What’s New About the LPGA 2015 Season?
Jul 21, 2013; Toledo, OH, USA; An usher holds a quite sign as Lexi Thompson hits during the final round of the Marathon Classic at Highland Meadows Golf Club. Mandatory Credit: Andrew Weber-USA TODAY Sports
With less than three weeks remaining until the Coates Golf Championship tee time I’m feeling both impatient and excited for the start of a new LPGA season: 33 events, $61.6 millions in prize money and, best of all for the fans, 410+ hours of television coverage. That’s an increase of $4 million for the players and 30 hours of LPGA television coverage for the fans this year! Who wouldn’t be excited to get the season going?
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This year the LPGA season starts and ends in Florida. Sandwiched between the pre-Super Bowl
Coates Golf Championship
at the
Golden Ocala Golf and Equestrian Club
in Ocala, FL and the
CME Group Tour Championship
at
in Naples there are changes in the Tour schedule that signal two significant and welcome shifts in the LPGA’s focus:
- A new sponsor, All Nippon Airways, for the historic and cherished Major at Rancho Mirage, California brings a new name to the event, the ANA Inspiration, secures Dinah Shore’s legacy to women’s golf, and ensures the annual leap into Poppy’s Pond through 2019. While it remains to be seen whether ANA, now the official airline of the LPGA, will do a better job of getting players clubs to their desired destination in a timely fashion than some of the other airlines, the sponsorship further cements the LPGA’s global scope and more explicitly aligns the Tour with the increasing internationalization of recreational golf, and these are both good for the game at all levels.
- The transformation of the LPGA Championship into the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship will do much to strengthen and elevate the prestige, public image, and player compensation of women’s pro golf. That, in turn, will help grow the game at the grass roots and recreational levels by attracting girls and women to the game who might otherwise continue to think of golf as a sport that’s owned and controlled by a bunch of cigar-puffing retired CEOs who hang out at the local country club’s 19th hole.
What do these changes mean for the fans? Well, certainly, there will be more television time but there’s another layer of meaning that’s less immediately apparent.
These changes will make it possible for us to watch women take on some of golf’s most challenging venues, a dream long-held by the LPGA’s Founders as they traipsed from one cow pasture track to the next, carving the path that would eventually lead this year to the Lancaster Country Club for the US Women’s Open, to Scotland’s fabled Turnberry for the RICOH Women’s British Open, to the French Alps and Evian Les Bains for the Evian Championship and to Golf Club Saint Leon-Rot for the Solheim Cup.
This is exciting stuff; and while most of us can only dream about playing these venues or joining the gallery to watch Stacy Lewis and Michelle Wie battle for hegemony, or Karrie Webb play her smooth-as-silk game of precision golf, and admire the youthful flexibility of Lydia Ko and Stephanie Meadow, television coverage is the next best thing, last season capturing and preserving Paula Creamer’s 75-foot putt in Singapore and Mo Martin’s life-changing magical moment on the 72nd hole at Royal Birkdale.
I can barely wait to see what this year will bring!