The Captain's Eye: Stacy Lewis on a winning Solheim Cup and the money reshaping women's golf

19 December 2024

Stacy Lewis approached the captaincy like a problem to be studied. She dived into the statistics, got to know her players' games, and set the course up so that most of her team would suit it, knowing which players, an Andrea, a Megan, it did not favour, and adjusting how and where she used them. After that, she says, the week becomes gut: who is hot, who pairs well, when not to break up a partnership that is working. She felt the weight of the decisions, and she is adamant that it is why a playing captain no longer makes sense to her. She had once thought she could do both; after living the role, there is no way in the world, and she would tell Keegan Bradley as much.

The win mattered to her beyond the trophy. The event needed it, she says, because nothing should be too one-sided, and she still finds herself explaining to people that the Solheim Cup is the women's version of the Ryder Cup. There is, in her telling, a way to go in simply telling the world it exists.

What strikes her most is how the economics have shifted under the players' feet. Early in her career, a very good year meant a little over two million dollars across twenty-eight events. Nelly Korda, she points out, doubled that in roughly half the schedule. You can now make a fine living in women's golf without being number one in the world, and parents see that, which is part of why participation among young girls is climbing. The talent and the coaching, she says, are off the charts; the swings these kids have at a young age are simply better.

She places it in a longer line, from Annika Sörenstam and Juli Inkster back to Nancy Lopez and Babe Zaharias, an organisation that has been a leader in women's sport for seventy five years. The job now, as she sees it, is to keep that going, and the missing piece is exposure: more television, a consistent home where fans can find the players and get to know them.

She is clear that the growth is global, and that Asia has been a power for longer than people realise. The wave of Thai players, she says, is a direct result of the LPGA tournament in Thailand and the access it created, with government money now feeding the pathways; she sees the same in Korea, Japan and across Europe, and worries the United States is still missing the mark on developing its own. The women's game, she adds, is the more relatable watch, swing speeds and shots an amateur can see themselves in, where she cannot relate to the men's game at all.

Asked the blunt question, whether golf is in a good place, she does not dress it up. Probably not, she says. The fracture between LIV and the PGA Tour has not been healthy, and she does not know how it heals once that much money has changed hands; the malaise has trickled into the women's game, too, with fewer people watching than before. Her wish list is practical and repeated: play faster, modernise the game as baseball has, and give the women's game a consistent television home. There is room, she says, for a lot of growth.