Lights, camera, action: PGA Tour Studios gearing up for January opening

PONTE VEDRA BEACH — For Luis Goicouria, the process of bringing the PGA Tour Studios from blueprint into reality must have felt about as daunting at times as taking a one-handed swing at the 17th green at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass.

"The COVID years, inflation has hit, labor shortages, supply chain issues, everything you can imagine has been thrown at us while we've been building this building," said Goicouria, the PGA Tour's senior vice president of media. "But the commitment from our board and from our executive team has been there every step of the way to get it done, and we're almost there."

The final flagstick is in sight.

Players fan guide: A one-stop shop for everything you need to know about the tournament

Amid a fast-changing golf media landscape, the PGA Tour Studios are drawing ever closer to completion and the PGA Tour Fleet is already up and running as new systems take shape to deliver the sport to fans around the world, starting from the First Coast.

While it's still a construction site for this week's 50th anniversary edition of The Players Championship, the PGA Tour Studios building is scheduled to be up and running well before the first stroke of the 2025 event.

With 165,000 square feet, eight audio control rooms, eight production control rooms, seven studios, 290 work stations and capacity for substantial further expansion, the PGA Tour Studios are big. Really big.

And they're coming soon, part of a sweeping project to revamp the PGA Tour's content creation and distribution efforts. The first part of that upgrade, the PGA Tour Fleet, launched earlier this year with a group of nine trucks at the top of the line in mobile sports production.

"Think of kind of going into a brand-new house," said Jon Freedman, PGA Tour vice president of broadcasting production, "and every high-end upgrade that you'd ever want is in that house."

For St. Johns County, the arrival of PGA Tour Studios likely carries a substantial economic impact: Upon completion, the Tour estimates that 250 to 300 employees will work at the building.

For viewers, both in Northeast Florida and elsewhere, the future is just around the turn.

PGA TOUR FLEET: PRODUCTION ON THE MOVE

Call longtime NBC Sports lead golf producer Tommy Roy a fan of the Fleet's features.

"I've produced Super Bowls and NBA Finals and all the great golf events, and worked in a lot of really spectacular trucks," Roy said. "And this is the best one I've ever seen."

For years, CBS and NBC relied on their own production equipment to broadcast PGA Tour events. Now, with the launch of the PGA Tour Fleet, that process moves under the Tour's umbrella, which among other things gives broadcasters instant access to a wider array of technical resources.

The fleet consists of nine trucks, eight of which were present for the start of The Players. Freedman said the ninth already traveled ahead to Palm Harbor to lay cables ahead of for next week's Valspar Championship at Innisbrook Golf and Spa Resort.

"From our side of it, it's definitely unique," said Michael Raimondo, the Tour's vice president of broadcast technology. "The biggest change for us is that we become a service provider for our network partners."

But not without a few logistical challenges.

While many aspects of CBS and NBC coverage largely mirror each other, network differences in standard procedures vary in subtle ways between NBC's team under Roy and the unit of his CBS counterpart, Sellers Shy.

For example, within the main truck, NBC positions the lead golf producer slightly forward within a notch on the front row where he can look around the director to see monitors at the vehicle's edge. CBS, Roy said, uses a different alignment.

Harmonizing those plans for the development of the main production truck and a veritable wall of video required extended meetings over Zoom involving high-ranking representatives of both networks, including NBC director Joe Martin and CBS director Steve Milton.

"I have to be honest," Roy said. "Initially, I was a little skeptical about how this would work."

The fleet rolled out at the Farmers Insurance Open in January, during a CBS portion of the schedule, which meant NBC had to wait until the Cognizant Classic two weeks ago in Palm Beach for its first live tournament in the trucks.

Although Roy and his NBC colleagues had previously seen the main truck during the development stage in Pittsburgh, stepping inside for live action was a thrill worth the wait.

"I was pumped up," Roy said.

For the Players, Roy and his production crew began the week coordinating their efforts with cameras by the dozen and more than 140 microphones spread across the course, with the resources to capture every stroke during the week. That includes extra activity for the pre-cut rounds Thursday and Friday, when multiple balls often take flight at the same time across the course.

Freedman declined to discuss a dollar value for the fleet, but said the value of the vehicles developed by Pittsburgh-based NEP Group stretched into the multiple millions.

The mileage adds up — the fleet is scheduled to travel to every Tour event held in the continental United States and Canada — but a complex system of color-coded wiring helps speed the week-by-week transition.

"It usually takes hours and hours [in the former system] to park and power," Freedman said. "We were told [Wednesday] morning that this fleet came in and it took just about an hour and a half to get everything powered up and running, because of how everything has been worked out together between CBS, NBC and the Tour."

