LPGA commissioner addresses Solheim Cup shuttle fiasco

GAINESVILLE, Va. – Just as the sun rises above the horizon on Saturday morning at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, the Grandstands surround the 1st tee it shakes. Music was blaring over the speakers and fans were dancing and singing from their seats. By the time the first game of the day ended, it was standing room only.

This scene was very different from what we had seen 24 hours before. When the 19th Solheim Cup officially started on Friday, finding a place to stay was not a problem. Of the 2,000 seats available in the large structure surrounding the tee, just over half were filled.

Five kilometers away, in the large spectator parking lot, fans were stuck. There were not enough buses to meet the demand of fans hoping to see the opening shot. Even for those who arrived early, it took almost two hours to get from the refrigerator to the main gate.

The LPGA released a statement later this morning, and finally offered free weekend tickets as a gesture of goodwill. But after a rough start to women's golf's biggest event, the damage was already done.

Apart from this terrible journey from the car park to the site, there has been a lot of criticism for not talking about the problem. The LPGA Tour issued its first statement at 9:30 a.m. and sent a letter to fans apologizing for the failure before 9 p.m.

“We certainly weren't trying to avoid questions, and we were trying to be transparent, but I think at the end of the day we really needed to go into a sort of triage mode,” LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said during the meeting. and the media on Saturday morning. “Actually, I would say, hands are on the floor with a lot of our senior staff to figure out where we were, what happened, and how we're going to solve the problem.”

To the LPGA's credit, the shuttle bus situation was a lot improved on the second day of the competition. However, while Samanan promised to be transparent about the cause of the problem, his answers were clear on the details.

When asked how many buses were used on Friday – and how many were added on Saturday – he called it a “difficult question.” He was later asked how the event did not have a solid transportation system while the event was recording record ticket sales. His only explanation was that there were “incorrect calculations and insufficient planning.”

He pointed out that parking staffing is another problem, but stopped short of looking into the details of the plan coming in this week.

“I don't want to get into who exactly is, the details of responsibility,” he said. “At the end of the day I am the leader of the organization and I must own it. We have a championship team that owns all of this, but I'm sitting here in front of you as the leader of the LPGA, and I need to own that.”

The Robert Trent Jones Golf Club has previously hosted four Presidents' Cups – as well as the 2015 Quicken Loans National – and hasn't faced the same problems fans encountered this week. The LPGA Tour runs the Solheim Cup every four years when the biennial event is held in the US.

“This was an LPGA problem,” he said.

Zephyr Melton

Golf.com Editor

Zephyr Melton is an assistant editor for GOLF.com where he spends his days blogging, producing and editing. Before joining the GOLF team, he attended the University of Texas followed by stops with the Texas Golf Association, Team USA, Green Bay Packers and the PGA Tour. He assists in all instruction and covers youth and women's golf. He can be reached at [email protected].