On the KPMG Girls’s PGA, ladies’s golf is elevated in tangible methods

As one of many longest-tenured lively gamers within the ladies’s sport, Stacy Lewis holds quite a lot of clout. The 39-year-old former World No. 1 has 13 victories on her resume, together with two main championships, and can captain the U.S. Solheim Cup group for the second time this 12 months.

Lewis has been round lengthy sufficient to have a useful perspective on the expansion of ladies’s golf. And as a longtime KPMG ambassador, she was an integral determine within the plans to raise the LPGA Championship into what’s now the KPMG Girls’s PGA Championship, which celebrates its tenth version at Sahalee Nation Membership in Sammamish, Wash., this week.

“KPMG has picked my mind through the years how we will get higher and what do we have to do to boost the championship,” Lewis stated Tuesday. “All the things I stated they did and proceed to do. So it’s been an amazing partnership for me personally and an amazing partnership for the Tour.”

Great certainly. KPMG’s involvement has elevated the championship in quite a few methods: staging the match at top-notch venues, growing purse sizes and introducing new know-how improvements. The KPMG Efficiency Insights know-how platform launched in 2021, enabling gamers to have entry to full-field, shot-level knowledge, superior analytics, and statistics comparable to strokes gained, proximity averages, and efficiency indexing.

This 12 months, KPMG not solely raised the championship purse to $10.4 million (a $400,000 enhance), but additionally launched Champcast, offered by T-Cell, which is able to characteristic 3D imagery, radar knowledge, shot trails, inexperienced views and particular person shot video highlights, enhancing the fan expertise with entry to this real-time knowledge.

For Lewis, there’s satisfaction in witnessing the evolution of the ladies’s sport, the place tournaments run just like the KPMG Girls’s PGA Championship have gotten extra of the norm than the exception.

“It’s humorous. It’s wonderful to observe,” Lewis stated. “The gamers which have been on tour possibly seven or eight years, they anticipate this at main championships. They anticipate to stroll out and see the large tents and see the golf course excellent. Fifteen years in the past, that was not the case. We had been getting on venues that simply hopefully needed to have us and possibly they didn’t shut down the golf course forward of time and there have been divots all over the place. You bought what you bought mainly. So simply I feel you’re feeling vital if you stroll on property, and that’s one thing that the brand new gamers haven’t needed to fear about that these of us that been out right here just a little longer needed to fear about.”

Girls’s golf is in an amazing place in the intervening time, with the LPGA attracting funding from a number of big-name sponsors lately.

“You’ve bought Ally, Chevron, AIG, KPMG, Ford. You bought some actually nice, I imply, prime corporations supporting us that we didn’t have ten years in the past,” Lewis stated. “I feel simply these corporations seeing the worth of working with us and desirous to convey their clients and their individuals they do enterprise with out to have this expertise to wine and dine and make it an amazing expertise for them. That’s finally what we’re making an attempt to do right here.”

It goes with out saying that the lifeblood of the LPGA is the gamers themselves — one thing Lewis is eager to not overlook.

“The standard of golf is so good now. I imply, so good. Like simply the expertise from prime to backside. It’s more durable than ever to win,” she stated. “That’s what makes Nelly’s run a lot extra spectacular, is how good all people is now. You possibly can stroll that vary and the ball placing is off the charts.”

Given all of the progress of the final decade, what’s subsequent for the LPGA? Lewis stated it’s getting progressively more durable to prime annually’s excellent news.

“Each time there’s an announcement it’s form of like in my head I’m like, okay, what are they going to do subsequent 12 months to prime this?” Lewis stated. “We’ve made quite a lot of strides in ten years since this championship began. I’m excited to see the place we go.”

Golf.com Editor

As a four-year member of Columbia’s inaugural class of feminine varsity golfers, Jessica can out-birdie everybody on the masthead. She will be able to out-hustle them within the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily accountable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular tasks, comparable to GOLF’s inaugural Fashion Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview collection, “A Spherical With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each within the journal and in video kind on GOLF.com.