LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan met with the media Saturday morning to discuss the Solheim Cup shuttle fiasco.
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GAINESVILLE, Va. – Just as the sun peaked above the horizon on Saturday morning at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, the stands around the 1st tee were rocking. Music blared from the speakers as fans danced and sang along from their seats. By the time the first game of the day was over, it was standing room only.
The scene was a stark contrast to what we saw 24 hours ago. When to 19th Solheim Cup officially started on Friday, finding seats was no problem. Of the 2,000 available seats in the massive building surrounding the facility, just over half were filled.
Five miles away, in the main spectator parking lot, fans were trapped. There weren’t enough buses to meet the demands of fans hoping to see the opening shots. Even for those who arrived well ahead of time, it took roughly two hours to get from the lot to the main gate.
The LPGA released a statement later in the morning, and eventually offered free weekend tickets as a goodwill gesture. But after a disastrous start to the biggest event in women’s golf, a lot of damage has already been done.
In addition to the nightmare journey from the parking lot to the venue, there was plenty of criticism about the lack of communication about the problem. The LPGA Tour released its first statement at 9:30 a.m. and sent a letter to fans apologizing for the failures shortly before 9 p.m.
“We certainly weren’t trying to avoid questions and we were trying to be transparent, but I think at the end of the day we really needed to go into some sort of triage mode,” LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said when met. with the media on Saturday morning. “It was really, I will say, a complete readiness with a lot of our senior staff to understand exactly where we were, what happened and how we were going to solve the problem.”
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To the LPGA’s credit, the bus situation was LOT improved for the second day of the race. However, while Samaan pledged transparency about the root cause of the problem, her answers were light on specifics.
When asked how many buses were used on Friday – and how many were added for Saturday – she called it a “tricky question”. She was later asked how the event did not have a more robust transportation plan when the event had recorded record ticket sales. Her only explanation was that there were “miscalculations and insufficient planning”.
She stated that staffing the parking lot was another matter, but did not delve into the details of the plan entering the week.
“I don’t want to talk about exactly who, the details of responsibility,” she said. “At the end of the day, I’m the leader of the organization and I have to own it. We have a tour team that runs all of that, but I’m sitting here in front of you as the leader of the LPGA and I have to own it.”
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Club previously hosted four Presidents Cups — as well as the 2015 Quicken Loans National — and didn’t face the same logistical problems fans encountered this week. The LPGA Tour operates the Solheim Cup every four years when the biennial event is hosted on American soil.
“That was an LPGA issue,” she said.
