Eight days after Nelly Korda won the U.S. Women’s Open at Riviera Country Club, she stood in a tan trenchcoat beneath her own Nike billboard in Times Square while a group of enthusiastic members from LPGA*USGA Girls Golf surprised her with chants of “Nel-ly! Nel-ly! Nel-ly!”.
Two days later, at the USGA’s annual press conference during the U.S. Open at Shinnecock, Chief Championships Officer John Bodenhamer said it will be 10 years before we know the impact of Korda’s historic triumph.
What’s certain is that, in many ways, the groundwork for a potential watershed moment in the women’s game was put in motion 15 years ago. While LPGA fan attendance has waned in recent decades, the number of females playing golf has soared.
When a fast-talking Mike Whan, a father of three boys, set out to save the LPGA from utter collapse, he came up with a crazy idea: ask the players to compete for free.
The Founders Cup began in 2011 with a mock purse. The idea was to celebrate the 13 remarkable women who started the tour while also building toward the future by raising money for LPGA*USGA Girls Golf. The mock purse didn’t last long, but the emphasis on growing girls’ golf did.
At the time Whan launched the Founders Cup in 2011, roughly 12,000 girls participated in LPGA*USGA Girls Golf. Last year, 186,000 girls were served across 680 sites. Whan, who is now CEO of the USGA, also notes that in the past decade, 1,000 high school girls’ golf teams have been added in America.
“About four out of every 10 players who start the game right now is a woman,” Whan said recently on Golf Channel’s “Live From” desk at Riviera.
“Women are changing this game,” he continued. “If you took women out of the last six years of this post-COVID growth, our growth would be less than half.”
When Korda is asked about how the Tour has changed in recent years, she often points to the number of dads with their young daughters.
“It is absolutely amazing to see,” she said. “It has grown every single year.”
When Whan, who grew up in Chicago Heights and Naperville, set out to breathe new life into LPGA*USGA Girls Golf, female golf participation had dropped 30% to 5 million (from 2006 to 2012) during the Great Recession, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF). Since the COVID-19 pandemic forced people outside, NGF reports that female participation in golf is up 45% to 8.1 million. The women’s game is growing at a rate that’s four times faster than the men’s.
As an example, industry veteran Abby Liebenthal founded Fore the Ladies in 2019 as a way to offer women an on-ramp to the game. Intro-to-golf clinics turned into group lessons and Happy Hour 9s, to full-blown Golf Getaways to places like Pinehurst, Bandon Dunes, Streamsong and Sand Valley.
In 2015, KPMG launched the first Women’s Leadership Summit at the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship at Westchester Country Club in New York. The goal of the summit was to get more women into the C-suite. Hundreds of women came to Rye, New York, to listen to a who’s who panel that included keynote speaker Condoleezza Rice.
The Women’s Leadership Summit was such a hit that it was modeled at LPGA events across the country over the next decade, introducing female business leaders to each other, the Tour and the game.
As much as having a dominant American No. 1 player matters, sometimes a simple invitation is all that’s needed. Whan would often point to his own mother, Karen, who took up the game at age 59, as an example.
When he asked what made her start so late in life, she said, “You know what, Mike, somebody finally asked me.”
The recent New York City billboard scene was reminiscent of one that played out at the 2013 Founders Cup when Stacy Lewis rose to No. 1 in the world for the first time. As Lewis made her way down the closing hole at Wildfire Golf Club in Phoenix, a group of juniors from the LPGA*USGA Girls Golf gathered behind her. As the spectator ropes came down, kids ringed the 18th green, getting a front-row seat to the American player who ended Yani Tseng’s 109-week run at No. 1.
After Lewis thanked the LPGA founders who were on hand that day – Louise Suggs, Marilynn Smith and Shirley Spork – she announced a $50,000 donation to LPGA*USGA Girls Golf.
“If those ladies taught me anything,” Lewis said, “it’s to give back to the game and leave it better than I found it.”
It’s truly the only way forward.
Beth Ann Nichols has been covering the women’s game for Golfweek for 25 years and is a frequent contributor to Golf Channel. She’s falling in love with golf all over again in the backyard with her 3-year-old son.
