1/31/25

A Wishlist for the 2025 LPGA Season

Less mess and more rivalries, please

by

The LPGA’s 75th season is now underway at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions. From an on-course perspective, it’s going to be tough to top last year which will go down as one of the most memorable ever. There’s plenty of room for improvement off the course, however. Here’s what I’m hoping the new season brings:

Less Mess

Things got downright ugly for the LPGA late last week with the announcement that the Fir Hills Seri Pak Championship will not be held in late March. What would cause a tournament held at one of the best courses the LPGA visits and hosted by an icon of women’s golf to be canceled just two months before it was scheduled to be played? Enter the underwriter. As reported by Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols, multiple sources confirmed the entity that ghosted the LPGA by failing to pay any portion of what it owes for the 2024 and 2025 tournaments is South Korean television company, JTBC.

Let’s hope we get an answer from the LPGA soon as to why this tournament was announced as part of the 2025 schedule in December. It’s a real head-scratcher that months into not receiving a check in the mail from JTBC for the 2024 tournament they’d roll it out again for the 2025 season. For now, here are a few of the ripple effects from the announcement:

  • The Fir Hills Seri Pak Championship was one of the few full-field events on the schedule for the first four months of the year. Rookies and players low on the Priority List now have just three playing opportunities before the first major of the year, The Chevron Championship.
  • Nelly Korda now has one less event to defend after her historic 2024 season. That’s one less week for the Tour to market Nelly, the face of the sport, at the place that began her streak of winning four tournaments in five weeks.
  • Seri Pak started hosting this event last year. She spoke in the pre-tournament press conference about how it had been a dream of hers since her retirement eight years before. Year two has proven to be a total nightmare for Seri, whose ambassadorship is crucial for the LPGA.

Plain and simple, the messes have to stop. The Tour doesn’t have control over every partner and sponsor they work with, but this development, combined with the Founders Cup losing Cognizant as a sponsor late last year, is a discouraging trend. Founders has a new sponsor for this year but moved from May to February. That means Rose Zhang won’t get to defend her title as she’ll be finishing up her semester at Stanford. An already disjointed schedule becomes even more so and the players are the collateral damage. Not just Rose and Nelly. Every LPGA Tour member is losing out. The remainder of the season needs to be free of faux pas.

A Capable Commissioner

The to-do list is lengthy for the new commissioner (see above). Whoever the LPGA’s new leader is, he or she needs to hit the ground running. There’s no time to listen and learn on the job. The work needs to begin on day one. Bring the mop and bucket and let the cleanup commence. With an announcement on the new commissioner coming as early as the end of the first quarter, the Tour could have a new look just as it gets ready to begin the biggest events of the year.

A Real Rivalry

Expectations are high for Korda’s follow-up to her wildly successful 2024 season. Repeating that success is extremely unlikely, but history tells us 2025 could be another banner year for her.

If (and it’s a big if) Nelly bags five wins, she could qualify for the LPGA Hall of Fame if one of the wins is a major and she takes home a couple end-of-season awards. The only thing that would make that type of performance even better? A rivalry. Maybe Lydia Ko’s got plenty left in the tank to keep rolling back the clock. Maybe Hannah Green continues her strong play after her under-the-radar three-win season last year. Maybe Jeeno Thitikul, Ronni Yin, Haeran Ryu, or any of the rest of the fleet of young talent are due for a career season. Rivalries are the backbone of sport. The problem is they’re nearly extinct in pro golf. I’d love to see that change this year.

Meaningful Change to Slow Play Policy

At the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, Mollie Marcoux Samaan, in what would be her final public address as LPGA Commissioner, stated that a pace of play committee would convene in the offseason to address golf’s hot issue of the moment: slow play. Player pushback on the issue reached a fever pitch the week before at The ANNIKA, where rounds crept towards the six-hour mark. Nelly Korda, Charley Hull, and Lexi Thompson all expressed frustration at how out of control things have gotten. The LPGA has the opportunity to be the first organization to put real change in effect, and in return, gain loads of goodwill from fans aggravated by the issue every time they tune in. It would have been nice to hear from the pace of play committee before the season teed off this week, but I’ll remain optimistic that an update is coming.


This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.