The Simulator Superintendent: A Q&A with TGL’s Tanner Coffman

Tuesdays in January can be pretty bleak, especially for sports fans. The weather is cold throughout most of the country, and the sports schedule has also cooled off. It’s hard to justify that trip to the local Buffalo Wild Wings when the TVs are mostly set to reruns of the weekend’s action.

Lo and behold, here comes TGL — Tomorrow’s Golf League — to help shake off some of those sports winter doldrums. Broadcast live on ESPN and featuring some of the game’s best players mic’d up, it’s a new spin on an old game. By now, it needs no introduction. The inaugural season concludes March 25 and features an impressive playing atmosphere inside the SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.

Good news for this magazine: Even televised simulator golf needs a superintendent. That’s because the players are hitting most of their shots off natural grass, in this case, Tahoma 31 bermudagrass. Golfdom caught up with the man responsible for the playing conditions for TGL: Tanner Coffman, director of turf management.

Golfdom: Tanner, thanks for taking the time for Golfdom. To start, can you tell me how you got into the business?

Tanner Coffman: I’ve been in the turf industry pretty much since my senior year of high school. That goes back 17 years at this point. Back when I was going into school, I really fell in love with soil chemistry and soil science and thought I wanted to be a farm consultant. I thought it’d be so cool to travel around, go to different farms, take soil tests, make recommendations to farmers about crop rotation, what chemicals they need to be using and all that kind of fun stuff. On that journey, I found out that superintendents basically do that same exact thing. It’s just the crop is grass, not soybeans or corn. And then it kind of brought in an athletic aspect. As a kid, I loved sports. So, being able to connect both of those into a career really seemed uplifting.

Golfdom: What has been your career path?

Coffman: I started off the turf journey in golf. I did golf for a handful of years — six or seven — doing different golf courses out in Tennessee. Then I kind of fell into a sports turf atmosphere. I got into minor league baseball, then jumped out of that and into Major League Soccer. I worked on an expansion team, Austin FC, built a brand new stadium and built the practice facility out there as an assistant director and then became the director at Colorado Rapids (MLS). So, lots of moving around the country — Salt Lake, Austin, Denver, Tennessee, Florida.

Golfdom: How did you end up latching on with TGL?

Coffman: Honestly, it came as a surprise. While I was out in Colorado, I got a message from a recruiter, and she was like, “We’re doing this thing, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are backing it … It’s indoor golf, but we’re using real grass, and there’s tons of technology.” I just had to sit there, and I thought, I think this is spam! Someone stole the algorithm of my Facebook or my Twitter account and was just throwing keywords at me. I had to read that email a couple of times before I was convinced that, OK, maybe this is legit.

I Googled what TGL was, and this was almost two years ago, so there wasn’t much on the internet about what it was. It was just a concept at that point. But thankfully, TGL had already been working with Dr. Trey Rogers (Michigan State). I knew him, so I reached out to him and got his clarification on, you know, what exactly is this? Is it even possible? They’re talking about greens going up and down and turf flying in and out of this building? What’s the deal here? Once I started talking to people, I thought … this is a chance worth taking, let’s go ahead and try it.

Golfdom: I’ve seen the broadcasts on ESPN, but outside of those days, what does the job entail? What is your nine-to-five like?

Coffman: I’m still trying to figure that out. TMRW Sports, we’re a startup company, and we’re still small, even though we’re doing such big things to a large audience. What I do is pretty much no different than a traditional golf course superintendent. We have just over 2,000 square feet of natural turf, which, compared to the hundreds of acres that some golf courses have, that’s nothing. However, that 2,000 square feet is on prime-time TV every week, versus some of these golf courses having an entire year to lead up to their big tournament.

I’m working with the grass, determining if this is a divot that we need to replace with a plug or let it grow in. We’ve got grow lights. Do we want to go with red light views this week versus blue light views? Or do I want to get the high-pressure sodium light out so it gets a little bit of heat to the grass? All those crazy agronomic things — that’s my day-to-day. And then, obviously, the rest of the playing surface is artificial turf, and a lot of people have the misconception that you just install that stuff and you’re done. It’s actually very high maintenance, almost too high, in my opinion. I’m in there every day, cleaning it, brushing it.

Golfdom: Can you describe where your nursery is and how you transport the turf to the stadium?

