacon a little bit and then we'll talk about how Deacon can work with other things beyond the ball. Yeah. So Deacon, it really is, we call it our course management system. It's a cloud -based platform. There's mobile apps. So you have them on iOS and Android. They're native apps. So they work perfect on the phone. There's no web interface on your phone. But then you can go on the computer and there's also a web interface.

So I think the name's pretty cool. The name comes from Deacon Palmer, who is Arnold Palmer's father. So for those that don't know, Deacon was the long time superintendent and head golf professional at Latrobe Country Club. And so it's incredibly humbling for us to be able to bear that name on our product and knowing that legacy and what that means and it's something we take a ton of pride in. Yeah, I think that's excellent. It is. It's a nice nod.

The platform itself is quite powerful, right? And so, you know, our thing has always been how do we help bring data together to help inform those decisions? And that goes all the way back to, like I said, my days in motorsports. So Deacon's really been my baby at the USGA since I got there. We want to help bring together the most important aspects of data on the course. And what it does is it really becomes a resource management thing. You know, we talked about, you know, a couple foursums is the cost of the ball.

But the way we're looking at it is it's not, hey, we're using a GS3 to charge you offers more money. We're saying, hey, use GS3 and Deacon so that you can make the best resource management decisions for your facility. Because many times that could mean pulling things back if you need to, or accelerating things forward. In Deacon, there's a couple of big aspects of it. So from a golf maintenance standpoint, we have a bit of a job board. We have an application log so you can track.

all of your chemicals and top dressing and PGRs and fertilizers, all of those sprays, they all have a huge impact on playing quality. Okay, let's let's stop there because I like to get into the details of some of this stuff. So did you all build that interface and then the superintendent is simply making inputs? Exactly. Okay. All right. Yes. We built the interface, like I said, works mobile, which has been a huge aspect of this, right? Because, you know,

When we look at driving adoption of tech on a golf course, if you always have to go back to your office and sit in front of a computer and do it yourself as the superintendent or directors of grounds, it's not going to get adopted, right? And so we've focused a lot on these mobile apps and making very native so that, you know, your maintenance crew or any of the young, you know, men and women that are on your crew, something that they're familiar with, right? They've grown up with a phone in their hand at this point. So we've tried to make those interfaces very similar to things that they would be used to in their daily lives right now.

Right, that's smart, that's smart. Now, on the food and beverage side, and I'm not taking you there, just let me here. So you've got a company, there's a lot, but let's say Gordon Food Service out of Grand Rapids, Michigan. When Gordon delivers to a golf course, there are certain operating systems for golf courses that actually know that order's already coming.

And all of that data goes right into the F and B piece of the operating system is, is, are you all integrated at that level? So when, when I buy my chemicals from Nate at SynaTek out of Philadelphia, that stuff injects right into Deacon automatically. We're not at that level of work. We're taking that, that order form from, from the chemical company yet. yeah, it's something we want to be extremely careful of. Yeah, exactly. our goal is to make sure we're.

Let me say first of all, we do not sell your data, right? Your data is your data. This is key in golf. This is amazingly important in golf. Exactly. And we know that that's not the same everywhere in golf right now. But yeah, we are not reselling your data, right? So if you put it in, you put it in, and it's yours. And we only use it internally for our use for research. Yeah, so we tie a couple of these things in. So you have that chemical, like I said, application piece. You have a wonder.

weather integration, we use a DTN, which is a very popular weather service in golf that, you know, many people pay a lot of money for that that comes inside of the Deacon subscription. So what that's doing right is now we can say, hey, what was the weather that happened on those days leading up to that firmness or that smoothness? Right? Again, everything going back to how does this help impact the setup of the golf course? Okay. Are you saying that the weather data is now I get that for free essentially if I'm paying for Deacon?

