At four in the morning, golf is mostly a theory. The courses are dark, the range picker is asleep, and a sensible person is nowhere near a seven-iron. Tommy Graunke built a room for the insensible ones. A member can arrive at Scratch Golf Club in Dallas, open the door with a phone, choose a bay and begin sending balls into a landscape made of pixels. The sun, for once, has no vote.
The idea did not begin with a feverish pitch deck. It began with an inconvenience. Graunke had moved to Dallas and lived downtown. He wanted to practise golf around a working schedule, but the convenient hours and the available facilities failed to overlap. The old Hank Haney Golf Center near Uptown had closed years earlier. Before sunrise or after sundown, a serious practice session required either a drive, a compromise or surrender.
Graunke chose a fourth option: make the missing place. Scratch opened its original downtown studio as a private, members-only club, accessible at any hour. It put three Trackman simulator bays, multiple camera angles, a putting surface and lockers into roughly 2,600 square feet. There was no cart path, no first tee and very little room for the ancient golfing art of blaming the wind.
01 / The useful obsession
Build the room you keep looking for
Golf entertainment had already proved that people would hit balls indoors while eating, drinking and keeping score. Graunke was after a different appetite. He wanted a place for the player who prefers diagnosis to spectacle. The distinction is small in square footage and enormous in temperament. One customer wants a night out. The other wants to know why the face was two degrees open.
Scratch was organized around the latter. Tournament-grade balls replaced the cheerful casualties common at public ranges. Trackman produced measurements. Fixed cameras supplied slow-motion replay. A golfer could record a swing and send it to a coach, turning a solitary session into something legible elsewhere. The simulator could conjure famous courses, but its practical value lived closer to the ground: the impact, the path and the unromantic evidence of what the club had actually done.
“I saw a pretty big hole in the market.”Tommy Graunke
Founders often speak of gaps as if markets were celestial maps. This one was gloriously literal. Downtown golfers wanted to hit golf balls. The nearest convenient patch of open sky did not cooperate. Graunke brought the activity inside, then treated access as part of the product rather than a line beneath the opening hours.
02 / A digital apprenticeship
Before the swing data, there were screens
Graunke came to this physical club through a markedly digital career. He studied entrepreneurship at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. Before and after college, his public work history traced a ladder through StormWind Studios: internships in business development, operations and digital marketing, followed by roles in innovation, marketing and technology. The company sells live online IT training, a business concerned with a familiar problem: how to keep a human being engaged while a screen mediates the lesson.
He also founded small ventures named Pocketutors and StormPeaks, and developed an audience as a gaming and PC-setup creator. Those facts can look like separate browser tabs. Scratch closes them into one window. A simulator is a screen with consequences. A slow-motion replay is educational content starring the student. A phone becomes the key. Branding sets an expectation before the golfer enters, while interface choices follow the person through the room.
The connection is not that everything must become software. It is that useful feedback changes behavior. In online training, a learner needs to see progress before attention evaporates. In golf, the problem is harsher: feeling and motion regularly disagree. The golfer swears the club traveled one way; the camera, an employee with no instinct for diplomacy, reports another.
Graunke's interest in design was visible before Scratch. While managing innovation at StormWind, he oversaw outside work on the user experience of an IT training application. The project partner later praised the communication and shared thinking behind the collaboration. That history matters because Scratch is not just a lease full of expensive equipment. It is a sequence: discover, enter, settle in, swing, inspect, adjust and return. Poorly designed, any one step becomes a reason not to practise.
03 / The inheritance
Entrepreneurship was already in the family vocabulary
Graunke describes himself as the product of an entrepreneurial family. His father, Tom Graunke, built companies in computer training and e-learning, including Mastering Computers, KnowledgeNet and StormWind. Tommy watched businesses grow and sell from close range. It gave him an early view of self-employment without the usual soft-focus mythology. A company is an idea, certainly, but it is also payroll, deadlines, stubborn software and the chair that arrives in the wrong color.
His choice of Baylor carried a family thread too. His sister had gone there two years earlier. He wanted a mid-sized Christian school and liked its football culture. He graduated in entrepreneurship, a field in which the final exam tends to arrive years later and charge monthly rent.
That family background can invite an easy confusion. Tommy is not Tom. The father is StormWind Studios' president and chief executive; the son became a vice president across marketing and technology while building Scratch. The useful point is not the similarity of their names but the migration of a business instinct. One generation helped move technical training onto screens. The next used screens to make a physical sport available after dark.
“Let's create something epic together.”Graunke's public professional statement
The word “epic” sounds naturally at home in gaming, less so in a controlled golf bay where the victory may be a six-yard reduction in dispersion. Yet Graunke's public persona joins grand appetite to methodical detail. Curiosity, synthesis and fearless thinking appear in his own account of what drives him. Scratch translates those abstractions into cameras bolted at useful angles and golf balls selected for radar.
04 / A club, not merely a room
Privacy makes space for community
A 24-hour facility could easily become a vending machine for swings: enter, consume data, leave. Graunke added membership, which changes both the economics and the manners. Access is limited. People recur. Strangers become familiar enough to exchange names, then advice, then perhaps the dangerous confidence of amateur swing instruction.
He has said that members got to know one another because of the private model. That is a revealing ambition. The club was built to remove distraction, yet it was not designed to remove people. Members can choose ambient music from a touchscreen. A television can carry a tournament while someone practises. The room sits somewhere between laboratory and clubhouse, with considerably less weather than either golf usually provides.
Community also appears away from the business. Graunke's public volunteer history describes annual trips to Ensenada, Mexico, where a team of about 20 built a home from a concrete slab. At the time of that account, he had participated in nine builds. The work is different from launching a club, though the grammar is recognizable: assemble people, give them a bounded task, and leave behind something more useful than a meeting.
By early 2024, a second Scratch location was being prepared in Dallas's Park Cities area. Expansion tested whether the original idea belonged only to one founder and one room, or whether its rituals could travel. The current business presents multiple Dallas-area locations and keeps the central promise intact: anytime access, serious technology and practice without guesswork.
05 / What the screen cannot do
Technology measures the swing. It cannot make the swing.
There is an attractive severity to Graunke's model. The club can stay open. The cameras can record. The radar can count. None of it moves the golfer's hands. Improvement remains stubbornly manual, purchased one repetition at a time.
That may be why Scratch fits its founder's route so neatly. Graunke has spent a career near tools that promise learning: live online instructors, digital products, gaming systems and now golf simulators. The worthwhile ones do not perform the lesson on the user's behalf. They reduce the distance between action and understanding.
A golfer walks into the room with a sensation and leaves with a record. The face was open. The path moved left. The ball began precisely where physics, that notorious traditionalist, said it would. Tomorrow the member can return before breakfast, after dinner or in the blue middle of the night. The door will open. The virtual fairway will glow. And the only remaining excuse will be the swing.