By Kent Paisley
It has been a hectic recent travel schedule for Wei-Ling Hsu. She flew from the Honda LPGA Thailand to Los Angeles to pick up her Mom to drive to Phoenix for a U.S. Women’s Open qualifier last Monday. She won a playoff for the first alternate spot at Superstition Mountain Golf Club last Thursday, and came to Williamsburg, Va., bleary-eyed.

Then the seven-year LPGA veteran played through her slumber and won the Pure Silk Championship on the River Course at Kingsmill Resort on Sunday to achieve her lifelong dream of winning on the LPGA Tour for the first time.

“I thought to myself that I been wait for seven years, I don’t want to wait anymore,” Hsu said, fighting off tears.

The lead turned like a carousel throughout Sunday, with Hsu, Moriya Jutanugarn, and Jessica Korda taking turns atop the leader board. Jutanugarn emerged from the pack with a two-shot lead after back-to-back birdies on the 13th and 14th. The lead remained two after the 15th, the last par five. Then it flipped in a four-shot swing from Jutanugarn to Hsu.

Jutanugarn drove it into the fairway bunker on the left side on 15. It did not seem problematic, but Jutanguarn made it so after catching the lip with her second. She wedged out with her third. A three-putt from 30 feet compounded the mistake for a double bogey on the easiest hole of the week.

“I [didn’t] hit a good drive and it went into the bunker. Maybe I just catch it a little too thin,” Jutanugarn said about her bunker shots. “The sand was so soft and fluffy, it came back down and not a very good lie, I had to chip out.”

Hsu found the fairway off the tee and stuffed her fairway wood to about three paces to the flag on the 473-yard hole, then made eagle.

“I’ve been waiting for this for so long. You have to make this putt. You don’t want to wait another week, another year,” Hsu said of her thought before her eagle. “Just way too long. I have to make this putt.”

The 108th-ranked player in the world rolled home the eagle putt to wrest the lead and rip away the possibility of the third time in LPGA Tour history sisters would have won on back-to-back weeks, after Ariya Jutanugarn’s victory in the Honda LPGA Thailand.

Hsu added a birdie on the 16th and an emphatic fist pump for par on the 17th and win at 13-under par 271. Hsu’s victory is particularly meaningful given her native Taiwan is under lockdown with no sports due to an outbreak of Covid-19 cases. Her friends bombarded the 26-year-old over night with encouraging messages through Facebook and Instagram after the third round.

“I hope that I give them some positive thought and good energy, to believe something, you can always believe something and it will actually happen,” Hsu said.

Hsu also gets into the U.S. Women’s Open field, which she was most excited about after her victory. Hsu has played in it every year since 2014 except for 2020, when she stayed in Taiwan due to the pandemic. She has played six consecutive weeks with her qualifier last week and can play the following two LPGA events, including the U.S. Women’s Open.

She’s unsure if she’ll play next week before Olympic Club, but her exhaustive effort delivered a chance at her ultimate dream in two weeks.

“I really want to win U.S. Open, definitely getting into the field give yourself an opportunity to win the trophy,” she said.

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By Kent Paisley
The 2021 LPGA Tour season moves on to its 10th tournament of the year this week at the Pure Silk Championship. At a glance, it would seem like a run-of-the-mill event, albeit one that begins a parade of 11 straight weeks of tournaments through early August.

But with a closer look, the stop at Kingsmill Resort in Williamsburg, Va., is actually one of the more critical weeks of the year for LPGA members, specifically those who earned their cards via Q-Series and have limited status. After Sunday’s play wraps up, the LPGA “reshuffles” the priority list for tour members for the first time since the middle of 2019. That means players have one last tournament to earn critical CME points and potentially set themselves up for more access to events for the rest of 2021.

“Reshuffles are huge, especially for people who don’t have the best priority status,” said LPGA Tour rookie Jennifer Chang. “If I can bump up a couple more spots even, depending on how everything goes, that would be a huge thing for me. Even just one spot can be the difference between getting into a tournament versus not getting into one.”

Like the PGA Tour, the LPGA classifies members into various categories depending on their play from the previous season. Top categories include players high on the money list, career money leaders and winners in recent seasons. Tournament fields are filled in order of categories, so the better or higher category you’re in, the better chance you can pick what events you want to play in.

The reshuffle, which ordinarily happens twice during the season, lets players from lower categories move into higher ones based on their current play (or move up on the priority ranking within a category).

Reshuffles for 2021 are using CME points instead of official money. And the potential movement is limited. The LPGA Tour has Category 8 for players from lower categories who are in the top 80 of the CME points list in 2021 after Pure Silk. In addition, Category 13 will absorb all players from lower categories who don’t move to Category 8.

So, for example, Leona Maguire is 16th on the CME points list and will move up from Category 9 (the top 10 LPGA Symetra Tour players) to Category 8. Lydia Ko sits atop the CME points list but is already in Category 1, so she won’t reshuffle.

