Built by someone who
made every mistake first.
The Hitting Bay started as a personal project to build a home golf simulator in a two-car garage in Mooresville, North Carolina — and turned into a resource for every golfer trying to do the same thing without spending months figuring it out the hard way.
The Story
Why This Site Exists
The idea was simple: build a golf simulator in the garage, practice year-round, stop losing three months of ball-striking consistency every winter. The reality was considerably more complicated.
The first enclosure was the wrong size. Not slightly wrong — genuinely wrong. The room width calculation didn't account for the frame clearance on each side, and the enclosure that arrived looked perfect on paper and was immediately too large to swing in comfortably. Return shipping on a DIY enclosure kit is not a pleasant experience. The second order was the right size. The projector that came next was a standard throw ratio — which, in a 17-foot garage, meant the golfer's shadow covered the entire left half of the screen on every backswing. That was another return. The hitting mat that went down first was rubber tiles from a hardware store. Three months later, a stubborn case of golfer's elbow pointed directly at what happens when you take thousands of swings on an impact surface with zero give.
None of these mistakes were obvious before making them. The information existed — scattered across Reddit threads, forum posts, manufacturer specs buried in PDF downloads — but there was no single place that explained the full picture clearly, honestly, and in a way that was actually useful before placing an order.
Every guide on this site was written to answer the question someone was asking the week before they made an expensive mistake.
The Hitting Bay was built to be that place. Not a review site that recommends the product with the best affiliate commission. Not a manufacturer site that only covers its own SKUs. A genuinely useful planning resource — written by someone who has built a simulator, made the mistakes, learned what actually matters, and wants to help other golfers get it right the first time.
We're an authorised Gungho Golf dealer based in Mooresville, North Carolina. We sell enclosures, screens, and hitting mats — the physical components that every simulator lives inside. We don't sell launch monitors, projectors, or simulation software, which means when we write about those things, we have no financial stake in which one you choose. That independence is something we protect deliberately.
How We Work
What "Genuinely Useful" Actually Means
There are a lot of golf simulator sites. Most of them are built around affiliate commissions on launch monitors and full simulator packages — which creates an obvious incentive to recommend the products that pay the most, not the ones that are right for the buyer's specific room, budget, and goals.
We built this site around a different model. The physical enclosure components — the enclosure kit, the impact screen, the hitting mat — are what we sell. The planning guidance, the room configurator, and the 15 guides covering every dimension and decision in a simulator build are what we give away for free. The theory is simple: if we help someone plan their build correctly, they'll trust us enough to buy the physical components from us. If the guidance is bad, they'll figure it out eventually and buy elsewhere.
This forces us to be honest. A guide that tells someone their 9-foot ceiling is fine for a full driver swing when it isn't doesn't serve us — it creates a customer who builds a dangerous setup and blames The Hitting Bay. A launch monitor recommendation that steers someone toward a radar unit in a 12-foot room produces someone who contacts us angry about data quality that has nothing to do with our products. Honesty isn't virtue here — it's just the correct business model for a planning-first resource.
What We Stand For
Four Things We Won't Compromise On
If your room is too small for the driver swing you want, we'll tell you. If the ceiling height with your garage tracks is marginal, we'll tell you that too — with the specific measurement process to verify it. Telling someone what they want to hear is easy. Telling them what they need to know before they order is what makes a return less likely and a build more successful.
Guides that say "you need a good projector" and "make sure your room is big enough" are not useful. The guides on this site give you specific numbers, specific products, specific reasons, and the exact calculations you need to make a decision. "10 ft is the gold standard ceiling height and here's the arithmetic behind it" is more useful than "10 ft is recommended."
We sell enclosures, screens, and mats. We don't sell launch monitors, projectors, or simulation software. We're upfront about that — and equally upfront that our monitor and projector recommendations exist entirely to help the buyer, not to earn us a commission. If the Garmin R10 is the right monitor for your budget and room, we'll say so. We have no reason to steer you elsewhere.
Most simulator content is built around the best-case scenario: perfect 10-foot ceilings, unlimited budgets, new construction rooms. Most buyers have a standard garage with a door opener, a 9-foot ceiling, and a budget that has to work with the space they have. We write for that person — not for the person building a $30,000 purpose-built studio.
- ✗We don't recommend the most expensive option by default. The Garmin R10 at $499 is a better choice for many buyers than a $6,000 Foresight GC3. We say so, clearly, in the monitor guide.
- ✗We don't hide that our ceiling was too low. The origin story of this site involves building a simulator that had three components wrong on the first attempt. The guides are built around those failures — which is what makes them actually useful.
- ✗We don't pretend 9-foot ceilings are always fine. They're not — for many players, in many positions, with many club types. We explain exactly when they work and when they don't, with the physical swing test you should do before ordering anything.
- ✗We don't add content just to have it. Every guide on this site exists because a specific question kept coming up with a specific answer that wasn't clearly written anywhere else. The garage door track guide exists because builders kept discovering the opener problem after the enclosure arrived. The wedge paradox ceiling guide exists because people kept assuming if they could swing a driver, they could swing everything.
What We Are
A Small Business That Knows Its Lane
The Hitting Bay is a small, owner-operated business in Mooresville, North Carolina. We're an authorised dealer for Gungho Golf — one of the most respected enclosure and hitting mat manufacturers in the residential simulator market. We carry Gungho's full line: the DIY enclosure kit, the retractable screen system, the built-in screen kit, the Holy Grail hitting strip, and the Holy Grail mat.
We're not trying to be the largest golf simulator store on the internet. We're trying to be the most useful planning resource for someone who is serious about building a home simulator correctly — and the place they naturally turn to for the physical components when they're ready to order.
If you've read one of our guides, used the configurator, or are trying to figure out whether a particular setup will actually work in your room — and you have a question the guides don't answer — the contact page gets to a real person who has built a simulator, made the mistakes, and will give you a straight answer.
Get a straight answer about your build
A real question about whether your room works, which size you should order, or whether a specific monitor is compatible with a specific enclosure. We answer these — honestly, specifically, without trying to upsell you.