Mission Hills World Ladies Championship: Top Teams

The Mission Hills World Ladies Championship runs 3 competitions simultaneously. We look at the top 5 pairs in the team event.

The Mission Hills World Ladies Championship will dominate women’s golf news this week.

For the first time, the World Ladies Championship will be tri-sanctioned, bringing together players from the Ladies European Tour, the China LPGA and the Korea LPGA and an international field of amateurs to contend for the individual, team, and amateur titles.

Mission Hills Dongguan will host the 5th edition of the World Ladies Championship this. Despite China’s official disapproval of the game that encourages bourgeois values, the Dongguan resort boasts 17 18-hole championship courses designed by some of golf’s brightest luminaries – Annika Sorenstam, Justin Rose, David Leadbetter – and hosts quite a range of international competitions, including the World Celebrity Pro-Am and the Justin Rose-Ian Poulter Match Play.

Golf has posed something of a conundrum for China and the luxurious Mission Hills resort certainly seems at odds with the official government position on golf resorts. Yet the sport is immensely popular, particularly among Chinese elite, and Mission Hills is an enormously profitable operation.

The Mission Hills World Ladies Championship will be contended on the Blackstone course and the three contests – the individual stroke play, the team, and the amateur championships – will run simultaneously.

South Koreans have dominated both individual and team events, which have been held at Mission Hills Haikou for the last four years. Inbee Park won the individual strokeplay in 2014, while So Yeo Ryu pipped her by one stroke 12 months ago. Curiously, neither Park nor Ryu is in the field this week.

South Korean teams have held the team trophy since 2013, when Na-Heul Kim lifted the trophy with Park. The former world number one then paired with Ryu to victory in 2014 and 2015.

This year Jin-young Ko – “the other Ko,” according to Golf Channel commentators at the 2015 Ricoh Women’s British Open – and Jung Min Lee will aim to continue South Korea’s success story in the World Ladies Championship when they line up at Mission Hills Dongguan in China.

Let’s take a look at the five pairs likely to dominate the team competition at 2016 World Ladies Championship.

Next: The Koreans: Ko and Lee