NAPLES, Fla. – The 2025 season has been historic for the LPGA. But that history has also brought up a question that needs to be answered as new commissioner Craig Kessler looks to take the tournament to new heights.
This season, the LPGA has flexed its depth and parity. Entering this week’s CME Group Tour Championship, there were 29 unique winners. Up to world number 1 Jeeno Thitikul had an unlikely comeback on Sunday at the Buick LPGA Shanghai last month, there have been zero repeat winners this season. A year after Nelly Korda won seven times, including five in a row, the LPGA experienced the opposite. There were 11 first time winners. Star amateur Lottie Woad turned pro and promptly 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 won the Maybank Championship.
repeat, who has yet to win in 2025will be the first to notice that the talent on the LPGA is getting better and better every year. This is a good thing, especially in the long run. Armed with a transformative new television deal, Kessler and the LPGA have a vision to capture more eyeballs and reach a wider audience. But can the LPGA do it with depth and parity, or does the tour need a star or two to dominate and break into the sport’s biggest conversation and take the tour with it?
As the LPGA season draws to a close this week in Naples, the answer is murky at best.
“As a tournament and even from a fan perspective, yeah, it’s nice to have someone like Nelly who was so dominant last year,” Hall of Famer Lydia Ko said. “It gets you a lot of attention, especially with her — in Nelly’s case, being an American player. It gets a lot of different attention. Even if you don’t play golf, you know who Tiger Woods is. Like having a figure like that is, yes, very important, but at the same time, just one level of play between the No. 1 player and the C00 rank. Not much different.
“I think as a tournament having better talent and more talent on the leaderboard is just as important as having a superstar.”
Where the question becomes even stickier is when you consider the LPGA’s global reach. The Tour’s Asian swing shows how popular it is around the world. But with most tournaments played in America and much of the television revenue residing in the states, perhaps superstars are needed to elevate the LPGA in America while depth and parity propel it around the world.
“I think the Tour is the strongest it’s ever been,” said three-time major champion Minjee Lee. “I think because of our tour, we play mostly in America, so I feel like we have one or two stars on the LPGA, maybe then it can help us in some way.”
“We market ourselves as a very global tournament and I think that’s what we see and that’s what we see, especially having (11) first-time winners this year, a group last year and the year before that,” Ko said. “It’s a double-edged sword in the 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 were to point to somebody, it’s a lot easier to trade one person than 30 people.”
Lexi Thompson, who has been one of the main faces of the Tour for more than a decade, doesn’t think the LPGA’s growth strategy should depend on one or two players taking home the most trophies. There is strength in numbers.
“It’s a global tournament,” Thompson said of GOLF. “These ladies come from all over the world. It’s not about winning a lot of times. That’s great and all, but I think people like to see different winners and different personalities, you know, different ways you go on the golf course.”
Kessler knows that one of his biggest goals is creating and trading stars. The talent on the LPGA is undeniable, but the stars don’t just exist inside the ropes. It takes the support of a tournament to raise their profile and make them bigger than golf. High quality play is important, but so is the ability and willingness to overcome the course. If you want to catch the eyeballs you wouldn’t normally get, you have to go where they are. You can’t wait for them to come to you.
“There are no silver bullets to create stars, and that’s where you need an ecosystem,” Kessler said. “Yesterday we had our partner meeting and at the end they kindly asked: What can we do to help? We said two things: Raise your hand if you have ideas or a megaphone that you are willing to share; and, two, make introductions to those who can also support and help.
“There are so many examples we could cite, whether it’s what Nelly did going to the Met Gala or Sports Illustrated or Charley (Hull) going to a state banquet in the UK or some of the recent things she’s done on social media.
For Kessler and the LPGA, their job is to find players who have the ability to hit a larger audience—those not typically tuned into golf—and want to be the faces of the LPGA. It would be nice if these players were also the ones who are consistently at the top of the charts, but this is not non-negotiable. Kessler has already delivered some big wins for the LPGA in his short time at the helm, and he’s willing to try different things to reach the ultimate goal, with star building one of his top priorities.
“You’ve got the best players, you’ve got the most marketable players and you’ve got the ones that are actually willing to lean in and do the work,” Kessler said of building stars. “It’s a handful of players at the center of that Venn diagram where we’re going to invest our resources in order to create global superstars and create that player-fan connection.”
Hull, who Kessler specifically mentioned as a top player who is willing to do things off the golf course, is willing to lean toward being one of the faces of the LPGA.
“I’m just being myself,” Hull told GOLF. “I think it’s great to be invited (to the UK state dinner). I’ve had a pretty good year and it’s been lovely. I think it’s a good thing for women’s golf that people are accepting it and, yeah, I’m just being myself.”
“It used to be like the top-10 players could win, and now it’s like the top-10, 40 players all have a chance to win because the standard has gone up and we have a lot more depth and that’s what we want,” Hull said.
The LPGA would likely benefit from having one or two dominant players break through to a larger audience. It certainly wouldn’t hurt. But what everyone from Kessler to Hull to Korda and Ko on down wants is to not have to put everything on one player’s shoulders.
“I think the way our tour is right now, I think there’s so much and so much storytelling that can be done that we don’t necessarily need to fund just to have this person,” Ko said.
“So our job is to find the right set of balanced, balanced stories to tell so that our fans are excited week after week,” Kessler said when laying out his strategy. “If we’re relying on one person, whether it’s a star or a celebrity, to carry the weight of the tournament on their back, I think we’ve missed the boat.
“There is so much magic happening on the LPGA and we have to bring it all to life.”
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