“We’re working every day to make the LPGA the best place for women” Marcoux Samaan talks about her main objectives as Commissioner (Exclusive)
Since childhood, Mollie Marcoux Samaan has always had sports as part of her life. She attended Princeton University as a two-sport varsity athlete, playing soccer and ice hockey. In her senior year, she was voted as the school's top female athlete.
After graduating cum laude in 1991, she went on to work as assistant athletic director, assistant dean of admissions, and coach of the girls’ ice hockey and soccer programs at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey.
After that short stint at the Lawrenceville School, Mollie went on to have a very successful 19-year career with Chelsea Piers Management, the company that owns and operates Chelsea Piers New York and Chelsea Piers Connecticut. That journey culminated with her becoming Executive Vice President of Chelsea Piers' 400,000-square-foot multi-venue complex in Connecticut.
In 2014, Marcoux Samaan returned to Princeton, assuming the role of the University's Ford Family Director of Athletics. In her seven years as Director of Athletics, Princeton teams won a league-leading 65 Ivy League Championships.
Long a leader in athletics throughout her career, Mollie found her way to the LPGA Tour in August 2021, becoming the ninth Commissioner of the LPGA since its formation in 1950.
In the first two years of her tenure as Commissioner, Marcoux Samaan has done a fantastic job in elevating the LPGA Tour, including seeing the highest purses and winners’ checks in women’s golf history come to the Tour.
Mollie will be the first to admit that there is still much to do, but progress has certainly been made.
“We’re working every day to make the LPGA the best place in the world for women to showcase their athleticism and to use that platform to elevate, empower, and advance opportunities for girls and women on and off the golf course.” - LPGA Commissioner Marcoux Samaan
I caught up with Commissioner Marcoux Samaan recently to talk about the state of women’s golf, both among the professional and amateur ranks.
How would you personally summarize the state of women's golf, on both the amateur side and professional?
On the rise at every level. And that’s not by accident. Our mission at the LPGA is to use our platform to elevate, inspire, and advance women and girls on and off the golf course, so it’s something we think about and work on every day.
Our purses have grown 54% since 2021. That shows the wave of enthusiasm people have for the women’s game.
But apart from growth with our professional tours, I see growth everywhere. I see it at our events. Young girls are lining the gallery ropes and waiting to get pictures and autographs from the players who are their role models. And I see it in our LPGA Amateurs, an enthusiastic group of women who engage with us on a regular basis. Of course, one of our fastest-growing programs is the LPGA*USGA Girls Golf, which I know you’re personally passionate about.
We currently have more than 100,000 girls who participate every year at our more than 500 LPGA*USGA Girls Golf sites around the world.
Beyond what I see within the LPGA, more than 6.5 million women played golf in the United States last year. At the moment, 41% of all new golfers are women and girls. We aren’t quite at a 50-50 ratio between men and women golfers, but that is the ultimate goal.
You are the ninth Commissioner of the LPGA since its formation in 1950. What are your main objectives as you lead the LPGA in the years to come?
We’re coming up on our 75th anniversary in just a little over a year, which is exciting. The LPGA is the oldest continuous women’s professional sports league in history, so we have a lot to be proud of. But we’re certainly not spending any time resting on our past.
One of the hardest and most important things we must constantly work on is how to put together a global schedule that best showcases the top players in the world in a way that is both financially rewarding and sustainable.
We want to give members of all of our tours the best playing opportunities, which fairly reward the best players while providing travel schedules that make sense, and allow the athletes to reach peak performance.
We can’t do that alone. Growing partnerships is critical. We’ve been fortunate to have great partners who see the tremendous value in our product and who see the unique opportunity we have to elevate, transform, and advance women.
In order to continue increasing the value we provide partners, we must build a strong infrastructure that will allow and facilitate this growth. When I say infrastructure, I mean expanding our technology, focusing aggressively on marketing our league and our players, growing our content creation in new and unique ways, and capturing and analyzing fan data in a more sophisticated way. More people need to be exposed to the LPGA, and my goal is to make huge strides in this area.
We’re also focusing on growing the LPGA Amateur programming, our LPGA Professionals teaching division, and the LPGA*USGA Girls Golf program because those are vital grassroots touchpoints that allow us to impact women and girls all over the world directly.
In what ways has your previous role as the Director of Athletics for Princeton carried over into your current role with the LPGA?
Throughout the entirety of my career, I’ve had the privilege to work for complex sports organizations at every level - youth, high school, college, amateur - and all have led me to this job, which combines all of my experiences and is, in my view, the pinnacle of professional women’s sports.
My experiences at Chelsea Piers and Princeton showed me how important sports are to society and how meaningful they are to both the athletes playing and the fans being inspired.
At Princeton, I focused on what athletes needed in order to reach peak performance in sports and in life. We are trying to do the same thing at the LPGA. We had 37 D1 teams at Princeton, so we had this wonderful petri dish to study performance culture. I learned a great deal, including what was the difference between good teams and great teams.
The LPGA is at a much bigger scale with more focus on commercialization, but there are so many important parallels.
But the biggest lesson I’ve learned from my entire career is that the best organizations focus on a mission, and everyone in the organization works toward that mission.
Successful teams must be passionate about their work and want to grow and get better. The athletes, coaches, and administrators at Princeton had that passion. So do the LPGA Players, LPGA Professionals, our partners, and our staff.
What are the biggest challenges that the women's professional game faces currently?