Yep, that's all for free all in there. So maybe I can even create a cost savings here. Okay, good to know. Exactly. We so we have that we have sensors so you can put some other types of sensors you can manually and put things like soil moisture. You can also input, you know, for superintendents, a big thing, you know, that you might hear about from a GM or pro shop site is that they'll do soil tests, right? They do things like organic matter tests and soil nutrient tests. All of that data goes in there.

Where this becomes nice and I think there's applicability across the operation here is what we do on our widgets, especially in our dashboards. We have this days and target range, right? So we think data is a great communication tool and. Not everybody is going to comprehend every piece of that data, right? There's some very complex pieces or very specific pieces to jobs, but what does translate is well, how consistent are we right? That's that's something we can all get behind.

And so in a lot of our widgets, we have what we call the stays and target. What that's going to say is for our green speed or for our smoothness or our firmness, what is our target range? And if that target range on green speed is say 10 to 10 and a half feet, what the ball is going to do and what Deacon is going to do is it's going to calculate how many days you've been within that range. So now we can go back and say over the last month, 28 out of 30 days, we were within our target range. And one day we were above and one day we were below. So all of a sudden,

we get away from was the green speed 10 -2 or 10 -4 or 10 -5. We get to, well, no, we delivered a consistent playing surface for an overwhelming majority of that month. With these other tools that we have, weather, app log, jobs, for the days that we weren't consistent, we can go back and look at what was going on. Did we get a huge rainstorm that came in and we couldn't go do maintenance for a couple of days? All of a sudden, we have that data there to have that type of communication.

For the users between the ProShop, the GM, the superintendent, being able to leverage that data, communicate that back to membership, we've seen a lot of really great positive interactions because it takes that subjectivity out of it. Now we're talking hard numbers. Or not just membership, but again, because I tend to think public, back to the owner of the golf course. So there's a company in golf. It's a startup called Golf Geek Software.

And one of the, and they deliver a dashboard. And one of the pieces that is popular for Golf Geek is revenue to budget for yesterday, revenue to budget for the last seven. I mean, they actually are tracking revenue to budget. And you, I could just imagine, and I don't, I don't know this. I'd have to go back and talk to them, but I can just imagine if you could ingest some of what Deacon has and you could say why you missed budget.

Right? Why you missed on the revenue side, that, that would be an interesting enhancement. And well, before we get into golf operations and tee times and those kinds of things, cause you know that I am passionate about finding a way to get that into Deacon. Can you, can you kind of go over the integrations that you do have today? Maybe you have an integration to John Deere. Maybe you have an integration to Playbooks or, or to EZLocator I don't know. I genuinely don't know what your integrations are.

Yeah, and I think just before we get to the last last major feature we do have in Deacon is our whole location software. So if you were to go on Twitter the last couple of days, you'll see the pin sheets for the US Women's Open. Those are all generated out of Deacon. And again, that comes free of charge for you in there. So you can generate all of those daily whole location sheets for your clubs. Our major integrations right now are with the Weather Service.

And then we do some integrations with Spio for their in -ground moisture meters. Beyond that, there's not a ton of integrations. And I think this is an area of opportunity for the golf industry. And one that I've certainly been beating the drum on is finding ways to work better together. Between irrigation companies, between tee sheet softwares, I think there's a lot of potential for us to do that and to bring those sources of data together.

And I think that's really going to be the next step in this data journey and technology journey that we see is these systems are becoming more sophisticated. They're driving more value across the enterprise of a golf course. That's right. The next step really is going to be to bring some of them together so that what those softwares are best at doing, they keep doing. And then the pieces of data that we need in each, we start to synchronize. That's right. The first time you and I talked, that's

I immediately went there, right? I started to think about startups like TenFore and I don't expect you to know who, but TenFore is a tee sheet and point of sale company out of Texas. Startups like TenFore or more established companies like Club Caddie or foreUP or something like that. That's where we've got to get all these connections going. And again, it goes back to...

