The PGA of America challenge
The PGA of America hosts several major championships throughout the year, while also organizing over 30 tournaments. The organization needed its content management system (CMS) to be able to handle various unique live-event challenges, especially for the annual PGA Championship, which has been running for more than 100 years:
- High-stakes tournament window: Typically held in May with more than 150 golfers, the PGA Championship is a once-a-year event where the organization’s digital products (website and mobile app) are under extreme scrutiny. Decisions about digital features to implement are made months in advance, and if something doesn’t go according to plan, there’s no quick fix.
- Limited rights: The PGA of America doesn’t own live streaming rights for the PGA Championship. The organization can only redistribute shots after they’ve aired, so their digital strategy is built around video-on-demand (VoD), requiring creativity, quick thinking and close partnership with its CMS provider to maximize impact.
- Two distinct audiences: On-site fans need seamless ticketing, interactive maps and other tools in the mobile app to enhance the live experience, while the much larger remote audience needs a compelling online experience to follow the tournament from wherever they are in the world. Balancing the needs of both audiences requires thoughtful product decisions that work across different contexts.
When we make decisions about what features we are and are not going to implement in our digital strategy, we have to be confident in our choices because they span the entire year. There’s no quick way to course correct, so we need to make sure we get it right the first time.
The Brightspot solution for PGA of America
The PGA Championship is one of the PGA of America’s biggest weeks of the year. The digital team tasked with ensuring each part of the digital experience can handle huge traffic spikes, as well as the many advertising campaigns that make the event possible, requires the right partner to pull it off with zero room for error. That’s where Brightspot comes into play.
Brightspot creates the connective tissue across the PGA of America’s ecosystem, serving as the single content platform powering both its website and mobile app. The CMS takes a “sit in the center” approach, ingesting data and content from various third-party partners for ticketing, video, shot tracking, ad injection and more. This strategy allows Brightspot to apply the PGA of America’s business rules and logic to all content and deliver everything back to fans for a seamless experience.
From a content perspective, Brightspot offers best-in-class editorial capabilities that allow the PGA’s team to continuously publish articles, videos and push notifications throughout the PGA Championship week. Alongside its editorial strengths, the platform supports a sports-centric data model, with features like tee times, player profiles and the leaderboard, which is widely considered the crown jewel of the audience experience.
Another key to year-over-year success is the Brightspot team serving as an extension of the PGA of America’s digital team, coordinating with third-party vendors and helping conduct stress testing and simulations ahead of each tournament to ensure the system can handle the scale and high-stakes nature of a multi-day global live event.
“We think a lot about innovation, but getting the fundamentals right is what really makes the experience a great one,” says Scott Lipsky, Director, Technical Product and Event Operations, PGA of America. “That’s where we’re really heads down — year in, year out. It’s weeks and weeks of testing for a four-day championship because there are certain core functions like live scoring that just have to work properly.”
The result for PGA of America
It’s a winning partnership. Brightspot eliminates complexity across the PGA of America’s stack, while also withstanding the demands of live global events. During the 2025 PGA Championship, the team delivered across two key areas.
Leaderboard and scoring supported a real-time experience that peaked at over 600,000 unique visitors:
- Provided hole-by-hole scoring detail from the PGA Tour’s Scoring API, surfaced within a single scorecard flyout that updated every 120 seconds.
- Ingested every shot from the live broadcast, delivering shot-by-shot 3D tracking.
Video and content throughout the tournament maximized every moment of live and on-demand coverage:
- Delivered targeted video highlights automatically matched to the right golfer, hole and round, as clips were produced and tagged.
- Maximized VoD rights by embedding shot videos directly into push notifications.
- Automatically injected ads after every 10 golfers and promoted PGA professionals, linking out to coaches based on location.
Looking ahead: No Mulligans in sight
What began as a mission to get the fundamentals spot on for the PGA Championship years ago — a reliable leaderboard, accurate tee times, a stable live scoring experience — has since evolved into a platform and a partnership designed to drive innovation.
Now, the PGA of America and Brightspot partnership is entering its most exciting round yet, with sights set on creating a truly personalized fan experience, based on direct fan feedback, that looks and feels different depending on whether you’re following the tournament from home or walking the course.
