Club Benefits
I attended the PGA Championship at the Aronimink Golf Club in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania. As an avid golf fan, attending my first in-person event, and having it be a major should have been exciting enough.
But as a tech nerd, I was almost as excited to see what the PGA Championship had to offer in terms of the in-person experience.
Tracking players on the map so you always know who's in front of you and where your favorites are playing stands out the most to me, but other features like an AI companion, grandstand seat tracker and Roar Moments that prevent you from missing impressive shots while you're on a different hole create an experience that I hope becomes the standard at professional golf events — and sports events in general.
How an app became one of my favorite parts of the PGA Championship
When I decided to go to the PGA Championship, I assumed there'd be some kind of app designed to help me get around the venue. After all, a golf course is a rather large venue for a sporting event compared to an arena or even a stadium.
What I didn't expect was how robust the app's features actually are and how much connectivity it would offer. In my experience, getting around the Aronimink Golf Club was smooth, as I always knew where I was, which players were near me and where I needed to go.
Golfer tracking
As dedicated a golf fan as I am, I can't tell who's on the fairway 200 yards away from me. I don't have super-powered vision, nor did I bring binoculars with me. So when I settled down into a spot, I pulled up the app, and in real-time, I could see which golfer was coming down the fairway. It helped to create a more at-home-like watching experience, even though I was at the event.
If you've ever been to a live golf event, you know how hard it can be to find an open seat in any of the grandstands. You walk up and hope someone happens to be leaving their spot at that exact moment, but there rarely is.
With that in mind, T-Mobile added a feature that tells you if there's any room in a particular grandstand and even lets you see a close-to-real-time photo of it, so you can see how much room there is for you (spoilers, there's probably no room if it's Sunday near the 18th hole, as I learned the hard way).
"You'll see a color circling around the grandstand. If it's green, that means you've got seating available," explained Scott Jacka, Sr Director, Technology Development Strategy at T-Mobile.
AI companion
AI is making its way into everything, and T-Mobile's app is certainly no exception. The AI assistant can answer all kinds of questions about the event, whether they're historical. For example, who won the last PGA Championship at Aronimink? It was Gary Player (pictured below with me) in 1962, by the way. You could also ask questions like did a certain golfer make the cut, what's a player's score at the moment and all kinds of other queries.
I did find the AI companion having a human avatar to be a little weird. I could have done without the attempt to humanize it, but for people less comfortable with AI, it might help make it feel a little more natural. Thankfully, there's an option in the settings to remove the avatar and have a more traditional AI chatbot experience.
It's not perfect, and there were some instances of it getting an answer wrong (I asked if Akshay Bhatia made the cut, knowing he didn't, and it responded that he did, but when I asked again, it said he scored a +5 and missed the cut). Still, if you want a quick knowledge hit about the PGA Championship, it's definitely a cool feature.
Roar Moments
When you're walking around a live golf event, you'll often hear cheers coming from another hole. Friends who attended many live golf events have told me this is one of the worst parts of going in person, as you then have to scan social media and various websites to find out what the hype is about.
"You might be in a particular location, and something good happens. You hear this roar of the crowd away from where you are, and you can have a little anxiety that you missed out on a key moment of action," explained T-Mobile's Scott Jacka. "Based upon how loud the crowd is, the technology can automatically cut and upload a clip to the cloud and then push it out to the fans, and so they can see that moment even though they weren't there."
Roar Moments, as the name implies, detects these loud bursts of crowd noise and feeds them into the app, so just a few moments after they happen, you can see the highlights. Is it as good as standing next to the green when Rory McIlroy or your favorite golfer sinks the birdie putt? No, of course not. But it's much better than scanning social media to find the highlight and guessing who it was and at which hole.
The future of in-person sports
Sometimes, attending an event live can make you feel like you're missing out, and this is especially true for golf because of the large playing area. But that's much less of a problem with the PGA Championship app.
Will we see this technology at Augusta for The Masters? Probably not, as that tournament is more steeped in tradition, but I would love to see it extend to the rest of the PGA Tour events and majors (note: the PGA Championship is a major hosted by the PGA of America, which is a different entity from the PGA Tour).
We'll see what the future holds, but if this is just a taste of what attending live sports will be like, I can't wait for more.
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