On the KPMG Girls's PGA Championship, girls's golf is elevated in tangible methods

As one of many longest-tenured energetic gamers within the girls’s sport, Stacy Lewis holds a variety 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 workforce for the second time this 12 months.

Lewis has been round lengthy sufficient to have a helpful 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 Women’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 are able to get higher and what do we have to do to reinforce the championship,” Lewis mentioned Tuesday. “All the pieces I mentioned they did and proceed to do. So it’s been a terrific partnership for me personally and an incredible partnership for the Tour.”

Large certainly. KPMG’s involvement has elevated the championship in quite a few methods: staging the event at top-notch venues, rising purse sizes and introducing new expertise improvements. The KPMG Performance Insights technology platform launched in 2021, enabling gamers to have entry to full-field, shot-level information, superior analytics, and statistics resembling 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-Cellular, which can function 3D imagery, radar information, shot trails, inexperienced views and particular person shot video highlights, enhancing the fan expertise with entry to this real-time information.

For Lewis, there may be 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 superb to observe,” Lewis mentioned. “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 massive tents and see the golf course excellent. Fifteen years in the past, that was not the case. We have 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 in every single place. You bought what you bought mainly. So simply I feel you’re feeling vital whenever 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 a bit of longer needed to fear about.”

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

“You’ve obtained Ally, Chevron, AIG, KPMG, Ford. You bought some actually nice, I imply, high firms supporting us that we didn’t have ten years in the past,” Lewis mentioned. “I feel simply these firms seeing the worth of working with us and eager to deliver their prospects and their folks they do enterprise with out to have this expertise to wine and dine and make it a terrific expertise for them. That’s in the end what we’re attempting 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 high to backside. It’s tougher than ever to win,” she mentioned. “That’s what makes Nelly’s run a lot extra spectacular, is how good everyone is now. You possibly can stroll that vary and the ball hanging is off the charts.”

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

“Each time there may be an announcement it’s sort of like in my head I’m like, okay, what are they going to do subsequent 12 months to high this?” Lewis mentioned. “We’ve made a variety 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 out-hustle them within the workplace, too, the place she’s primarily liable for producing each print and on-line options, and overseeing main particular initiatives, resembling GOLF’s inaugural Model Is­sue, which debuted in February 2018. Her origi­nal interview sequence, “A Spherical With,” debuted in November of 2015, and appeared in each within the journal and in video kind on GOLF.com.