Now I think people work better as a team at the individual golf course. I think there's a lot more commercial opportunity. I think there's a better story to be told as to why the golfer should, should come back even more. I just think that that's almost, you know, almost endless. I think one of the use cases I gave you was I, I thought it would be amazing if we could make it really easy for the superintendent to see the tee sheet utilization.

in a UI that they're already using. I know there's a lot of people listening that are going to say, Mike, the superintendent can't see the tee sheet. We've already given them a log in the tee sheet, but we all know from human behavior, the more different platforms you got to log into, there's attrition there. That's why dashboards are actually popular nowadays. It is. And you know, the number one complaint we hear, again, I work majority of my time with superintendents, right? The, the,

Number one complaint I hear from them is Scott, there's too many apps. Like I'm logging in here, I'm logging in there, I'm logging in there. And you know, these are very busy people, right? They're starting early. They're working a ton like all of us. We got to make it easy. If you tell them, you can go visit, see this piece, go remember the login for this piece of software and log into this link, like you've lost them. That's right. And so.

Yeah, I agree with you. It's a discussion we're having with some, and hopefully we can lead the way more. But certainly things like being able to pull the tee sheet and the time slots into Deacon so a superintendent can see that, can see where they might have a maintenance gap, can see how heavy the play is going to be. Again, Deacon's not meant to be a tee sheet management software, right? But pieces of data there would be very valuable to the superintendent to have access to as they're trying to do things like.

Hey, are we mowing and vertical mowing today and how's that going to impact, you know, ball roll metrics, right? That's right. Deacon isn't always going to be an operating tool. Deacon can be a visualization tool, right? Essentially you could say a communication tool. I'm just trying to communicate the data to everybody at the golf course. And so, yeah, so Deacon will serve different roles there. Go back to your whole location a little bit because that does sound a little functional. Explain how the whole location piece works in Deacon.

So within Deacon, we have all the golf courses mapped out. So you have a polygon representing the green. We can ingest a lot of different types of data. So if you had your course scanned, we can load those course scans in there. We can scan the course for you. We have a lot of vendors we work with as well that do that. From that point forward, you set the green depth, so the front and the back, with your blue reference dots, just like we would at a championship. And then you can set the pin location for each day.

The way we see that used is superintendents use that to help communicate to their maintenance crews in the morning where they want whole locations cut. Again, when we can show a visual reference with the outline of the green and numbers, that makes it very easy to do. We can also print that sheet out and give that out to golfers, which we see done a lot of member, member, member, guest type events. It's a very nice touch.

But I think a great integration opportunity, right? As more superintendents are using tools like that to record data and do setup, that's something that can go to the Pro Shop, right? That's something that we can put into cart GPSs and have access to golfers. And not just cart GPS, which we're a fan of here, but also the app, right? That the person is on. Listen, I think carts can slow golf down and I'm all about playing quick.

So I want four players in a foursome all with a mobile device on them where they can look quickly and get their yardage and that kind of thing. So that's why my head goes there. But yes, that would be the ultimate, right? Is that we can show the hole location in real time to everyone that's on the golf course. You know, obviously COVID popped, helped golf pop again. It's another time that golf has really expanded.

probably the first time since Tiger came on the scene. One of my beliefs has been we're seeing so many young players because golf is kind of friendly to gadgets. And I think young people like gadgets, frankly, right? So the better the experience we can make in all these different gadgets, the longer we're going to keep those players around. It's fun, right? I mean, we all like to mess with things. We're all tinkerers at heart. It is fun. And so, you know, you can make it fun. We can make it cool.

you're going to pull a lot more people in. I know the hole location thing is, that's not for every golfer, but I think it's just one example of the types of integrations that if we start to think bigger picture in this industry, if we start to think big picture about how we integrate with each other, that's just one avenue that we can start to explore tying the front of the house and the back of the house together and producing a much better experience for our customers. That's right. I agree.