For Players viewers, a few new touches also joined the production, including a mounted drone near the 18th hole, expanded tee box cameras and a new bunker cam for the pot bunker just left of the green at the tempting but tricky par-5 16th.

"In years past, we may have had only six tee box cameras that were here all the time," Freedman said. "Now, this one has all 18 tee-box cameras available to everybody."

PGA TOUR STUDIOS: NEW FACILITY MOVING ON UP

The PGA Tour Fleet is ready, here and now. But the new PGA Tour Studios complex, next to the Tour's Global Home, represents the next wave.

Commissioner Jay Monahan highlighted the project's significance to the Tour's mission during Tuesday's press conference ahead of The Players Championship's opening round.

"It will help us bring live golf and other live content to our fans in a more dynamic way, bringing them closer to our players and closer to our sport," Monahan said.

The 165,000-square foot building, a project of architects Foster + Partners (exterior) and HLW International (interior), represents a massive upgrade in both size and technical capacity compared to PGA Tour Entertainment's current facility in the World Golf Village. Also in the plans: a library of golf footage billed as the largest in the world.

There's still plenty of work ahead and some issues to work out — a fire alarm blasted unexpectedly among assembled media on Wednesday — but installation is progressing quickly.

The building will have the capacity to record up to 144 live feeds or live cameras, encompassing the PGA Tour, Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Champions, with live production occupying most of the first two floors. Around 20 percent of the building is being left open for expansion into technological fields as yet unknown.

"The media landscape is changing at a rate that's accelerating, really in technology," said Andrew Wisniewski, PGA Tour vice president of engineering. "We're really trying to look at what we're doing today, what we're going to be doing in two years and in 10 years."

Under the Tour's plans, the new building will be equipped for multiple upgrades in technical specifications, particularly in audio, where the new PGA Tour Studios will include support for 5.1 and Dolby Atmos audio formats.

Wisniewski said the largest of the seven studios, a towering and still-unfinished room measuring around 2,500 square feet on the first floor, will include LED displays in the walls and floor for graphics-rich production.

"We want to make sure we don't take viewers away from the action even when we go to the studio," Wisniewski said. "We're looking at very innovative ways of showing golf with the studio."

Greg Hopfe, PGA Tour senior vice president and executive producer, said that four of the control rooms are dedicated to ESPN+ streams, plus one each for the Korn Ferry and PGA Tour Champions, one for digital and original content and an eighth for an advanced international feed. A network of internal communication will link all of the control rooms, production rooms and studios.

The key concepts, he said, are "flexibility and versatility."

Goicouria, the senior vice president of media, expects the move to PGA Tour Studios to enter its next stage by the end of the month with the building's certificate of occupancy.

On the current timetable, engineers would begin installing technical equipment during the summer, followed by the arrival of more staff in October. During the fall tournaments, production would occur in parallel work streams with the existing St. Augustine-based facility, an indirect test run for the new setup.

"The more technology we add, there are more chances of things going wrong," Wisniewski said. "What we want to make sure is that we build a studio that we can use even if something goes wrong with technology, so we can have extended sets and program graphics and all that fun stuff."

Then, if all goes well, all operations would flow at full speed at the new site by January 2025.

Goicouria said the Tour initially began plans for the PGA Tour Studios in 2017 — he said the project's birth long preceded the Tour's $3 billion deal with Strategic Sports Group and its still-active negotiations with Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund — but the coronavirus pandemic and its consequent complications slowed the construction process leading up to its July 2022 groundbreaking.

As for the current 35,000-foot building, the Tour expects that it will eventually be sold back to St. Johns County, potentially making it the latest major golf property to change status in the county. The World Golf Hall of Fame closed its building last summer after 25 years and relocated some of its assets to Pinehurst, N.C.

In the big picture, Goicouria envisions that the new venue could be used for other productions as well, outside golf or even outside sports. He particularly values future growth potential for international production, where the Tour hopes in time to create individualized feeds, with unique sponsorship arrangements, for different national markets.

"If you're watching in the Nordics, you can watch every single shot that [Ludvig] Åberg hits, or that [Viktor] Hovland hits," he said. "In Japan, you could watch all of Hideki's [Matsuyama] shots, or Korea, you can watch any of the Korean golfers that are doing so well on the PGA Tour. That's the dream, and that's where we eventually will get to."

By next March, barring unexpected surprises, fans may see some of the results of the Tour's new innovations from the opening tee shot at the Stadium Course.

Whatever the technology, whatever the language, when there's golf at The Players, highlights are never far away.

"The great thing about this place is I can always go to the 17th," Roy said. "Doesn't matter who's on that tee box. You can go there and watch, and even if it's an unknown player or a semi-unknown player, watch them just grind and try to figure out how to hit that shot. It makes for really, really good TV."

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: PGA Tour Studios: Production to boost Players Championship by 2025