NAPLES, Fla. — The 2025 season has been a historic one for the LPGA. But that history has also brought a question that must be answered as new commissioner Craig Kessler looks to elevate the tour to new heights.
This season, the LPGA has flexed its depth and parity. Entering this week at the CME Group Tour Championship, there had been 29 unique winners. Until World No. 1 Jeeno Thitikul mounted an improbable Sunday comeback at the Buick LPGA Shanghai last month, there had been zero repeat winners this season. One year after Nelly Korda won seven times, including five in a row, the LPGA experienced the inverse. There were 11 first-time winners. Star amateur Lottie Woad turned pro and immediately won the Women’s Scottish Open. Rookie of the Year winner Miyu Yamashita won the AIG Women’s Open and then joined Thitikul as the only other repeat winner when she captured the Maybank Championship.
Korda, who has yet to win in 2025, will be the first to note that the talent on the LPGA is getting better and better every year. That’s a good thing, especially in the long run. Armed with a transformative new TV deal, Kessler and the LPGA have a vision to capture more eyeballs and reach a broader audience. But can the LPGA do that with depth and parity, or does the tour need one or two stars to dominate and transcend into the larger sports conversation, and take the tour with them?
As the LPGA season reaches its conclusion this week in Naples, the answer is murky at best.
“As a tour and even from a fan perspective, yes, it’s great to have somebody like Nelly that was so dominant last year,” Hall of Famer Lydia Ko said. “Catches a lot of attention, especially with her — in Nelly’s case, being an American player. That catches a lot of different attention. In the case of even if you don’t play golf, you know who Tiger Woods is. Like having that kind of a figure is, yes, very important, but at the same time, just a level of play between the No. 1-ranked player on the CME rankings to 100, I think the talent is not that far different.
“I think as a Tour having better talent and more talent throughout the leaderboard is just as important as having one superstar.”
By:
Josh Schrock
Where the question becomes even stickier is when you consider the LPGA’s global reach. The Tour’s Asian swings show how popular it is worldwide. But with most tournaments played in America and a big chunk of television revenue residing in the states, perhaps superstars are needed to elevate the LPGA in America, while depth and parity boost it around the world.
“I think the Tour is the strongest it has ever been,” three-time major champion Minjee Lee said. “I think because our Tour, we play mostly in America, so I do feel like if we have one or two stars on the LPGA maybe then it can help us in a way.”
“We market ourselves to be a very global tour, and I think that’s what we see and that’s what we see, especially having [11] first-time winners this year, bunch last year and the year before,” Ko said. “It is a double-edged sword in that sense that you want the depth and the talent because you just want to see the whole game grow, but at the same time, if I was to market someone it’s much easier to market one person than 30 people.”
Lexi Thompson, who has been one of the Tour’s marquee faces for more than a decade, doesn’t think the LPGA’s growth strategy should be dependent on one or two players lifting a majority of the trophies. There is strength in numbers.
“It’s a global tour,” Thompson told GOLF. “These ladies come from everywhere around the world. It’s not a matter of winning multiple times. That’s great and all, but I think people love to see different winners and different personalities, you know, different ways you get around the golf course.”
Kessler knows that one of his biggest objectives is to create and market stars. The talent on the LPGA is undeniable, but stars don’t just exist inside the ropes. It takes the backing of a tour to lift their profile and make them bigger than golf. High-quality play is important, but so is the ability and willingness to transcend the course. If you want to grab eyeballs you wouldn’t normally get, you have to go where they are. You can’t just expect them to come to you.
“No silver bullets to creating stars, and this is where it takes an ecosystem,” Kessler said. “Yesterday we had our partner meeting, and at the end they graciously asked: What can we do to help? We said two things: Raise your hand if you have ideas or a megaphone that you’re willing to share; and, two, make introductions to those who can also lean in and help.
“There are so many examples we can point to, whether it’s what Nelly did by going to the Met Gala or with Sports Illustrated or Charley [Hull] going to a state banquet in the UK or some of the recent things she’s done on social. I could take you through a through a variety of players and things that they have done to show up in culture, not just inside the ropes. Those things make a difference.”
For Kessler and the LPGA, their job is to find players who have the ability to crack a larger audience — those not typically tuned in to golf — and want to be the faces of the LPGA. It would be great if those players were also the ones consistently at the top of leaderboards, but that’s not a non-negotiable. Kessler has already delivered a few big wins for the LPGA in his short time at the helm, and he is willing to try different things to achieve the end goal, with building stars being one of his top priorities.
“You have the best players, you have the most marketable players, and you have the ones who are actually willing to lean in and do the work,” Kessler said of building stars. “It’s the handful of players at the center of that Venn diagram that we are going to invest our resources against in order to create global superstars and create that player and fan connection.”
Hull, who Kessler specifically mentioned as a top player who is willing to do things away from the golf course, is willing to lean into being one of the faces of the LPGA.
“I’m just being myself,” Hull told GOLF. “I think it’s great that they invited me [to the UK state dinner]. I’ve had a pretty good year, and it was nice. I do think it is a good thing for the women’s game of golf to have people acknowledging it and, yeah, I’m just being myself.”
Hull won the Kroger Queen City Championship this season and had a Sunday run at the AIG Women’s Open come up just short. She is one of, if not the star of the LPGA, and she sees the explosion of talent in women’s golf as the bedrock of what the LPGA is building.
“Before it used to be like the top-10 players could win, and now it’s like the top-30, 40 players have all got a chance of winning because the standard has gone up and we’ve got so much more depth and that’s what we want,” Hull said.
The LPGA would likely benefit from having a dominant player or two breaking through to a larger audience. It certainly wouldn’t hurt. But what everyone, from Kessler to Hull, Korda and Ko on down, wants is not to have to put everything on one player’s shoulders.
“I think just the way that our Tour is now, I think there is just so much and so much storytelling that can be made that we don’t necessarily need to just bank on having this one person,” Ko said.
“So our job is to find the right holistic, balanced set of stories to tell so that our fans get excited week-to-week,” Kessler said when laying out his strategy. “If we are reliant on one person, whether it’s a star or a celebrity, to carry the weight of the Tour on their backs, I think we’ve missed the boat.
“There’s so much magic happening on the LPGA and we have to bring all of it to life.”
As they do, the answer will become clear.