Can we talk about, I don't want it to be uncomfortable, but I had a time in golf where I kind of worked for a really, really big entity. And immediately some people get competitive about that, or they don't like you because you're big. And clearly the USGA is very, very big, right? Talk a little bit about the USGA's commercial interest in all of this, Deacon, GS3, what have you, and how...

what you all are talking about internally so you can remain friendly with as many players in the industry as you can and really just kind of be here for the ultimate good. Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think Alina, I always go back to Mike Whan, our CEO. He's always said to us, you know, he wants golf to be around for his kids, kids, right? So that is our underlying motivation. We're not looking, you know, I don't have a profitability target.

that's stuck on my head that for next quarter I gotta go do this, right? Our goal and my goal is how do we make golf sustainable and fun for not next year, but 100 years from now, right? And that is our core underlying motivation in everything that we do. When we look at Deacon and GS3, where we've entered that market is we saw an unmet need that wasn't getting solved. And...

in this industry, and we've gone after that aggressively. And I think you will continue to see us do things like that. There's plenty of areas in this industry that have great solutions and areas that we're simply just not going to enter. There's not a need there for that. But when it comes to GS3, there is nothing really like it. We saw it as something that, with the true firm that we invented,

And we wanted to make sure that that was more accessible to golf courses all around the country. When it comes to Deacon, as I said, bringing that data together, bringing the industry together is something that we see the USGA being well positioned to do. We're not going to be an irrigation company, right? We're not going to make mowers. There's a lot of things that we're just not going to do. But taking data regardless of which of those companies you decide to use,

and bringing that together to help you make a decision that ultimately impacts the golf course and the economic sustainability and environmental sustainability of the course. That's something that we think that we are well suited to do. Yeah. Let me, let me bounce just a scenario off of you. And there is no, there is no permanent answer to this, but let's say, some guy in upper Arlington, Ohio, or in my favorite place in the world, Boone, North Carolina.

Let's say some guy in Boone, North Carolina, builds a similar ball as GS3, similar ball, and then says, hey, Scott, I'd like to connect it to Deacon. Is that something you think the USGA would be open to? We are always open to innovation. And I think we are looking at Deacon as a really a platform for innovation, right? When you look at the startup cost of trying to

build an app, build infrastructure, charts, logins, all of these things. That's incredibly costly, right? And the USGA has invested a ton, a ton, a ton of money into that. So if there are other people that have cool ideas and great ideas for different sensors and different integrations, we would love nothing more than to talk to you to learn how do we integrate. Because we think that we can take a lot of cost off of your plate and help deliver that to the market faster and quicker and more impactful to golf courses. So.

Yeah, give us a call. I think it's pretty easy to find. We just did a podcast with a gentleman in the Netherlands, Menno Liebregts, and he essentially has built a dashboard system. Again, more on the tee time frankly more on the golfer data side. But it's this overall concept of open or closed, right? It's this, listen, are we building open platforms and encouraging innovation from every part of the globe?

or are we gonna be a closed platform and just try to do it all on our own? And we know that Steve Jobs is this amazing, amazing success story and he clearly believed in closed, right? There was a time that closed mattered. And I'm not here to speak for Steve Jobs, but I'm not so sure Steve Jobs wouldn't be more aligned with open platforms today. I think that that's where the evolution of technology has gone. And so hopefully,

there's more and more open platforms and hopefully Deacon emulates that as an open platform in golf. I think that that would be great for everybody. Yeah, I mean, look, I love my Apple products. I got a MacBook, I got an iPhone, but if there's one thing I think they got wrong is that, you know, they take the developer side of it knows Apple takes a 30 % cut of all of your revenue if you have an app on their platform. We're taking 0%, right?

And we think the more open the better. And if we can find ways, like I said, to integrate and do things there, the better golf will be in the long run. Well, good for you. That's great. That's great. Well, listen, anything else you want to share? Well, one other item I did want to touch on. You are part of the Green Section Why don't you just explain the Green Section a little bit, Lark. Like this entity within the USGA. Yeah, the Green Section. So it's.

