SAN DIEGO — Two days before Christmas, Foresight Sports co-presidents Jon Watters and Scott Werbelow were at their desks at their headquarters in the San Diego surburbs, their large office warmly lit by bright sunshine. It hardly felt like the winter holidays, and while some businesses hit the snooze button this time of year, Foresight was busier than ever just a short time before the new PGA Tour season was to begin.
Minutes before the executives got on a web meeting for an interview, Rory McIlroy reached out to see when his new launch monitor would be delivered. The day before, local resident Phil Mickelson stopped by to trade out his machine and raved to the staff about what the company’s equipment had done to boost the game of so many professional players.
Watters recounted those interactions with a humble but satisfied smile. “All we wanted to do in the beginning was not be famous, but help golfers, because we know how hard this stinking game is,” he said. “And if we can help people enjoy the game better, then that’s kind of our mark. That’s our legacy.”
Foresight can claim both popularity and impact. On a wall in the second-floor lobby is a museum-quality display of the company’s history and its influence in golf. It begins with the clunky launch monitors exclusively built for Nike (and thus Tiger Woods) from 2006-09 and continues with the various iterations through 2024’s four-eyed QuadMax that is used by nearly all of the top players in the world.
Among Foresight’s key development points has been making monitors that can be used both with indoor simulators and outdoors on the course—not an easy task given the differing requirements of each—and after the company achieved that, it set its sights on helping avid everyday golfers better use the technology. For the latest advancement, they might need to find another prominent place in the office timeline display.
On Tuesday, Foresight Sports announced a sizable technological breakthrough with a system that gathers data from its new three-camera GC3S launch monitor and programs it into a Bushnell Golf rangefinder. With the patent-pending LINK-Enabled technology, golfers will for the first time be able to see distances in their rangefinder that are specifically based on numbers from their own monitor assessment sessions, including carry distance and trajectory. Further, environmental conditions such as temperature and barometric pressure for that particular round will be factored in. With all of that information combined, the rangefinder will recommend two possible club selections for every shot—all seen in the eyepiece. (Just about the only thing they haven’t captured is wind speed.)
And in a second level of potential use on a Bushnell app, golfers can view their own dispersion patterns of each club to either help them prepare for a particular course or identify potential best decisions on particular holes.
Dispersion circles on the Bushnell app show where a golfer is likely to hit their shot, based on data gathered from the Foresight launch monitor.
This is groundbreaking stuff, and safe to say, this entire setup should get golf gadget and tech geeks humming.
“To say we’re excited would be an understatement because it’s difficult for companies to have things that they pioneer,” Watters said. “It’s easy to kind of follow the trend, to lead and pioneer is a completely different position. And we kind of take that seriously. So we’re ecstatic about this next step in our evolution, if you will, as technology creators and trendsetters.”
After Foresight launched the QuadMax, it was about the time of the PGA Show last January that the ideas began to percolate about linking monitor results and rangefinders. It was a natural fit, considering Bushnell had become a part of Foresight Sports, with all operating out of the same building. Engineers and technicians needed only to traverse stairs to consult each other and perform testing.
The advancement, as Foresight saw it, was for golfers to be able to gather data in their home, club or instruction settings that would then translate onto the course. Watters and Werberlow had blazed trails years earlier when they worked in sales for Full Swing Golf (Werbelow was president for a time), which continues today as one of the leading golf simulator companies. The two broke off to form Foresight in 2009 and have been advancing the technology of swing monitors ever since. (Displayed in the offices are the various iterations—the early ones now looking like something pieced together in a garage; the latter appearing as high-tech pieces of art.)
Both executives say they faced challenges early on in advancing the equipment for both indoor and outdoor settings—one monitor that was pitched had a bright flash that blinded golfers indoors—while facing skeptics who didn’t believe that results translated into actual play. (They contend that the big club manufacturers today are still a bit wary of the indoor results.)
They express a high amount of confidence that the indoor numbers do indeed work well outdoors, which is why they’re excited about the new technology.
In terms of how the system can help average golfers, Werbelow pointed to the way tour players use their own monitors and rangefinders. In practice rounds at events, they take them out on the course with their caddies and nail down various yardages based on conditions, ball flight and elevation. With this new Foresight setup, regular golfers can do much of the same for any course they play. “It’s like having an expert caddie,” Werbelow said.
The personalized info on shot distance and trajectory is a huge advancement, because in all previous iterations of rangefinders, slope and distance numbers were based on the ball flight of pros, not weekend warriors. “For the first time ever, your trajectory and spin profile will be used to adjust for that uphill and downill carry number,” Watters said. “And then it’ll be matched with how far you actually carry that club. You’re getting two degrees of accuracy that you didn’t have before by using this integration. That’s the simplest way to put the benefit.”
The Bushnell app adds another live layer with the shot dispersion data. “It’s like a yardage book on steroids,” Watters said. So, say that you’re playing a par 3 with water in front and left; if your dispersion data for your club shows that you often pull it left, you might want to either leave room to bail out right or choose another club. A second example is facing a blind tee shot and identifying the best yardage and club.
Some golfers will hear this and think: slow play! But the Foresight execs contend that they didn’t create the system to be used on most shots, because that’s the point of having all of it in view inside the rangefinder—and that course preparation with the app before the round can be more valuable.
Ultimately, Foresight believes the value will come in the results. “It’s the empirical data that people trust,” Werbelow said.
With the announcement of the system, the entry-level GC3S swing monitor and Bushnell Golf Pro X3 rangefinder are available as a package for $3,799, with the required annual software subscription ($499 ) included for the first year. The existing GC3 monitor, new rangefinder and other benefits are $6,999. Owners with existing Foresight monitors also will be able to use the Link system, with the Pro X3 priced at $599.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