Chang is currently in Category 14 from earning her card through Q-Series in 2019. This category is the break even group for entry into most full-field events. Chang finished T-9 at the 2019 Q-Series, and is currently 137th on the tour’s overall priority list. Chang is making her seventh start of the season at the Pure Silk, a full-field event with 142 players competing. (A priority number inside 144 essentially lets you play any full-field event you wish.)

On the other side of the breakeven point is long-hitting Bianca Pagdanganan. She, too, is in Category 14 (finished T-38 at Q-Series) but is 167th on the overall priority list. The 23-year-old Filipino rookie has only played twice this year, and just once from her status. (Pagdanganan’s start at the ANA Inspiration came from finishing in the top 80 on the money list in 2020.) She’s missed the cut in both starts so has no CME points earned in 2021. Thus she needs to have a really good week (top eight or better finish) in hopes of somehow getting into Category 8 or risk moving only to Category 13 and being low on the priority list inside the category. (All this despite a third-place finish at the LPGA Drive On last fall and a spot in the CME Group Tour Championship last December.)

Bianca Pagdanganan needs a T-8 finish or better this week at Kingsmill if she hopes to jump from Category 14 to Category 8 and be able to pick what full-field events she plays in this summer on the LPGA Tour. Michael Reaves

“I think the reshuffles are a bit stressful for some players, especially for rookies, because if you get passed, your schedule can be very much in limbo,” says LPGA Tour veteran Christina Kim, currently in Category 14 as a Q-Series grad but set to move to Category 8 thanks to being 57th on the 2021 CME points list. “On the flip side, if you’re in my camp, knowing that all I needed was a tee time to get a chance to play well, you don’t have to focus on the reshuffle because good golf will take care of itself.”

Chang has made the most of her opportunities, with her first career top-10 at the LPGA Drive On Championship at Golden Ocala in February. She is in 72nd place on the CME points list and is in the field in Kingsmill. If she stays in the top 80 after play on Sunday, she’ll move to Category 8. Otherwise she can only jump to Category 13.

The second reshuffle doesn’t happen until after the CP Women’s Open the last week of August. So for many Q-Series grads, this week is a make or break point for hopes of keeping a LPGA card for 2022 or having to go back to the Q-Series.

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By Kent Paisley
This week is the first time since November 2019 that the LPGA will be holding a tournament in Asia. The HSBC Women’s World Championship in Singapore kicks off a two-event/three-week stretch (originally scheduled for three in three) that marks the tour’s return after officials had to cancel the scheduled spring and fall Asian swings in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

While a handful of top American players, including Nelly and Jessica Korda, Lexi Thompson and Jennifer Kupcho, aren’t making the trip, the 69-player field at Sentosa Golf Club has nine of the top 15 on the Rolex Women’s Ranking competing with heightened health and safety measures in place.

The COVID protocols used in the tour’s six U.S. events so far in 2021 have required players, caddies and tour staff to be tested twice before being allowed on the course at a tournament, first at home (a negative test needed to travel), then upon arriving onsite. Players could practice and do anything outdoors until they received a negative result. After that, players were allowed to go to restaurants to pick up to-go orders, but otherwise had to either be at the golf course or wherever they were staying, be it a hotel or an Airbnb.

As outlined by an LPGA spokesperson, players and caddies making the trip across the Pacific (agents and family have been prohibited) all had to take COVID tests in Los Angeles last Friday at the Hugel-Air Premia LA Open to be cleared to fly. Each needed to download the app TraceTogether on their smartphones; the nation-state has required everyone in Singapore to have it since last October. They all also had to take another COVID test after arriving at the airport in Singapore or the designated hotel, where the tour has secured rooms on specific floors.

“Life is different with COVID,” said Inbee Park, twice a winner of HSBC title. “We had a 17-and-a-half hour flight from L.A. to here. After that we were sent to hotel and got tested and then another probably 12 to 14 hours in the room quarantined. Probably we spent about 30, 40 hours just indoors.”

Only room service will be allowed for player dining during the evenings. Shuttles will carry players to and from the hotel to the course.

For the following week’s Honda LPGA Thailand tournament, the tour has set up a chartered flight to take players from Singapore to Thailand. There are also designated flights to Thailand from the United States for those only playing at Siam Country Club. No tracing app is required, but all the other regulations will carry over.

“I know it is sometimes tough when you are just stuck in the room and just, you know, there’s nothing you can do,” Park said. “But obviously we are doing it for everyone’s safety and that’s what we need to do. … It’s just something that we need to do in order to play golf tournaments.”

The tour was supposed to go from Thailand to China for the Blue Bay LPGA, but that event was cancelled earlier this year because of COVID concerns.

Upon the resumption of the LPGA schedule in the U.S. at the Pure Silk Championship, there will be another protocol tweak for players at Kingsmill Resort in Virginia. For the first time, the tour will allow limited outdoor dining. Otherwise, the rules remain the same that the players had heading into Los Angeles.

As is the case on the PGA Tour, where commissioner Jay Monahan has encouraged players to get vaccines but will not require them to compete, LPGA chief Mike Whan has taken the same tact. Unlike the PGA Tour, however, the LPGA has not decided whether vaccinated players will be able to bypass weekly testing as the year moves on.

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