Entering its 75th season, the LPGA Tour will award a record $131 million-plus in prize money across 35 events (33 of which will be official) spanning 12 nations and 14 states in its 2025 schedule, which was released last week. The season prize fund is up 90 percent – about $62 million – in four years.
Among the highlights, the LPGA will debut the Black Desert Championship at the same site as this fall’s inaugural PGA Tour event of the same name, at Black Desert Resort in Ivins, Utah. The LPGA also will visit Asia twice – for three weeks in February-March and for five weeks in October-November – for a total of eight stops, and the tour will return to Mexico for the first time since 2017 with the Riviera Maya Open in Cancún.
The LPGA will begin and end the season once again with two-week stops in Florida.
“The 2024 season was another year of historic growth for the LPGA Tour, and with this 2025 schedule we will continue to improve on that growth,” LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said from Naples, Florida, site of the season-ending CME Group Tour Championship. READ MORE
“That’s inappropriate for a tournament of this magnitude to be on tape delay. I have told Mollie [Marcoux Samaan, the LPGA commissioner] I don’t like that. I will leave it in her hands to see where that ultimately ends up. If you are going to continue to build women’s sports, you have to give them the same billing as men and stop the nonsense of saying we have to show the men’s tournament because they’re the men.”
– Terry Duffy, chairman and CEO of CME Group, which title-sponsors the LPGA’s season-long competition and year-end tournament, on weekend play being broadcast on Golf Channel via tape delay in favor of the PGA Tour’s RSM Classic
In other LPGA news:
>> CME Group signed a two-year extension to title-sponsor the LPGA’s year-long “Race to the CME Globe” and the tour’s season-ending tournament, through 2027. Last week’s CME Group Tour Championship awarded an $11 million prize fund, second only to the $12 million U.S. Women’s Open, and paid an LPGA-record $4 million to the winner and $1 million to the runner-up. On the men’s side, only the Players ($4.5 million) and the U.S. Open ($4.3 million) offered bigger checks to winners. READ MORE
>> The LPGA Elite Amateur Pathway program will provide top female amateurs with a new path to tour membership starting in 2025. Through LEAP, which is modeled after the PGA Tour University and the DP World Tour’s Global Amateur Pathway programs, female amateurs can earn exempt priority-list tour status. READ MORE
>> The LPGA vowed to deal with its plodding pace of play, which drew criticism from top players one week earlier when two-ball weekend rounds at the Annika driven by Gainbridge exceeded 5½ hours and the network TV window had to be extended. After Nelly Korda, Charley Hull and Lexi Thompson expressed frustration, commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan promised to form a committee in the offseason to study the issue. “I think everybody is invested in this and have to be committed to making some change there,” she said. “So, yeah, we totally recognize it. We hear it. We’re digging in, and all we can do is try to find the best solutions moving forward.”
>> Outgoing executives Seth Waugh and Martin Slumbers were honored with the Commissioner’s Award for having “furthered the cause of women’s golf.” Waugh, who resigned earlier this year as the PGA of America’s CEO, helped shape the KPMG Women’s PGA into a cornerstone of the women’s game. Slumbers, the R&A’s outgoing CEO, was instrumental in transforming the AIG Women’s Open into one of the R&A’s premier championships.
>> One omission on the LPGA’s 2025 schedule will be the Toledo, Ohio, market, which the women’s tour has visited since 1984. However, the demise of the former Jamie Farr Toledo Classic, known more recently as the Dana Open, has given way to a new tournament on the developmental Epson Tour. The new tournament, which has not been named, will bring past and future stars of the LPGA together for a dual 54-hole stroke-play event on July 25-27 at High Meadows Golf Club in Sylvania, Ohio. Stacy Lewis, a Toledo native and 13-time LPGA winner, will host the event, which will feature 102 Epson Tour players and 42 LPGA Legends players. READ MORE
Compiled by Steve Harmon and Jim Nugent