At 2:15 p.m. on a freezing Orlando Sunday, LPGA professionals finally stepped onto the course at Lake Nona. Celebrities had been playing for hours. That four-hour gap between amateur tee times and professional ones became the fulcrum of a controversy that forced LPGA Commissioner Craig Kessler to publicly acknowledge what critics already suspected: the tour was not prepared. Not for the cold. Not for the communication. Not for a Monday finish that could have resolved everything.
“We were not prepared fully for Monday,” Kessler told Golfweekon Tuesday, two days after the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions was shortened to 54 holes. “In hindsight, if we can do it over again, there are a number of creative solutions that absolutely could have worked. We should have explored those and been more prepared. We weren’t.”
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The admission arrived after mounting pressure from players, media, and fans who watched an explanation shift between Sunday and Tuesday. On Sunday, when Ricki Lasky—the LPGA’s chief tour business and operations officer—appeared in the NBC booth, she cited ball behavior on hardened ground. Shots were releasing unpredictably. The trajectory was compromised. Injury risk went unmentioned.
By Tuesday, Kessler framed the decision differently: fear of wrist injuries, broken bones, the kind of damage that could derail a season before it started. The concern was real, he insisted. The communication was not.
“Can you imagine if in week one of the season somebody really hurt themselves, broke a wrist, did something, and I was the leader who chose to let them go out and play?” Kessler said. “I don’t know how I would have lived with that.”
The logic invited an obvious question. Beth Ann Nichols of Golfweek posed it publicly on X: “If it was so dangerous, what about Annika Sorenstam’s wrists? Or Blair O’Neal’s? Or any of the other celebrities who bundled up and played on at 10 a.m.?”
Annika Sorenstam, a 10-time major champion and Lake Nona resident, directly contradicted the tour’s assessment after playing nine holes Sunday morning, as previously reported. “I don’t know why they’re not playing,” she told Golfweek. “There’s pitch marks. I mean, I hit some crispy shots today, and the ball even stopped. I am surprised. It’s difficult, it’s cold, but it’s as fair as anything.”
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Lydia Ko, a Lake Nona resident who held the 36-hole lead before struggling on Saturday’s back nine, told Golfweek she was “gutted” that Monday wasn’t an option. The communication failures compounded the frustration. On Sunday, when an LPGA media official was asked directly whether conditions were dangerous, the answer was no. The official explanation cited a lack of “optimal competitive environment” without specifying what that meant.
The gap between what officials said Sunday and what Kessler admitted Tuesday extended beyond messaging into infrastructure.
LPGA’s six-year Monday gap shapes Craig Kessler’s scheduling bind
The LPGA hasn’t finished an event on Monday since 2020. Six years without a contingency that most tours treat as standard operating procedure. When Orlando’s overnight freeze dropped temperatures into the mid-20s and forecasts promised warmer conditions by Monday afternoon—climbing into the 50s—the path seemed clear. Thirty-nine players in the field. A nearly three-week gap before the next event in Thailand. Every logistical barrier had a workaround. But the tour had no infrastructure for it. No recent precedent. No muscle memory.
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Kessler sent a letter to players on Tuesday, apologizing for the confusion and promising structural changes: clearer principles for play decisions, stronger contingency planning, faster and more transparent communication.
“I’m seven months into this job,” Kessler said. “Seven years into this job, when I have pattern recognition, and I understand what’s a little bit of noise versus what’s a very, very grave concern and who the information’s coming from—those are things that take time for a leader to get his or her arms around.”
Trust, as Kessler himself noted in his letter, is fragile. The LPGA’s season opener tested it before the year had barely begun. Pattern recognition takes time. So does rebuilding credibility.
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