Adam Stanley/ Canadian Press
The CPKC Ladies’s Open has received the LPGA Excursion’s very best event honour for the second one consecutive 12 months.
The development, hosted Aug. 22-27 at Vancouver’s Shaughnessy Golfing and Nation Membership, used to be named the back-to-back winner of excursion’s event of the Yr on the LPGA’s annual year-end event awards Wednesday evening.
“We actually have a secret sauce,” event director Ryan Paul advised The Canadian Press on the CME Team Excursion Championship, the general match of the LPGA Excursion season. “It’s actually an implausible golfing event. You’ve were given the most efficient gamers on the planet a rope-line clear of you, however out of doors the ropes there are such a lot of good things that you’ll see and do.”
The Canadian event additionally received for highest sponsor activation and highest volunteer appreciation on the rite hosted at Tiburon Golfing Membership.
The sponsor nod used to be a end result of the event’s spouse programming just like the Brooke Brigade fan zone. Distinctive for this 12 months — and specifically identified — used to be a junior health facility on the Musqueam Golfing and Finding out Centre for First International locations adolescence hosted through star-in-waiting Rose Zhang. Zhang become the primary golfer in 72 years to win in her professional debut at the LPGA Excursion when she captured the Mizuho Americas Open in June.
The volunteer award stemmed from a brand new initiative the place each participant, caddie, and body of workers on website online at Shaughnessy used to be given a poker chip to offer to a volunteer who they identified had been going above-and-beyond their name of accountability. The poker chip may well be redeemed for prizes. There have been greater than 1,300 volunteers this 12 months.
“A bunch like that you’ll see how vital they’re to the luck of the development,” Paul stated. “With out them we don’t have a golfing event.”
American Megan Khang received the 2023 CPKC Ladies’s Open in a dramatic playoff over former global No. 1 Jin Younger Ko. It used to be her first LPGA Excursion win.
Giant crowds and remarkable performances all through the 2023 CPKC Ladies’s Open helped Canadian Pacific Kansas Town (CPKC) carry just about $3.5 million for kids’s center well being, with $2.9 million to the BC Kids’s Sanatorium Basis and $580,000 to the Royal Inland Sanatorium (RIH) Basis.
The 2024 LPGA Excursion time table used to be introduced Thursday, with the CPKC Ladies’s Open set for July 25-28 at Earl Gray Golfing Membership in Calgary.
“(With) the time table, now not going to lie … I used to be slightly frightened after we had been going to switch our date to July. The Olympics at all times messes issues up,” Paul stated. “However I spent a while chatting with the gamers this week they usually love our match. They’re now not going to pass over it for the sector. They’re satisfied the time table has a pleasant go with the flow.”
Subsequent 12 months marks the fiftieth anniversary of the CPKC Ladies’s Open. Paul stated there are going to be a large number of bulletins to return in party of the historical past of the event over the approaching months. And he stated a “three-peat” subsequent 12 months can be further particular as the development celebrates crucial milestone.
The 2-time event of the 12 months will see its handbag larger for 2024 to US$2.6 million, up from $2.5 million.
The whole prize fund for the 2024 LPGA Excursion season will likely be greater than US$118 million, the very best ever in excursion historical past and up a staggering 69 in line with cent from 3 years in the past.
The excursion will commute to fifteen states and 10 international locations and can characteristic 3 new occasions in 2024.
Introduced previous this week, the CME Team Excursion Championship — the LPGA Excursion’s season finale that includes handiest the highest 60 golfers at the yearlong Race to CME Globe — larger its handbag from $7 million to $11 million with an excellent $4 million given to the winner. Just one match at the PGA Excursion has a first-place prize of upper than $4 million.
“The cash says that they’re valued in what they do as the highest 60 gamers on the planet enjoying right here,” stated LPGA Excursion commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan. “They usually must be compensated commensurate with that implausible world-class skill.”
The 2024 season will start Jan. 18 with the Hilton Grand Holidays Match of Champions in Orlando, Fla., the place Brooke Henderson of Smiths Falls, Ont. would be the protecting champion.
