CALGARY — The summertime schedule crunch for the LPGA Tour with the Olympics just around the corner has impacted plenty, including the field strength at the CPKC Women’s Open, which often boasts one of the most impressive on the calendar.
But for all the players who are not here — including world No.1 Nelly Korda, who has won six times already this season — you wouldn’t know it, given the pre-event buzz and the potential storylines emerging at Canada’s national open.
The ticket sales are well up from 2023 and it’s expected that this year’s event will out-sell last year at Shaughnessy Golf and Country Club, especially with the weather supposed to cool off through the weekend. Tournament organizers, earlier in the spring, had to close off the volunteer requests as they had got about 1,300 – and just didn’t have any more space for folks to help out.
The Calgary area hosts an annual event on PGA Tour Champions, the Rogers Charity Classic, and the golf fans here have helped make that tournament an award-winning stop for the over-50 circuit for a decade. The LPGA Tour hasn’t been back in Calgary since 2016, but they’re already coming out in droves. This event has won ‘Tournament of the Year’ at the year-end LPGA Tour awards the last two seasons.
As far as the inside-the-ropes competition is concerned — outside the ropes, the fan and corporate build out is set to be the biggest in tournament history and the biggest on the LPGA Tour this season — it’s certainly not all doom and gloom.
“I probably put the most pressure on to get the kind of field like we had at Magna (in 2019) where we had 98 of the top 100 in the world. That’s my job. But when I look back and look at the schedule and the Olympics and it’s a Solheim Cup year. So, to have 73 of the top 100 is quite impressive,” Tournament Director Ryan Paul told Sportsnet. “We’ve got 23 Olympians. They’re here. It’s an easy event to skip — but for them to be here means a lot and it shows how special the event is to them.”
Among those Olympians in the field include world No. 2 Lilia Vu of the U.S., Australian Hannah Green, who is a two-time winner already this season (and who, if Korda wasn’t having her incredible campaign would make her the front-runner for Player of the Year), former world No. 1 and fellow Australian Minjee Lee, and young American superstar Rose Zhang.
And of course, there’s Brooke Henderson — the person everyone is here to see.
“I can’t imagine what this tournament would be like without her,” Paul said. “You know where she is (on the course) because no one is anywhere else.
“The fact that she does all these other things and she already won the tournament is incredible. To be the ambassador and then come Thursday, she goes and competes, it’s pretty special.”
If Henderson were to win again this week, she would become the first Canadian in tournament history to win it twice.
There’s a little more history up for grabs this week, with Lexi Thompson teeing it up for the final time in Canada (she announced she would be retiring from a full-time competition schedule at the end of this year) and Lydia Ko aiming for a spot in the LPGA Hall of Fame, again.
Ko has won the CPKC Women’s Open three times, and if she was to win it again she would be the tournament’s first four-time champion — and she would earn the single point she needs to to etch her name into the Hall of Fame.
“At that point if I win one more time here, I should get like free (Canadian) citizenship or something,” Ko said with a laugh. “It’s where it started for me, and if I can get that last point where it really started for me championship-wise, it would mean a lot.”
You can’t have an event without a course, and Earl Grey Golf Club — which is over 100 years old — is set to be a solid first-time venue.
“At first it was kind of a ‘wow,’ like, we didn’t know we could host something like this. We’re a club inside the city that isn’t as well known for how good we are,” Pat Wilmot, the director of golf at Earl Grey, told Sportsnet. “It’s an opportunity to showcase our club nationally. Internationally, fine, but nationally our club should be recognized a little bit more for how good we are.”
Earl Grey is completely re-routed from its normal layout for the CPKC Women’s Open and the key for this week is how players handle things tee-to-green, with the tilted greens running quick and the rough up high.
“It’s very important to drive it well and get it into the fairway. We’ve got these tight, thick tree lines and in addition to the rough if you’re offline and hacking it out you can’t even go towards the green. It’s imperative to drive it straight,” Wilmot said.
So, it may not be a CPKC Women’s Open that’s chalk full of all the game’s best. But there are plenty here. And there’s Henderson. And there’s a first-time venue ready for its time in the spotlight.
It’s the 50th playing of Canada’s national open, and everyone who is here is excited to get going.
“Just the legacy that this entire event has brought to the tour is simply incredible,” Zhang said. “This is the one stop that everyone just really enjoys.”