At the KPMG Women’s PGA, women’s golf is elevated in tangible ways

As one in every of the longest-tenured lively gamers in the ladies’s recreation, Stacy Lewis holds lots 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 crew for the second time this yr.

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

“KPMG has picked my brain over the years how we can get better and what do we need to do to enhance the championship,” Lewis mentioned Tuesday. “Everything I said they did and continue to do. So it’s been a great partnership for me personally and a tremendous partnership for the Tour.”

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

This yr, KPMG not solely raised the championship purse to $10.4 million (a $400,000 enhance), but in addition launched Champcast, offered by T-Mobile, which can function 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 is satisfaction in witnessing the evolution of the ladies’s recreation, the place tournaments run like the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship have gotten extra of the norm than the exception.

“It’s funny. It’s amazing to watch,” Lewis mentioned. “The players that have been on tour maybe seven or eight years, they expect this at major championships. They expect to walk out and see the big tents and see the golf course perfect. Fifteen years ago, that was not the case. We were getting on venues that just hopefully wanted to have us and maybe they didn’t shut down the golf course ahead of time and there were divots everywhere. You got what you got basically. So just I think you feel important when you walk on property, and that’s something that the new players haven’t had to worry about that those of us that been out here a little longer had to worry about.”

Women’s golf is in an excellent place at the second, with the LPGA attracting funding from a number of big-name sponsors in latest years.

“You’ve got Ally, Chevron, AIG, KPMG, Ford. You got some really great, I mean, top companies supporting us that we didn’t have ten years ago,” Lewis mentioned. “I think just those companies seeing the value of working with us and wanting to bring their customers and their people they do business with out to have this experience to wine and dine and make it a great experience for them. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to do 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 quality of golf is so good now. I mean, so good. Like just the talent from top to bottom. It’s harder than ever to win,” she mentioned. “That’s what makes Nelly’s run so much more impressive, is how good everybody is now. You can walk that range and the ball striking is off the charts.”

Given all the progress of the final decade, what’s subsequent for the LPGA? Lewis mentioned it’s getting progressively more durable to high every year’s excellent news.

“Every time there is an announcement it’s kind of like in my head I’m like, okay, what are they going to do next year to top this?” Lewis mentioned. “We’ve made a lot of strides in ten years since this championship started. I’m excited to see where 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 can out-hustle them in the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily answerable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular initiatives, equivalent to GOLF’s inaugural Style Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview sequence, “A Round With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each in the journal and in video type on GOLF.com.