How a past champion changed my thinking on the Chevron Pond

I didn’t buy tickets to this Stacy Lewis retirement tour. The two-time major winner announced that 2025 would be her last season on the LPGA Tour. However, she is making a one-week comeback to retire officially at the Chevron Championship, the same event at which she won her very first LPGA title 15 years ago and not far from where she grew up and still lives in The Woodlands, Texas

With her husband on the bag, her daughter in the on-site daycare and baby No. 2 on the way, Stacy and family are set for a fairytale ending to a memorable career.

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I’ve always found Lewis to be an interesting and thoughtful person to hear from, so when I saw her name on the list of players doing media on Tuesday at Memorial Park, I set aside time to listen in.

Among many topics she discussed, from retirement to motherhood, she touched on one that changed my way of thinking.

The pond jump.

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Dating back to 1988 and Amy Alcott spontaneously jumping into Poppie’s Pond at the tournament’s original host course, Mission Hill, the tradition of winners at the Chevron Championship leaping into the water by the 18th has, well, endured. This despite the event moving venues twice, including this year’s change to Memorial Park..

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From 2023 to 2025 the event had been played at The Woodlands outside Houston, the winner’s leap making trip from California to Texas. It took some dredging of the lake by the 18th hole as well as some specially installed netting to prevent any alligators from interrupting the winning celebrations, but it did continue.

This year at Memorial Park, tournament organizers have built a custom pool alongside the 18th green. There are plans to redesign the closing hole, adding a lake that will reach the green, but for this year, the 15 feet by 25 feet plunge pool will be home to the winner’s leap.

I, like many online, scoffed at the idea of this overtly, man-made, perhaps-forced idea of a tradition. This is a major championship and we have pundits updating us on the free relief players will get if their ball lands in the custom-built pool. What are we doing here?

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Then I listened to Lewis on Tuesday.

“There’s been a lot of debate about the pond and the jump,” she said during her interview. “I’ve told a lot of people I don’t remember getting the trophy [in 2011]. There’s a lot of things I don’t remember about that ceremony, but I remember the jump.”

Lewis won the event by three shots in 2011 and leapt into the pond at Mission Hills with her caddie, Travis Wilson, as well as her mother Carol, father Dale, and sister Janet.

Stacy Lewis (second from left), caddie Travis Wilson (L), sister Janet Lewis (C), mother Carol Lewis (second from right) and father Dale Lewis take the traditional jump into the pond after Lewis won the 2011 Kraft Nabisco Championship.

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Stephen Dunn

“It was the coolest thing in the world, because I had seen it before,” Lewis explained. “I’d been on the green as low am when Morgan [Pressel] did her jump, and seeing all these other players over the years make the jump and getting to do that yourself was just so cool.”

“You get to be a kid again and just have fun with it. In a world that’s become very serious and everything’s got to be a certain way, like it’s just fun to be a kid.”

In the space of a couple of minutes, Lewis had changed my mind on the pond. What I, like many, viewed as a slightly odd tradition seemingly overstaying its welcome was viewed differently by Lewis … and as it turns out some of her peers.

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“We had a past champions dinner last night and if you’d ask all the players in that room, the jump’s got to stay.”

Yes, it’s odd. Yes, this year it will look even more odd. But it is a tradition. And one that players, Lewis included, dream of taking part in.

She may not finish her LPGA career by diving into that pool at Memorial Park this weekend, but she has changed the way I think about it.