By Jim Nugent
In early December 2024, the LPGA announced that tour commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan was stepping down from her post after three and a half years. Before her departure this week, Samaan spoke exclusively with Global Golf Post about the organization’s achievements during her tenure and its outlook for the future. This interview has been edited for brevity and accuracy.
GGP: As your three-and-a-half-year tenure winds down, what are the areas of accomplishment that you are proudest of as you reflect on your service to the LPGA?
Marcoux Samaan: I think there are six key focus areas. There has been a tremendous amount of growth at the LPGA in my time. First and foremost is the financial situation for the players. Purses have grown more than 90 percent in the past few years. That’s remarkable.
We tend to look at player income as the key metric. The average player income for the top 100 players grew more than 100 percent, from $570,000 to over a million dollars in 2024. Two players recorded the most amount of money ever won last year: Jeeno (Thitikul) with more than $6 million and Nelly (Korda) at roughly $4.4 million. We had 10 players earn over $2 million, and 34 players made over a million dollars, up from 15 in 2021. We are very proud of these numbers.
We also look at the earnings of the 100th-ranked player. That player made over $200,000, which surpassed an internal goal that we had set. We have done a great job of providing financial opportunities for the best players in the world to make a living and try to realize their dreams.
Secondly is the global nature of our tour. We are proud of the extreme global nature of our tour. These are the best women golfers in the world playing on the LPGA Tour. We had players from seven different countries in the top 10 in 2024.
Closely related to this is our schedule. Over time, we focused on creating a schedule that allows the players to reach their peak performance. We became very intentional about how we move our players around the world. I am very proud of our 2025 schedule with the bracketing of events regionally and putting in natural breaks; this is something we worked really hard on.
We are very proud of the growth of the full media consumption metric. This number has just gone off the chart. In 2022, four million people were consuming LPGA content on average each week. In 2023, that number went to seven million, and in 2024 we exceeded 11 million with some really big spikes. During the Chevron Championship, we delivered 26 million, the Solheim Cup was 42 million, and CME (Group Tour Championship) finished the year at 19 million. Those are really big numbers.
We focused not just on income but player services, including stipends for missed cuts. We had 10 events with minimum financial payouts in 2023, including stipends. In 2024, that number rose to 17. I have always been a great believer in creating an environment for the best athletes in the world to reach their peak performance. This includes providing better food, a place for private physio sessions, travel vouchers, and the like. I am very proud of the progress we made in this area.
We also focused on our fund-raising efforts within the LPGA Foundation, to drive revenue so as to provide opportunities for young girls to benefit from the game itself but also from the life lessons the game offers. I am passionate about this, and we made good progress with our fund-raising to provide those opportunities, particularly for those who cannot afford it.
GGP: Do you leave behind any unfinished business?
Marcoux Samaan: This is the great part of the future of the LPGA. As good as the numbers that I shared with you are, we are not even close to reaching our optimal performance level. There is tremendous room for growth. We have to focus on building our tech assets, we need more sellable assets to attract more corporate partners to benefit from the great platform that is the LPGA. There is lots of growth ahead on the commercial side. We need to continue to optimize the schedule. There is no end to what the LPGA can do. We have a great team in place, we have a really good strategy. I am very optimistic about where the LPGA is headed.
GGP: You have had a couple of prominent players, Nelly Korda and Lexi Thompson in particular, pleading for more television exposure, for more prime-time viewing opportunities. Are they wrong? Is there any relief in the next few years?
Marcoux Samaan: In any sports business, the way that you interact with your fans through media is critical. In today’s world, your TV deal is important, but now there are a lot more ways to engage fans with video content. That’s why the full media engagement metric is important.
I would say that we are working well with NBC, Golf Channel, CBS, and ESPN, but there is always room for growth. This has been a main issue for all of women’s sports. Fans are really consuming women’s sports right now. If you are on the air at the right time and you market aggressively, demand is there. Fans need to have the most access they possibly can. To use a common phrase, if you build it, they will come. But in addition to time of broadcast, it’s also about production quality, innovating inside the broadcast to make the viewer experience exciting and dynamic, marketing the broadcast aggressively. These are joint initiatives we have been working on with our partners. Our partners really see the value in the LPGA and just have to continue to work with them on all of these items. How you engage with your fans is critical to continued growth.
GGP: A little more than a year ago, the proposed merger between the LPGA and the Ladies European Tour was canceled. Is there any reason to believe that that merger could be consummated in the near future?
Marcoux Samaan: The relationship between the LPGA and the LET is strong. We have been focused in 2024 on building the joint venture and maximizing that relationship. If you look at the last five years, the LET is in the strongest position it’s ever been in and it continues to grow. We will see what the future holds for this partnership.
GGP: This year marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the LPGA. There will be a lot of reminiscing and backward-looking storytelling during the course of the year, but I know that your focus will always be on the future of the LPGA. Comment on that future as you see it.
Marcoux Samaan: Seventy-five years of remarkable history, of women breaking down barriers every step of the way, leading the way in women’s sport. To think back to 1950 and what those women did. To think of Babe Didrikson Zaharias making $14,000 in 1950 when many people thought women had no business playing golf for a living. Those women believing in their value, both from an athletic standpoint and a commercial standpoint, what they did is almost unbelievable and that theme needs to be celebrated and carried forth into the future. People need to believe in the value of our amazing athletes, believe in the commercial value of the LPGA. I think the world is the LPGA’s oyster moving forward. We need to attract more great corporate sponsors while ensuring our current partners are maximizing their investment in the LPGA. We are just scratching the surface and there is a ton more growth to be had.
GGP: Near the end of your tenure, the LPGA announced a revised policy about transgender participation in LPGA tournaments. What has been the reaction of your membership to this revised policy?
Marcoux Samaan: The membership is focused on making sure that we have the most competitive environment possible. We worked hard to convene a working group of experts to determine if a change was needed to our current policy. In our competitions, we need to prioritize competitive fairness. The experts determined that certain advantages accrue to individuals through male puberty and that is why we made the change we did. I can’t speak for the membership, but I think we landed in the right place for the LPGA.