Lancaster Nation Membership desires to turn out to be a house for girls’s championship golf.
USGA/Jason E. Miczek
The record of future venues for the U.S. Ladies’s Open is stacked, however there’s at present a obtrusive omission.
All week on the U.S. Ladies’s Open, indicators lining the first fairway displayed the winners and former venues of championships previously decade-plus. As you walked across the chipping inexperienced and in by the primary fan entrance off the tenth fairway, these pathways have been lined with shows of the U.S. Ladies’s Open’s future venues.
It’s clear there’s been a large shift.
Over the previous 20 years, the U.S. Ladies’s Open has visited simply 4 programs (Pebble Seaside, Pinehurst No. 2, Oakmont and Olympic) which can be stables of the present-day rota for the lads’s U.S. Open. The winds have already began to alter with Pebble internet hosting one of the best ladies on the planet for the primary time final yr. By means of the subsequent 12 years, the venues lack not for status.
However lacking from the schedule is final week’s host, Lancaster Nation Membership.
After an exciting end and setting attendance information on the 2015 U.S. Ladies’s Open, the primary USGA championship held on the 1920 William Flynn design set within the coronary heart of Pennsylvania Dutch nation, the observe delivered once more final week, producing the toughest U.S. Open take a look at in a decade and a worthy champion in now-two-time U.S. Ladies’s Open winner Yuka Saso.
Final week’s occasion was essentially the most attended U.S. Ladies’s Open since 2015, beating match officers’ expectations and scoring a 4.83 out of 5 for fan satisfaction, the best for the reason that USGA started monitoring knowledge, in accordance with a USGA spokesperson.
The spokesperson additionally mentioned the match tied for its finest hospitality gross sales of any U.S. Ladies’s Open and was one of the best yr ever for U.S. Ladies’s Open merchandise gross sales.
“When individuals discuss Lancaster, they are saying, man, that’s a hidden gem,” mentioned USGA CEO Mike Whan on the trophy presentation. “Properly, you ain’t hidden anymore. You’re a gem.”
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It’s clear, not solely can Lancaster’s course take a look at one of the best gamers within the sport, however that the neighborhood supplies the thrilling environment wanted to maintain elite championship golf.
So whereas Lancaster’s subsequent potential alternative to host essentially the most prestigious occasion within the ladies’s sport can’t come till a minimum of 2037, the membership can and ought to be a part of the championship rotation for years to come back afterward. Earlier within the week, Whan mentioned discussions for future occasions have been ongoing and it was a “secure guess” there will probably be future USGA occasions at Lancaster.
After the success of the 2015 Ladies’s Open, the membership wasn’t awarded this yr’s occasion till 2018. Nevertheless, the USGA has been constructing out its U.S. Open schedules for each women and men properly upfront, with the most recent at present scheduled for 2048.
However the membership has grander plans than simply extra U.S. Ladies’s Opens, and I don’t imply internet hosting males’s U.S. Opens or males’s U.S. Amateurs.
“We’ve made a really deliberate choice to carry ourselves out as a house for the ladies’s sport on the championship stage,” Lancaster Nation Membership board member and Greens Chair Rory Connaughton instructed GOLF in an interview Tuesday. “Whether or not that’s amateurs or professionals, juniors or seniors or mid-amateurs, we see ourselves as a singular place within the sport in that regard.”
At only a skosh below 6,950 yards from the ideas, Lancaster isn’t lengthy sufficient to host right now’s longest hitters within the males’s U.S. Opens, or U.S. Amateurs, and even U.S. Juniors. It performs longer than the cardboard, owing to its par 70 and plenty of uphill method pictures, however even the Ladies’s Open had many par-4 tee containers tipped out final week.
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Connaughton, who has been a member of the membership for practically three many years, mentioned there was a possibility years in the past for LCC to construct heritage like its fellow Pennsylvania golf equipment Oakmont and Merion, which have hosted essentially the most and sixth-most males’s U.S. Opens, respectively, nevertheless it was handed on.
Now that the pool of programs that may host these males’s occasions has shrunk, it probably won’t ever have that likelihood once more.
“We’re not ever going to compete with the lads’s championships hosted by Oakmont or hosted by Merion in Pennsylvania or, or by any of the opposite nice golf equipment which can be on the shortlist,” he mentioned. And that’s OK with him and the membership.
Lancaster’s location additionally presents a singular alternative. Whereas town itself was simply shy of 60,000 residents as of 2018, the metropolitan space is greater than a half million individuals. The adjoining metro of Harrisburg-Carlisle has practically 600,000 residents. Inside an hour-and-a-half’s drive, you will have the vast majority of the 7.366 million within the Philadelphia metro space. Double that drive, New York Metropolis, Baltimore and Washington D.C. are all inside an inexpensive day journey.
Then there’s Lancaster itself, which has no main skilled sports activities workforce, and even minor league baseball. However the space has turn out to be dedicated to ladies’s sports activities, Connaughton says. Highschool subject hockey and woman’s lacrosse video games draw hundreds of followers and Lancaster County has been dwelling to prime nationwide highschool groups in subject hockey.
When the Ladies’s Open involves Lancaster, it’s the “solely sport on the town,” which Connaughton thinks is an enormous purpose for the attendance information and why the neighborhood helps the occasion so properly.
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He lauded the record of golf equipment tied to the U.S. Ladies’s Open for the subsequent 12 years, previous males’s U.S. Open venues internet hosting the ladies’s equal for the primary time similar to Merion, Riviera, Oakland Hills, Los Angeles Nation Membership, Chicago Golf Membership, Shinnecock and the Nation Membership later in 2045.
“They don’t have to show something to anyone,” Connaughton mentioned. “And by opening themselves as much as the ladies’s sport, they’re elevating the ladies’s sport in a single respect. And I believe they’re elevating themselves in one other.”
However he doesn’t see Lancaster’s want for extra ladies’s championships as a approach of stepping into the wrong way.
“For us, it’s not a automobile to the lads’s sport,” he mentioned. “We don’t have that heritage, however we do have a golf course. We do have a market. We do have a membership that embraces this.”
Earlier than final week’s occasion, the membership had been taking part in the course off mats since October and closed it utterly on Could 13, two weeks earlier than the championship.
In truth, Connaughton revealed that when the USGA initially approached the membership with internet hosting an occasion round 2007 and ’08, the preliminary choices included a Boy’s U.S. Junior Novice. However the membership pressed for extra and ultimately landed the 2015 U.S. Ladies’s Open.
Now the membership’s path in ladies’s championship golf is ready.
“Talking personally, I’d like to see a day when each ladies’s champion within the USGA portfolio of nationwide occasions is standing on our 18th inexperienced with their trophy in hand,” Connaughton envisioned. “With a headline above them that claims, ‘Welcome House.’”