Besides our championship group, it is the oldest and rules group. It's the oldest group that we have at the USGA. So the Green Section is 104 years old. It's got a storied legacy of providing consulting and education to the golf community. Ultimately, so that we can host these great national championships that we have. There's a couple of great areas within our team that's.

that we do. So first we have the Mike Davis program for advancing golf course research. The USGA is the largest funder of turf grass research in the world. So we rewrite checks every single year in the millions of dollars to land grant universities so that we have all of these great grasses, disease models, and research for golf courses. We disseminate that information through the Green Section Record. If you're not a subscriber to the Green Section Record, highly recommend that you are.

There's information in there for everybody. And we'll put that in the show notes. We'll do that. Yep. So it's a bi -weekly publication that we put out that has information around from everything from the latest research, but also a for the golfer section that explains how this research and how these things impact golfers every single day. And then on top of that, we have our consulting program. So we have regional agronomists who can come out, do an agronomic, anything from a full agronomic assessment.

to a half day visit and customize packages from there. A lot of our agronomists, they were prior superintendents and spent a lot of time in this industry. So we offer those and then obviously the latest offering that we have here with our tools offering that have the beacon tools, the GS3 and things like that. And so is that what you're calling it? Like the tools offer, I mean, is that becoming essentially a division within Greens?

Yeah, exactly. So the way we look at the Green Section is we have research, education, consulting and tools. So our four big buckets. Great. And the research and consulting, I guess maybe education too. You do create good content. I mean, that's part of why you want to subscribe to this thing. You all are big generators of simply of content within the golf industry. And I'm not sure we think about you all as much as we should that way.

No, and George Waters and his team that runs the Green Section record is phenomenal. If you don't follow, like I said, the Green Section record is the publication. We're also on Twitter. You know, the phenomenal content on Twitter as well. But, yeah, superintendents love Twitter. The ops guys like LinkedIn, the superintendents like Twitter. Those were the people hang out. Twitter is a big thing. The way we talk about internally is this the pyramid, right? So.

Research is the foundation of everything that we do. We publicly fund that through land -grant universities. The research papers are all online. They're all free to access. That breadth is extremely, extremely wide. But that can be hard to get to for everybody and hard to implement. You take the next layer up that pyramid, and you get to our education program. So that's where we're actively disseminating that content. Where...

We're taking it and we're boiling it down from the practitioner all the way to the golfer. At the top of that pyramid, we would jump there, and that's where the consulting offering comes. And that's highly individualized. That's a one -to -one relationship of an agronomic consultant going out to your golf course. And then that's where we've slidden that tools piece where it's a paid offering, but it's a paid offering.

it can reach a lot more people, right? Cause it's technology and we can get that out to everybody. So we'd like to think that at every level of that pyramid, you know, we have something from a free educational offering all the way up to, you know, highly customized consulting that we can deliver to your golf course. That's great. That's great. Well, listen, I hope I'm looking forward to, maybe I'll go down to site and maybe they have, but I'd like to see the ball in action. Cause I think the ball is really cool. And I hope.

that more and more public golf courses at it. I think of a place, Worthington Manor in Maryland, that guy needs this. And so I hope that Bob Sturges has that. But anyway, best of luck to you. Thanks for coming on. I didn't even know you were a Big Ten guy. It's great to have Big Ten people on the podcast. And you and not a lot of people know, but Jersey shore pretty good. Pretty good. Glad you spent time there too.

I think it's the best place in the world. I know everyone's got their own hometown feel, but yeah, certainly being a Jersey guy and we just try to wrap it here in Jersey. Yeah. I'm glad you were able to get back home because that's great. That's great. All right, Scott, thank you so much at Scott Mingay, USGA. The ball is called the GS3. We're going to put notes.

in the podcast so people can go find it. I'm not getting a commission on this. I'm not trying to sell these things to these guys. I think it's good for golf. And so that's why we're here to help tell that story. So thanks a lot, Scott, for joining us. Thanks for having

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