Lights, camera, action: PGA Tour Studios to launch
PONTE VEDRA BEACH — For Luis Goicouria, the process of bringing the PGA Tour Studios from blueprint into reality must have felt about as daunting at times as taking a one-handed swing at the 17th green at the Players Stadium Course at TPC Sawgrass.
“The COVID years, inflation has hit, labor shortages, supply chain issues, everything you can imagine has been thrown at us while we’ve been building this building,” said Goicouria, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of media. “But the commitment from our board and from our executive team has been there every step of the way to get it done, and we’re almost there.”
The final flagstick is in sight.
Amid a fast-changing golf media landscape, the PGA Tour Studios are drawing ever closer to completion and the PGA Tour Fleet is already up and running as new systems take shape to deliver the sport to fans around the world, starting from the First Coast.
While it’s still a construction site for this week’s 50th anniversary edition of The Players Championship, the PGA Tour Studios building is scheduled to be up and running well before the first stroke of the 2025 event.
With 165,000 square feet, eight audio control rooms, eight production control rooms, seven studios, 290 work stations and capacity for substantial further expansion, the PGA Tour Studios are big. Really big.
And they’re coming soon, part of a sweeping project to revamp the PGA Tour’s content creation and distribution efforts. The first part of that upgrade, the PGA Tour Fleet, launched earlier this year with a group of nine trucks at the top of the line in mobile sports production.
“Think of kind of going into a brandnew house,” said Jon Freedman, PGA Tour vice president of broadcasting production, “and every high-end upgrade that you’d ever want is in that house.”
For St. Johns County, the arrival of