When it opens next year, PGA Tour Studios will house 250-300 employees and feature seven studios.PGA Tour
Luis Goicouria remembers discussions going back more than a decade about the PGA Tour one day not only being a golf circuit, but a major media and entertainment company. That vision will come to fruition in January when the monstrous PGA Tour Studios opens in Ponte Vedra Beach, Fla.
The ambition Goicouria described has spread throughout the tour’s Global Home headquarters in recent years, which is just a Scottie Scheffler short iron away from the 165,000-square-foot Studios building.
Goicouria, the tour’s senior vice president of media, said it started in 2012 when the tour decided to bring all its digital operations in-house. Later, the tour launched PGA Tour Live, which has grown from two streams of tournament coverage on Thursday and Friday into a product that includes as many as four streams every day through its partnership with ESPN+, with expanded coverage around signature events.
At the beginning of 2022, the tour took control of the below-the-line production of its television broadcasts. And earlier in 2024, the tour debuted its PGA Tour Fleet production trucks that CBS and NBC will share for events.
“It’s been a steady drip until now,” Goicouria said recently as he guided media through the cavernous, under-construction venue. “But the proof is in the pudding. It’s one thing to talk about it and another thing to do it, and we’re doing it.”
The culmination of those efforts is the Studios facility, which will house between 250 and 300 employees and launch with seven studios (with capacity to grow to 12). ESPN+ production teams for PGA Tour Live will be in the venue, and tour-specific studios for both the Korn Ferry Tour and PGA Tour Champions also will be available. The main studio inside the venue will be encased in LED video/graphic walls with a 30-foot ceiling.
Production teams from PGA Tour Live will be among those who will use the new venue.PGA Tour
It’s a massive increase in amenities from the current PGA Tour Entertainment venue in St. Augustine, Fla., which spans just 35,000 square feet and has only one studio.
The new venue will feature 290 workstations, 29 offices, 13 meeting spaces and even an indoor/outdoor café with seating for more than 80 people.
“The thing here at the tour is that we’re really building for the future,” said Andrew Wisniewski, the tour’s vice president of engineering. “Really trying to design a facility that’s going to accommodate the unexpected and future technologies.”
The venue was conceptualized in 2017, but the pandemic led to delays in getting the ball rolling, Goicouria said.
The bones of the venue are still coming together. Equipment is expected to be moved in this summer, and the tour expects to spend the fourth quarter of the year in testing mode alongside some of its fall events before flipping the switch in January.
Foster + Partners, the same architect for the Global Home, designed the exterior of the venue, while HLW International is overseeing the interior work.
The cost of the facility isn’t known, but Goicouria emphasized the project was given the OK prior to the pandemic and isn’t relying on any new capital from Strategic Sports Group or Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, should a deal happen with the PIF.
“We built this building not only for what we need today, but for what we’ll need for the next 20, 25 years,” Goicouria said. “This is a very physical, tangible manifestation of the tour’s commitment to production and content and serving our fans.”
Because of its size and scope, its offerings may go beyond golf to other sports or networks, or even news shows, he said.
“If there’s a weekend that NBC needs to do a broadcast out of here, maybe it’s a February where they have both the Olympics and the Super Bowl, so they’re stretched very thin out of their Stamford facility,” Goicouria said. “If they need to come here and do one of their broadcasts here, we can switch that. We can do that.”
Other leagues have their own production facilities, including the NFL and MLB. NASCAR recently opened its own venue in North Carolina at 58,000 square feet. Goicouria estimated PGA Tour Studios would be the largest production facility of its kind between Miami and Atlanta.
“When we’ve sat down with every one of the companies we’re working with, it was a really good opportunity to have this sort of white canvas and say, ‘If you could do it from scratch, how would you do it?’” Goicouria said. “It’s going to change the way we produce golf.”
Jon Freedman, the PGA Tour’s vice president of broadcast production, said along with the fleet of production trucks, the facility will add more support for the tour’s network partners.
The tour’s media strategy also included rolling out its PGA Tour Fleet production trucks this year that are used for events by CBS and NBC.ESPN
“Supporting telecasts, PGA Tour Live, the international feeds, everything will be at their disposal,” he said. “They have some of that now, but it will really be expanded going forward.”
Adding to the tour’s vision recently was the creation of Pro Shop Holdings, the company formed by Netflix “Full Swing” producer Chad Mumm that will sit at the intersection of golf and culture.
Pro Shop’s Ponte Vedra-based team will work out of PGA Tour Studios, as the tour is a minority partner in the company. Employees for the digital content platform Skratch, which was acquired by Pro Shop, also will relocate to Studios once the venue is completed.
“Those conversations [about being a media and entertainment company] are exactly what we have,” said Scott Gutterman, the tour’s senior vice president of digital operations. “This is about us producing the best content for the world of golf right now and the ability for us to create content and tell stories for our players. Our goal is that we’re a media and entertainment organization that serves the tournaments and the players.”
