Acushnet — Titleist & FootJoy

Thirteen years working inside one of golf's most demanding organizations — across three separate engagements with three different Acushnet groups, each its own problem and its own codebase: rescuing the Research & Development group's engineering system (2013), designing and building the Tour Operations platform for the Titleist tour group (2018 – January 2024), and a cloud data-integration service for the FootJoy group (late 2018). The Tour and FootJoy engagements are complete; the R&D relationship continues today.

Project A — The R&D Rescue (2013)

The problem

Inside the company's Research & Development group, a web application meant to manage engineering projects and lab data had stalled. Two prior development attempts had failed to make it work reliably, and management was preparing to shelve the project for good.

What we did

We took ownership as principal developer and worked in two phases — stabilize first, then build. The application was ASP.NET WebForms, and many parts misbehaved because of incorrect implementation of the postback model; we reworked those flows and fixed stored procedures and SQL that were undermining data stability. Front-end bugs were patched with JavaScript/jQuery to stop the bleeding fast.

Once Acushnet judged the app stable enough for departmental use, new features were built on AngularJS v1 — most notably reporting: engineers kept all their club-design engineering information and testing data in Excel sheets, so we added formatted Excel output the engineers could use directly, an addition they especially appreciated.

The outcome

The application didn't just ship — it worked so well that management adopted it as the primary tool used by R&D engineers and management. A project one step from the trash became the department's system of record.

Project B — Titleist Tour Operations Platform (2018 – January 2024)

The problem

Every player sponsored by Titleist is the brand's most visible ambassador. Keeping those players fully equipped — exactly what they need, where they are on tour — isn't just logistics; it's reputation. The tour group needed an in-house system to coordinate equipment requests from the reps assigned to each player through delivery at events across tours.

What we built

A three-part system used exclusively by the tour group: a custom web application, a native mobile app for field reps, and an integration service connecting the platform to Titleist's existing on-prem systems:

• Electronic “tour bags” — every sponsored player has a precise spec record for each club in play: head and model, shaft (flex, bend profile, length), grip, loft/lie, swingweight and serial number
• Equipment requests & automated shipping — in-house tour reps request clubs, components and putters for the players they're assigned to, and the system automates the shipping behind those requests; orders check inventory that includes each rep's van stock at the event
• Internal player profiles — minimal player information maintained for internal use, tied to rep assignments
• Soft goods — balls, gloves, shoes and headwear tracked per player and per event alongside clubs
• On-site mobile app with true offline capability — a Xamarin.Forms enterprise app branded as Titleist and distributed in-house to field reps. It keeps a complete local database on the device (~170 entity types), so reps can view and update tour bags at venues with no reliable connectivity — clubhouses, basements, overseas. A delta-sync engine (incremental change tracking, chunked parallel server transfers, resilient retry logic) reconciles with headquarters when signal returns, and a visible sync log plus an “unsynced items” queue means reps always know exactly what hasn't synced yet
• Enterprise security — SAML 2 single sign-on with securely stored tokens; JWT-authenticated APIs throughout
• Enterprise integrations — gRPC / gRPC-Web services (inventory, orders, players, serials, tour bags) plus an automated pipeline from Titleist's on-prem shaft engineering system
• On-prem-to-tour shaft pipeline — a custom Windows service bridging Titleist's on-prem shaft engineering system and the tour web app: scheduled incremental sync with watermark tracking (only what changed since the last run moves), chunked transfers, JWT-authenticated API calls between systems, retry policies for resilience, and automatic email summaries of every export. Reps see approved shaft availability without anyone re-keying data
• Event-ready Excel reporting — 20+ report types consumed by staff assigned to events: tour bags by player and tour, marketing, order detail and system reports, physical and van inventory, user permissions

The outcome

A three-part platform (web + mobile + integration) running tour equipment operations for six years, then handed off cleanly to in-house developers in January 2024 — a clean handoff that only happens when the architecture is right.

Project C — Cloud Shaft-Sync Service for FootJoy (Late 2018)

The problem

The CMS team needed approved shaft data — the same data flowing into the tour platform — inside their own SQL Server database. That CMS is one of the data sources behind FootJoy's web application for fitting clients, so stale shaft availability wouldn't just sit in a table: it would travel downstream to where fittings happen. Re-keying by hand is slow and error-prone.

What we did

An ASP.NET Core application running as a scheduled Windows service: on schedule — or manually on demand, via a deliberately minimal web interface with two buttons (incremental sync using the last-sync watermark, or full refresh) — it pulls new and modified shaft data from the cloud tour system, inserts/updates it directly in the CMS database processed exactly like entries made through the CMS's own forms (including content indexing), and emails a distribution list every added and updated shaft. As part of this same engagement, we also built the sync endpoint on the Tour application that serves those requests — both ends of the pipe under one contract.

The outcome

Approved shaft data flowing into FootJoy's CMS automatically — unattended, with email receipts on every run — feeding the FootJoy web application used by fitting clients. One focused integration service doing exactly what it needs to do: on schedule, on demand, or unattended.

The outcomes at a glance

• R&D group: a project facing cancellation → adopted as the primary tool for engineers and management — still in use today
• Tour group: a three-part platform running tour equipment operations for six years, then handed off cleanly to in-house developers
• FootJoy group: approved shaft data flowing into their CMS automatically, feeding the web application used by fitting clients
• A thirteen-year relationship spanning three different Acushnet groups — ending in a successful handoff, which is the ultimate test of software quality