CityGolf Nashville Is Building America’s First Full 18-Hole Indoor Golf Course
Here’s something you don’t read every day: a 175,000-square-foot indoor golf course coming to the United States.
Not a simulator bay with a bar. Not a Topgolf with a thousand lights and a DJ booth. A full 18-hole indoor golf course with simulator screens for the long game and actual putting greens for the short game. Real grass (well, synthetic). Real bunkers. Real strategy.
CityGolf USA announced this morning that it’s bringing the concept to Nashville, opening later this year in a retrofitted facility that will be the first of its kind in America. The company has two locations running in China, and the numbers from those spots tell you exactly why they’re making the leap across the Pacific.
We should pay attention to this. Not just because it’s cool — although it is. But because it’s a signal about where the industry is heading. The line between “simulator golf” and “real golf” is getting blurrier by the month, and CityGolf might be the one that erases it entirely.
What CityGolf Actually Is
The easiest way to think about it: you play a full 18-hole round indoors, but you’re not hitting every shot into a screen.
For the long game — driver, irons, fairway woods — you hit into a Golfzon simulator screen. The ball flight data is calculated, your shot lands in the virtual fairway, and you move to your ball. That part works like any other high-end sim experience.
The twist comes around the green. Instead of putting on a flat mat into a projected image, you walk to one of 18 synthetic green complexes. Real undulation. Real breaks. Real bunkers. You chip, pitch, and putt on actual surfaces that match the contours of the hole you’re playing. Then you walk to the next tee box and do it again.
It’s not a simulator round with auto-putt turned on. It’s a real golf round where the long game happens digitally and everything inside 50 yards happens the way it would on a course.
The Nashville venue will also include a chef-driven restaurant, a full bar, a pro shop, and a simulator driving range with multiple bays. PGA-certified professionals will be on site for lessons, leagues, and player development. Founding Memberships are opening soon.
Why Nashville?
The short answer: Nashville is growing like crazy and the data backed it up.
“We’ve done a lot of market data and market study about Nashville and the visitors they’re attracting from their demographics to their growth in tourism numbers,” Sean Pyun, CEO of Golfzon America, told Sports Business Journal. “All of those played a pretty big role for us.”
CityGolf is targeting $60 to $125 per round, with the average expected to land under $100. That’s competitive with a premium public course in a major metro area — except you can book a tee time at 9 PM on a Tuesday in February. No frost delays. No five-hour rounds. No “sorry, we’re booked until 2027.”
The company is backed by Nessie Capital, Golfzon, Parlay Capital Holdings, and the Tennessee Golf Foundation. Golfzon Chairman Kim Young-Chan, who pioneered the digital golf course model, called it “a new urban golf club” for players who don’t have the time, space, or access to a traditional course.
The China Proof Point
CityGolf isn’t a concept on paper. The company has been running two locations in China since September 2024, and the numbers tell the story.
The Tianjin location logged 9,937 rounds in 2025. Through June of this year, they’re already at 7,623. That’s a run rate that would put them over 15,000 rounds annually — which, for context, is a number that would make most real golf courses happy, never mind an indoor facility in a market where the concept was brand new two years ago.
CityGolf isn’t treating the US as an experiment. They’re treating it as the main event. The company has laid out plans for 10 to 15 US locations by 2030, with target markets including New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities where land is expensive and time is scarce. The Nashville facility is being designed by a “world-renowned golf architect” — a name that will presumably be announced once the ink is dry.
What This Means for the Sim Industry
The National Golf Foundation reported that off-course golf participation in the US hit 37.9 million people through the end of 2025, a 63% increase from 2019. That’s not people who stopped playing real golf and switched to simulators. That’s new people, younger people, urban people, who found a way into the game that didn’t require four hours, a car, and a green fee that’s been creeping toward triple digits for a decade.
CityGolf’s model is the logical endpoint of that trend. It’s not “real golf OR simulator golf.” It’s both, mixed together in a way that preserves the things that make the real game worth playing — the touch around the greens, the feel of a bunker shot, the read of a breaking putt — while removing the barriers that keep people from playing it.
For home sim builders, this is worth paying attention to. The technology that makes CityGolf work — Golfzon’s screen-golf platform with AI spin sensing and high-speed camera tracking — is the same technology that’s filtering down into consumer products. The terrain-movement plates showing up in commercial venues today will be in home setups in five years. The hybrid real-digital format that CityGolf is pioneering will eventually find its way into the residential market.
“In our mind, the golf is at a point where you’re seeing significant demand where the supply may not be able to meet all the key time demands, at least in most of the markets that we’ve done studies on,” Pyun said. “When you look at golf, you have obviously the inclement weather problem and you have the daylight problem. Well, we take all those things out.”
That’s the simplest summary I can give you. Golfzon is spending real money — retrofitting 175,000 square feet in a prime market — on the bet that the future of golf is played indoors, on real greens, with a sim engine running the middle of the round. The data from China says they’re right. The NGF data says the market is ready. Nashville says they’re building.
We’ll see what the tee sheet looks like when the doors open later this year. But I know what I think: a $90 round of golf that takes two hours and ends with a decent cocktail is going to move.
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