Coffman: The nursery is about 100 yards away from the door of SoFi Stadium. I’m kind of tucked away in the corner. I’ve got a little storage building and a big pad. It’s a unique nursery because it’s a concrete slab versus most golf courses where, obviously, there’s a root zone. There’s dirt underneath it. For us, I’m sure you’ve seen we’ve got these trays that come in, they are dangling from the ceiling, and they drive over to the tee boxes. Those trays, there’s a big misconception — they’re a foot tall, but I only have about two-and-three-quarters inch of sod layer in there, so the rest of it is just empty.

Getting those pieces of turf off the ground, rolled up nice and clean and then placed into one of these trays is a pretty daunting task because this is sod grown on plastic, which is very thick, very heavy. It’s about 18 pounds per square foot, and I’m just one person. That’s a lot of grass to move. Usually, I just use a forklift and bring it into the building and get it positioned just right to our trolley system. That’s positioned directly over each tee box. Drop that chain down, hook it up onto four different hooks hidden underneath the turf and bring it out.

Golfdom: Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy are backing TGL … how involved were they in the selection of grasses, the way the bunker plays, etc.? And what is it like having these megastar golfers so involved in what you’re doing?

Coffman: I didn’t need them to come and tell me that they were picky — because I just knew golfers, in general, are very picky about their grass. Golfers are very educated about their grass and playing surface, and when you’re talking about two of the best players in the world, they know. So that definitely put some pressure on me.

We had multiple players who are involved in the TGL come through our training labs and testing facilities where we had grass, and the feedback was always really good. They’d hit their first iron shot into a screen, and then they kind of turn around, and even though they’re surrounded by all this technology, they kind of chuckle and grin. The feel is just as if you’re on a traditional course. Everybody’s first time hitting the ball off the tee box is always when I’m trying to be close. I want to hear what they say about it.

It’s really funny, Tiger’s first trip, I feel like I didn’t sleep for an entire week. I was just racking my brain — “What else can I do to make this place more perfect so he won’t find something that’s wrong? I want him to love it and enjoy it.” The hours I put in that week before his first visit to actually play the simulator were wild.

He didn’t really make too many comments about the grass, except for the rough. He hit a ball out of the rough, then he turns and says, “Man, that was perfect.” And then he goes and grabs 10 other balls, and he starts placing the balls into the rough. He probably talked about the rough for a good five minutes, just blown away by how good the rough was. And in my head, I was like, “Cool, but that’s the least amount of worry that I had in my head was the rough!” Because you just let the rough grow, where there’s so much more that goes into the fairways and then to the green.

I spent all my time on that. And the thing that I spent the least amount of time on is what Tiger thinks is awesome.

Golfdom: I know you’ve hosted some big games in your career, but that had to be a surreal moment to have Tiger there testing your handiwork. I bet your heart rate was crazy.

Coffman: If you were listening to my heart rate, you wouldn’t even know it was a heart rate! I was sweating. But they’ve been in enough now that it’s a little bit more relaxed. I still try to make it as perfect as possible, but I can sleep the night before.

Golfdom: No one has ever had this job before, you’re essentially inventing it yourself. What are the challenges that are unique to this job? Do you have a crew?

Coffman: That’s a topic of discussion right now. I’m a one-man band, except for on match nights; I have a really good team that comes in and helps me.

On a match day, we have about three to four hours in the morning where the teams are open to come and practice, and they usually take advantage of that, so that puts a whole other set of divots on the ground. The grass trays are getting beat up, the green is getting trampled on, so it’s speeding up every time that we’re using it.

Golfdom: I’ve seen enough professional golf that I know how hard some of these guys practice. A guy like Vijay Singh lives on a practice putting green. And this is broadcast on ESPN with a huge audience. I imagine they want to practice as much as possible because it’s a new format, and they don’t want to get embarrassed on national TV.

Coffman: I joke about it, but it’s really not a joke. I tell them, I can only do my job when you’re not here. And that’s not just the players. That’s the technology team that’s testing calibration and the broadcast team that’s testing their spider cams and their rovers. I can only do my job when they’re gone.

We have players coming in throughout the week that want to get better and learn. And this past week, it’s been raining every day. I feel like we’ve had every golfer come in like, “Hey, it’s raining today. I’d rather come in here and hit balls instead of go out to the range.” And we’re like, “Come on in!” So, yeah, that scheduling aspect of it — especially being by myself — is pretty harsh.

You can watch the full interview with Tanner Coffman below.

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<p>The post The Simulator Superintendent: A Q&A with TGL’s Tanner Coffman first appeared on Golfdom.</p>