Kingsmill Championship: Top 10 power rankings

The Kingsmill Championship power rankings start with some familiar faces but introduce new possible contenders as well.

The 13th edition of the Kingsmill Championship takes the LPGA Tour to one of the most beautiful tracks in the season’s schedule, Pete Dye’s River Course at the Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Virginia.

The par 71 golf course, which winds along the James River, will play 6430 yards this week. It’s a course that demands precision and shot-shaping skill, as you might expect from a Pete Dye design.

Ariya Jutanugarn in the defending champion and she’s facing a field that’s packed with past Kingsmill Championship winners. Minjee Lee, Lizette Salas, Cristie Kerr, Suzann Pettersen, and Karrie Webb all come to the tee having mastered the course. Kerr has done so twice.

There’s also a hungry pack of American and European players in the field who are hustling to accumulate Solheim Cup points as the deadline for team selection gets closer, and there are some very hot players looking to put a win on their resumes this week.

The Tour is coming back into action after a week off following the Lorena Ochoa Match Play and because that was a limited field event some won’t have teed it up in competition since the Texas Shootout. I’m expecting a bit of rust among those players who’ve had a three week layoff.

However, the Kingsmill marks the beginning of a 6-week run-up to the Tour’s 2nd major, the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship, that begins June 29. Look for the field to begin sharpening their tools this week, and look for these 10 players to be dominating play at the Kingsmill.