Bradley Bayley

Most of GearScout's golf coverage runs through the same room: a converted single-car garage in my house that I've slowly turned into a year-round practice bay. It started as an empty concrete pad with a side door, a fluorescent shop light, and a leak in the back corner — a place to store bikes, not a place to swing a 7-iron.

The first build was as bare-bones as it gets. A mat, a free-standing impact net, and a canvas I spray-painted to look like a fairway pinned to the wall behind it. No launch monitor, no projector — just a rough visual reference so the space felt like something other than a garage. It was enough to groove a swing, but it told me nothing about what the ball was actually doing.

The upgrade was the FlightScope Mevo+, and the jump in information was immediate. That swap is where I learned the most about which features in the marketing copy actually change how you practice — the data overlay on every shot, the session export, and the ability to play simulated courses turned the bay from a painted canvas into something I'll actually spend an hour in. That experience is the source material for the home-simulator and launch-monitor guides; the writeups are anchored to shots I've hit in this room, not a spec sheet.

If you read a golf guide on GearScout and wonder where the opinions come from, the answer is mostly: from this garage, after enough range balls to leave a permanent dent in the mat.