Leeds alum Andrew Macaulay is the technical genius behind a competition which has brought a fresh dimension to the world of professional golf.
“I thought all my Christmases had come at once,” says Andrew Macaulay (Computing and Operational Research 1991) reflecting on his appointment as Chief Technical Officer (CTO) at Tomorrow’s Golf League (TGL).
His brief was to oversee the technology behind a multi-million-dollar indoor golf league. Four years on, a host of the world’s finest players are set to a gather at the purpose-built arena in Florida just after Christmas to compete in the second edition of the ground-breaking tournament.
“The opportunity came at the perfect time for me,” says Andrew, who had spent the previous eight years as CTO at TopGolf, whose golf simulator technology has transformed the driving range experience for amateur golfers around the world.
TGL – established with investment from golfers Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods – takes the experience to a new level, with simulations of a range of different golf holes projected on a 64-foot wide by 53-foot high screen. When players drive their ball at the screen, the computer then simulates its flight and distance, calculating where their next shot should be played from.
Once they reach the green, the players cross the arena to a 3,800-square-foot artificial turf area with a rotating turntable and almost 600 embedded actuators below the surface that change the slope of the putting surface, creating variations at each hole.
The inaugural championship was a huge success, and saw players competing in teams in front of a 1,500-strong crowd and millions of sports fans around the globe.
After two and a half years of insane work, our team has turned that initial vision into something bigger and better.
“When I joined, this was still at the idea stage,” says Andrew. “It was my job to turn it into reality, the chance to build something from scratch. After two and a half years of insane work, our team has turned that initial vision into something bigger and better.
“There was no existing building that could house this,” says Andrew. “We were able to do some testing of the technology on sound stages, but needed a purpose-built arena for the league.” Its location in southern Florida, where many of the top PGA players have a home, drew in the cream of the crop – players like Shane Lowry, Justin Rose, Tommy Fleetwood and Ricky Fowler, in addition to the two big-name founders.
“We had the events on Monday and Tuesday evenings which meant they could live at home, rather than travelling everywhere like at tour events.”
TGL’s innovation doesn’t end with the technology. “The players are in teams of three, taking alternate shots for their team on nine holes of the match and then head-to-head singles for the remaining holes. So unlike a normal tournament where they are playing for themselves, here they’re always invested in what their partners are doing. Obviously these are players who would get competitive over tiddlywinks – but they took to it really well and genuinely played as a team. It led to real camaraderie.”
A shot clock, giving them a maximum of 40 seconds to play each shot, keeps the game moving, meaning that each match lasts around two hours – perfect for an evening’s entertainment. The championship final and SoFi Cup was eventually won by the Atlanta Drive Golf Club team of Billy Horschel, Lucas Glover, Justin Thomas and Patrick Cantlay. This year’s tournament tees off on 28 December.
Raised close to Watford, just north of London, Andrew caught the computing bug at a young age. “At school there was a computer, but they didn’t have anyone to teach it. So I bought some books and taught myself for my O-level and A-level computer science exams. I was obsessed with it.
“Leeds was one of the best universities for computing at the time. And I liked that the course combined computer science with operational research. It was the science of problem solving.
“Leeds was a great location too. I made lots of friends from other parts of the country in hall, and loved the fact that it was a campus university. We visited again before the pandemic. It was fun to look around, but it has changed so much.”
After graduating, Andrew enrolled on the MBA programme at Baylor University in Texas. “I was planning to go home afterwards but managed to get a job in the States as a programmer for a telecoms company. That was my first career for 20 years, before moving to Topgolf.”
As a former eight-handicapper himself, Andrew enjoys combining his passions for golf and technology into a career: “When we started setting up TGL I was able to test it myself, but we had a stable of really good local golfers who played around 50,000 test shots as we calibrated and tested the equipment.
“Part of our pitch was that it was a much higher spec system than an ordinary indoor golf simulator, where you take your shot about 12 feet from the screen. In the arena, the players are 35 yards from the screen, so that allows us to collect much more data about the flight of the ball from a host of different camera angles before it hits the screen. Using these, the computer can extrapolate exactly where the ball would have gone.”
Even so, Andrew admits that some of the professional players initially had some niggles about playing their shots into the system. “It’s different to what they are used to, of course. But they figured it out quickly and got better and better at it throughout the season.”
Andrew’s attention to detail is such that the set-up actually incorporates four separate ball-tracking systems, so on any one shot, it will still work even if three of them fail – a level of contingency that extends to every layer of the technology. “If something did go wrong we would have to stop the game – and we can’t ever allow that to happen.”
He acknowledges the role which his time at Leeds has played in his subsequent career. “Those three years were formative for me in terms of what I wanted to do in life.”
Further information
For more information, email Simon Jenkins, Communications Officer at the University of Leeds, at S.Jenkins@leeds.ac.uk.
The second season of TGL starts on 28 December 2025. Discover more about the TGL