Golf drive takes off with 1,000 county tour

A new charitable program is expected to help tee off golf's grassroots promotion to new heights by bringing accessible facilities and training expertise to county-level markets across China.

The "1,000 County Golf Tour", launched in Beijing on Saturday, is tasked with making the once expensive and niche sport equally accessible to young enthusiasts in China's rural areas by deploying low-cost practice facilities and non-profit training programs in up to 1,800 counties across 30 provinces in the next 10 years.

The project was announced by its founder Tang Yilong, president of Beijing-based company TsingLoong Golf, at the China Institute of Sport Science to the acclaim of over 60 partners, investors, and representatives from the sports and media sectors.

At the core of the program is an innovative self-serve practice course, which takes a small amount of space, runs at low cost, and offers swing practice sessions to users with no need for an instructor on site.

The new training facility, just like unattended supermarkets, will be officially introduced to consumers next month and will be set up at designated county locations on the tour, together with online and offline training classes, to reach an estimated total of 200 million users in the next decade, according to Tang.

"It can be deployed everywhere, such as village squares, urban parks, and business hubs. It will be a game-changer once equipped across the country," Tang said.

To ensure the program is operated as expected, a special charity fund was also established on Saturday, aiming to raise money from donations from partners and revenue from sales of licensing training gears and clothes.

Tang made a serious statement at the launching ceremony that he will donate 55 percent of his equity earnings from all his holding companies to the fund, beginning from Jan 1, 2026, to support the operation of the project. The use of all the donations will be strictly supervised and audited transparently, he said.

The sport's governing body welcomed the initiative and applauded Tang's commitment to making golf a more accessible and affordable sport for all.

"The new project is quite inspiring. It lowers the entry threshold financially for golf to involve more amateurs. It's a very bold, yet beneficial contribution to the sport's grassroots promotion, especially for young people," Wei Qingfeng, secretary-general of the China Golf Association, said.

Established in 2015, TsingLoong Golf has been pushing forward with its effort to promote the sport at the grassroots level, having built the country's first "warehouse training course" in Baoding, Hebei province, in 2017 and set up junior training facilities for free at the No 17 Middle School in Baoding and the Binjiang Kindergarten in Ganzhou, Jiangxi province.

"The lack of facilities and access in rural areas in our country has been a pressing issue for the overall sports development," Tang said.

"The 1,000-county project will help address the issue with support from local governments, business partners, and NGOs by making up for the lack of resources with golf promotions," he said.