Palm Beach State College in the golf-world spotlight

College spruces up PGA Boulevard campus for its international turn as host to Tiger Woods new indoor golf league.

When 1,500 golf fans descended last week on the new Tiger Woods-backed indoor golf arena, they got their first glimpse of the benefits of Palm Beach State College’s 2022 decision to convert an old ball field into an $80 million technology hub.

Thanks to investments from the Foundation for Palm Beach State College and golf league founder TMRW Sports, the campus along PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens sports a fresh look with murals, fence linings to cloak equipment areas and repaved and brighter parking lots, marked by upright lighted boxes branded with the college logo.

Traffic flowed smoothly into color-coded parking lots, which filled long before the 9 pm tee-off Tuesday of the TMRW Golf League’s first match, carried live in 113 countries. ESPN introduced its broadcast with the words, “From Palm Beach Gardens, Florida,” without mentioning the host college.

The broadcast drew an average of 919,000 viewers over its two hour time slot, reaching a peak of 1.1 million viewers, Golf Digest reported.

That’s more than any LIV Golf broadcast and also larger than this year’s PGA Tour season opener on the Golf Channel and NBC, ESPN reported.

The on-campus work is the physical manifestation of a deal that initially delivered no lease payments to the college but offered learning experiences for students through internships. One TMRW Sports intern has landed a job with the golf league and another is close, college President Ava Parker said Tuesday afternoon at a ribbon-cutting ceremony. 

The college is moving forward with an 18-hour sports management operations certificate and, Parker said, is working with a private company on developing an artificial intelligence program tailored to area employment needs.

“It’s having a positive impact on students,” Parker said.

The college’s foundation has received pledges of $1 million from TMRW Sports, which is led by golfers Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy and broadcast executive Mike McCarley, and $300,000 from Next League, a tech company that sponsors league events. 

The campus improvements, some paid by the foundation endowment and some by TMRW Sports, have a published budget of about $350,000 under the headings “Pedestrian/Roadway Lighting Improvements” and “Accent Lighting/Elements.” 

“It was a priority from a timing standpoint to seize the opportunity for the launch of TGL to put the campus in the best possible light,” foundation CEO David Rutherford said in an interview. “The idea is ‘Wow, this really has elevated our sense of pride and our feeling about the college and the campus.’”

The league, called TGL for TMRW Golf League, lost a year after its plan for an air-inflated dome fell apart in November 2023. A power outage deflated the dome and, the next day, high winds ripped the prone parachute-like material apart. 

To renegotiate its contract to allow a more permanent, metal-clad building, Palm Beach State College insisted on lease payments. The college will get $200,000 this year rising to $440,000 annually through 2029. 

The golf league has an option for three, five-year renewals after that, with payments rising by 10 percent each time.

College documents put the cost of the air-inflated dome at $11 million. That number rose to $50 million after the switch to the metal-clad building, a report to college trustees revealed.

Those figures don’t include $30 million worth of technology, a TMRW spokesman said in February. He said last week he had no update on those figures.

What’s next? The next match is 7 pm Jan. 14. Woods’ Jupiter Links team makes its debut. Tickets starting at $160 are sold out. Resales start at $700. Matches continue into March, with some sites pricing tickets at more than $1,300.