5 Ways the LPGA Can Supercharge its Product
As the LPGA Tour completes its season this week, the quality of play has been eye-poppingly high and the talent pool is broad and deep. Now it needs to get in front of more people.
The LPGA has a new commissioner, Mollie Marcoux Samaan, the former athletic director at Princeton University. She takes over from Mike Whan, who brought the LPGA Tour out of dire financial straits and revived the brand.
However, the job is not completely done and women’s golf has a number of needs, not the least of which is television exposure.
Here are some critical areas that require innovative thinking and can get the game to the next level:
1. Find another TV network
Easier said than done, but worth trying. The PGA Tour and LPGA deal with Golf Channel/NBC announced in 2020 lasts until 2030. The PGA Tour apparently takes the vast majority of the revenue from that deal, according to The Athletic, and given the amount of prime live viewing time the women get, would, on its face, seem like a bad deal.
The LPGA Tour is being suffocated from within by Golf Channel. The network’s contracts with the PGA Tour — which includes the Korn Ferry Tour and the PGA Tour Champions, along with the European Tour, leave hardly any live weekend airtime for the women, even on an all-golf network.
In fact, the dramatic finish of last week’s Pelican Women’s Championship was not shown live on Golf Channel. Instead, that time was used by the season-ending Charles Schwab Championship on the PGA Tour Champions. It’s tough to believe that the seniors are higher on Golf Channel’s pecking order than the LPGA Tour, but there it is.
One of the largest revenue streams for the LPGA Tour is Korean television. If the women are to achieve greater identity in the U.S., they must find a new American TV home where they are treated as a top priority.
2. Go all-in with streaming
With cable cord-cutting on the rise and new streaming platforms popping up at a head-turning rate, this is a broadcast alternative that the LPGA can’t ignore. Streaming and a contract with a cable network is not an either/or. Doing both is not only realistic, it’s opportunistic.
Surely, the sponsors of the five LPGA Tour major championships and the tour’s big advertisers could be persuaded to underwrite such a project.
3. Tell the players' stories
Traditional golf media has been decimated and the few remaining outlets don’t have the staff or resources to cover men’s golf adequately, which leaves women’s golf with next to nothing. It’s left to television to introduce us to the women of the LPGA Tour.
Every LPGA Tour telecast should have one three-minute feature on one of its players. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive. For example, tell viewers who she is, where she comes from, how she got into golf, what she likes to do away from the game, who her heroes are — in her voice.
In addition, there should be a one-minute golf instruction tip featuring a player in each telecast.
It’s true that the language barrier remains an issue but a number of Asian players are making admirable attempts to learn English and should be applauded for such. It’s not an insurmountable obstacle.
4. Play the final round Saturdays in the spring and summer
Instead of suffering through more decades worth of frustration of trying to compete with the men, the LPGA Tour would do well to give up that futile fight and find innovative ways to work around that issue. The LPGA shouldn’t force viewers to choose between watching men and women because they lose almost every time. However, if viewers have the opportunity to watch both live, it’s a winner across the board.
The best way to accomplish that is for the LPGA Tour to end its tournaments on Saturday through the spring and summer. In fact, where it’s possible, it would be ideal to schedule a Saturday finish by 4 p.m. Eastern Time to allow viewers the opportunity to watch the last two hours of the men’s telecast.
The LPGA Tour’s goal should be to own Saturdays during the heart of the season.
5. End the season out West for more TV time
There’s one sure way to avoid the problem of no live telecasts this time of year: go west. The LPGA Tour should finish its season in California and Hawaii for one prime-time reason: live television at night on the East Coast.
And for the argument that NCAA football and the NFL get in the way, either take your chances that hardcore golf viewers will watch anyway or just finish those last events on Fridays. There’s college football on Tuesday nights and the NFL on Thursday nights, so who says you can’t end a golf tournament on Friday?