Innovative Fun

I have to say that this was a lot of fun and is very high tech. Some friends and I went to Top Golf in Alexandria. Imagine a driving range made by geeks. That is what Top Golf is. First thing you sign in and get a card. With the card you go to a kiosk where you get a basket of golf balls. Mind you, these aren't just any balls. These balls have RFID chips in them. When you swipe your card the machine assigns your ID to each of the balls that it distributes for you. This will become clear later.

Then you find a piece of Astroturf and get ready to tee it up. Now I'm terrible at golf. I haven't swung a club in about a million years. You dump your balls in the bin and then when you are ready to play, you slide it through what I'll call an activator, put it on the tee and swing away.

A normal driving range will have a big lawn and a few flags letting you know where 150, 200 and 250 yards are. This place is different. Instead it has targets, some of the closer ones are about 5 to 7 feet in diameter and the more distant ones are 10 to 15 feet. This creates a possibility for a completely different dynamic of game play.

If you want to just hit the ball, no problem, have at it. If you want to play a game that keeps score, the Top Golf game, try to get as many balls as possible into the targets. The closer targets score less than the further ones. There are other games in which the computer tells you which targets to shoot for.

Overall, this was a great experience. The only thing I would change in their formula would be to make it more social. It isn't like bowling where you can have 4 different people in a lane and each takes turns. Instead, each person has his or her own bay. This made it more difficult to have that competition and ribbing among friends. If you've never been, you should go.