As one of the two main golf courses, the European Tour has long used its profile to differentiate itself from the PGA Tour in the United States.
While PGA tournaments are largely limited to North America, the European Tour has tournaments in 30 countries on five continents. Normally, the circuit would be halfway through an annual schedule of 47 tournaments spread over 50 weeks.
But those are not general times and, on the other hand, the tour faced the same demanding situations imposed through the coronavirus as the rest of the sports world. The conclusion of the Qatar Masters in March followed cancellations and postponements that began a three-month suspension.
The organization took advantage of the three-month break to devise a strategy that would allow professional golf to return to Europe safely. Technology has played a key role in achieving this ambition, with the company’s ongoing digitization program as the basis.
The return of golf
Unlike football competitions that take up position in a single country, the European Tour has to adapt to the stage and regulations of various territories that have received other reports from Covid-19. Meanwhile, a foreign pool table makes it difficult.
To get things back to normal in the best possible way, it was to host an eight-tournament tournament in Austria and the UK before spreading to other countries in the coming months.
“One of our biggest assets is that we play tournaments in so many countries, it’s also one of our biggest challenges,” says Michael Cole, European Tour technical director Michael Cole.
“We have 8 weeks of tournaments in the UK and Austria [ongoing] and those are going to have a very different feeling given the limited number of other people there. We adhere to the regulations and regulations [of any jurisdiction] and create an environment control to minimize any threat of infection ».
An organization
When Cole was appointed technical director in 2017, he was at the pace of the organization’s virtual transformation, having been part of the team that organized the good fortune of the 2012 London Olympics. The tour hoped that new technologies would make excursions less difficult and opportunities for knowledge gathering and fan participation.
Cole says the Tour’s IT needs would possibly be unique in the game, as each tournament requires the creation of a transient IT infrastructure that includes annotations, operations and viewers, as well as the media, a personal radio network and that of the host station. Although the needs remain the same regardless of location, demanding situations may vary.
Cole says that having so much visibility into this knowledge and the ability to act accordingly is incredibly valuable and that the partnership will also see the creation of an intranet for the near future.
The use of cloud technologies has helped other areas. While thousands of corporations have had to adapt to remote paintings since closing, the European Tour was already prepared for this. A renovation of the Wentworth headquarters forced the team to make paintings at the transit offices for more than a year. It was around this time that desktop phones were removed and collaboration teams such as Microsoft Office 365 were deployed.
This back-end team may not be as exciting as social media, virtual reality and cellular (VR) content, which it hopes will attract new fans, however, they have provided the virtual basis for returning to golf.
“Technology is getting our game back and I didn’t have the conversations a few months ago,” Cole says.
A contactless environment
Specifically, the generation has helped the European excursion with the creation of a “contactless” that minimizes human contact.
Typically, players register with a physicist and get paper documents that contain data such as place of play and distances. However, they have now been scanned in a reader app, an example of the virtual foundation that presents tangible end-user benefits to players.
And when enthusiasts return, ticket sales and payment will be contactless, with platforms like Workday allowing the tour to monitor the fan by reveling in genuine time, satisfaction and safety.
One of the benefits of golf in this climate is that it takes up position over a giant physical area. This means that social estrangement is more than in a football stadium, but it also makes it more difficult to manage.
In his role as technical director of the Ryder Cup for the 2018 occasion in Paris, Cole introduced the concept of the “connected route” that boosted operational functions, the hotel industry, the media and public Wi-Fi. Having such visibility of the course meant that it was less difficult to allocate human and technical resources to a giant field.
In the coronavirus era, connected devices would possibly have an additional protection advantage.
“We can make contactless disinfectants and attach them to the Internet of Things (IoT),” Cole says. “We can control the degrees of frost and the amount distributed. When you deploy disinfectants in a massive environment, we have to send other people with a safe intelligence in mind.”
Working together
As mentioned, the PGA Tour and the European Tour compete and complement others and there is a collaboration for primary occasions such as the Ryder Cup. This spirit of cooperation has allowed Cole to calculate the most productive practices on how the generation can help the return of golf and other sports around the world.
“I’m relatively new to golf … However, one of the first things I looked for to see was how the European Tour worked with our opposite numbers in the golf industry,” he explains. “I created the Tech in Golf Forum, which meets every month, but I did it more during the pandemic.
“I am close to my opposite numbers [in other sports organizations] and a few weeks ago I established a forum with technologists from Wimbledon, F1, the Olympic Games, the Grass Tennis Association (LTA) and cricket [authorities]. Eight to ten of us percentage our learning and experiences.
“A lot of things are happening in the industry, so it never feels like we’re alone. It feels like we’re in the same boat.”
I’ve covered the intersection of the game and the generation for over a decade, observing how new inventions are turning the games we love, the game.
I’ve covered the intersection of the game and generation for over a decade, observing how new inventions are turning the games we love, transforming gaming organizations into the point of advertising and how we consume the action as fans. As a game fan and veteran generation editor and editor, I attended some of the highest times in the global game and spoke to some of the biggest names that have led this transformation. From fitness apps and smart stadiums to background and streaming software, the game is experiencing its own virtual revolution.