WCCO Viewers' Choice For Best Indoor Golf Range In MN

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) -- Winter is long, cold and dark in Minnesota, especially for golfers. Instead of daydreaming about warm weather and your favorite course, you can still play the game inside. That's why we went in search of the best indoor golf in Minnesota.

Your votes sent Natalie Nyhus to Eden Prairie. Not to a dome, but a 5,300 square-foot space where you can play some of the most famous courses in the world: Inside Edge Golf.

Winter got you down? Without even buying a plane ticket, you can avoid all the cold, snow and ice, and tee it up on the 17th at Sawgrass in Eden Prairie.

"We've got TPC Sawgrass, Pebble Beach, St. Andrew's, the famous ones," Rick Emerson, owner of Inside Edge Golf, said. "You can play, you can practice, you can work on your game, you can get lessons. You can do everything here."

Except get a tan.

"We are a little different," Emerson said. "We have simulators. Our fabulous electronics are telling you exactly what's happening with your shot. We have the driving range, but you're hitting into the screen. The cool feature we have that other ranges might not is that you can also actually play courses."

Golf is a game Emerson loves with all his heart. As fate would have it, his heart is the reason he's here.

"I had a problem with a valve in my heart and went in for surgery on that," Emerson said. "Surgery went fairly well, except for while I was in recovery, I had a heart attack. Coming through that process, you really evaluate what's going on with life."

Not a guy who's used to laying up, Rick went for the green, creating Inside Edge four winters ago.

"As my wife says, 'The doctors may have saved my life that day, but this brought me back to life,'" Emerson said.

The sights and sounds are just as you'd hear on the course.

"One of our customer's favorite features is the mulligan button," Emerson said.

But this is no video game.

"The machines measure just about anything related to how the ball is moving away from where you've hit it," Emerson said. "It's a big difference from an outdoor range. You can see what's happening, but you don't get the why."

And if you need more help, they have a pro on staff. Rates at Inside Edge are $37 per hour on nights and weekends and $34 an hour on weekdays. That gives you a full round of 18 holes because there's no walking with the simulators.

They also have wireless Internet, food and drinks.