How GOLF+ & Meta Quest 3 Helped Team Europe Take Home the Ryder Cup
It’s been two months and change since Team Europe claimed victory at the 2025 Ryder Cup. It was an historic outcome — the first away team win since 2012. While the final score tallied 15 to 13, Team Europe led through the first days of the weekend by a seven-point margin — the largest two-day lead by any side since 1979. And it was largely thanks to Team Europe captain Luke Donald’s foresight that virtual reality helped give them an edge.
Six months before Team Europe bested Team USA at New York’s Bethpage Black, Donald hit up the team at GOLF+ with a unique proposal.
“It turns out he’s a huge fan of VR,” says GOLF+ President James Wright. “He had heard about its training applications in some other sports, and that triggered the thought for Luke: Is there any way that we can use VR to help the team prepare for this year’s Ryder Cup? He knew that it was going to be critical for the team to just really try to feel what it’s like to stand on that first tee box — to take that edge off of what it would ultimately be like.”
For a rookie who’s never experienced it to even the most seasoned of pros, the atmosphere of the Ryder Cup is especially raucous — and not something you can easily describe or prepare for. So what better way to get acclimated to the roar of the crowd, insults and all, than by fully immersing yourself in that environment ahead of time?
In lieu of a time machine to physically put you in that future moment, VR was the perfect solution.
Working in partnership with Team Europe, the GOLF+ crew set about not only meticulously recreating the very challenging course in-headset, but incorporating actual audio recordings of the crowds from previous Ryder Cups so that the players could get a better sense of what they were in for.
“We created a very dense crowd on the first tee,” explains GOLF+ CEO & Founder Ryan Engle. “We included some of the chanting audio, which isn’t available in the public game because it might be a little too distracting for our players. We tried to kind of make it as distracting as possible to get what Luke wanted out of it.”
At the BMW PGA Championship in September of this year, Team Europe was able to get hands-on with GOLF+ on Meta Quest 3 for the first time.
“We really looked at it as, like, this is a piece of history, and we get to be the first ones to ever try to do this and have some sort of impact,” notes Engle. “And given the result worked out well, we’re really hopeful that this becomes something that more teams do in the future and that it does become something that keeps on pushing things forward. The fact that the Europeans were willing to bet on this technology and allow us to be a part of it is an honor that we’ll never forget.”