There is so much opportunity to increase exposure and investment. Too few people know how amazing LPGA players are.
We need more network television coverage and more media attention on the women’s game. When you look at our numbers on the weeks when we are on network television, you see a huge uptick in interest and eyeballs. This year we had 10 events that had some network coverage. Those events generated four times the audience of our average viewership on cable. That proves that there is a market for our product on network. But you also have to have frequency. One-offs every couple of months make it very difficult to continue to grow our fanbase.
Another challenge is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: we need more resources to capitalize on the interest. Without more infrastructure, it will be hard to grow as quickly as I know we can.
It has taken place in pockets, but do you see a time when men and women professionals can compete together more regularly in the same event, at the same venue, in different or even combined divisions?
Well, we have the Grant Thornton Invitational coming up this year, the first official mixed-team event that is a collaboration between the LPGA and PGA Tours. We have two former world number one's teamed up with Lydia Ko playing with Jason Day. Lexi Thompson is playing with Rickie Fowler. Joel Dahmen, who has become one of the more popular players on the PGA Tour, is teaming with two-time major champion Lilia Vu. Also, former world No.1 Nelly Korda is playing with Tony Finau. We have an all-Sweden team in Madelene Sagström and Ludvig Åberg. And a couple of Canadians, Brooke Henderson, and Corey Conners, will have all of Canada turning in. It’s going to be great.
We also have the Scandinavian Mixed on the Ladies European Tour and the DP World Tour. One of our players, Linn Grant, became the first woman ever to win a DP World Tour event when she captured that one. So, there are glimpses of what this can be.
Many people are unaware of how good our women are compared to the men. When you see our athletes and the men side-by-side, most people are wowed. We have stats that prove that. Our players are just as good and, in some cases, better in various parts of the game. In 2022, Minjee Lee hit it closer to the hole on average than every player on the PGA Tour from every distance. Having our players side by side with the men allows people to make those comparisons up close and in real-time. We’d love to see more of it.
On the amateur side of the game, female participation has been the fastest-growing segment in the game over the last few years; however, retention seems to be an issue as women age. What can be done to help keep female golfers engaged in the game longer?
As I stated before, women, as a percentage, are playing golf more now than at any time since before World War II. We’ve seen a 15% increase in female participation since 2019.
But we need to do more to retain them.
Women are the fastest-growing segment of new golfers entering the game, but they also represent the largest number of players leaving the game. Some of that is social and economic, but we all have to work intentionally to make the game more welcoming and provide more opportunities for girls and women. We are committed to doing this through programs like our new Grads to Golf program, which we are now piloting.
Our Foundation has reinitiated an “Invite Her” campaign that encourages golfers to invite a woman who is either new to the game or may have stepped away for a while to come back to the course.
We’re also ramping up the benefits for our LPGA Amateurs. You’ll be seeing a lot more on that in the coming weeks and months, so stay tuned there.
As an LPGA*USGA Girls Golf site director, I know the power of this long-standing initiative, which incidentally, happens to be the longest-running youth initiative in the game...how proud are you and the entire LPGA of what you have been able to do for girls’ golf?
We just celebrated our One-Millionth Girl in the LPGA*USGA Girls Golf Program, and we’ve launched an ambitious campaign called “One Million More,” where we’re shooting to impact the next one million by 2027. That’s incredibly aggressive, but we think it’s very doable.
We’re also focused on Changing the Face of the Game. We have plenty of work still to do there, but since 2021, we have increased the number of ethnically diverse girls participating in Girls Golf from 35% to 45%.
Girls make up the fastest-growing segment of juniors entering the game, in large part because of what we’ve been able to do with our partners at the USGA. We see it with an increase in participation in other programs like the PGA Junior League, and in high school golf teams, and in the elevation of play at the college level.
Of course, a majority of the girls in the program won’t become professionals or even go on to play at the collegiate level. But the values and social skills that they learn from being in and around golf will help them in more areas than they know.
Finally, what more can be done to help in making women's professional golf more equitable in terms of prize money?
We’re working every day on that. In 2023, our purses exceeded $100 million for the first time in history. They will grow again in 2024. We have to keep pushing here so the best female golfers in the world prize money is commensurate with their extraordinary talents.
Purses on the PGA Tour have gone up by large percentages as well, as everyone knows. So, I’m not as focused on comparisons as I am on trajectories.
In 2022, for example, we had 27 athletes earn over $1 million dollars in prize money. The year before, 2021, that number was 15. Now, again, that’s not close to what PGA Tour athletes earn. Last year 126 PGA Tour players earned over $1 million. But we are certainly moving in the right direction.
Average earnings for the top 100 players on the LPGA Tour grew 37% from 2021 to 2022. It will grow again this year, although we won’t know all of the numbers until the season is officially over.
That’s not top-heavy growth, either. The number-one player on our money list earned 22% more year over year, but the player who was 50th on the money list earned 44% more year over year. The player who ended the year at 100 on the money list, which is our cutoff for keeping your card without having to go back to the final stage of the Q Series, earned 30% more in 2022 than in 2021. So, we’re seeing all the momentum trend in the right direction.
We’re growing. Interest is on the rise. Partnerships are stronger than ever before. And we’re inching closer to our goal of not just having the top players do really well but also having the player who finishes 100th on the LPGA Tour money list make a good living and be able to build a secure future.
We’re working every day to make the LPGA the best place in the world for women to showcase their athleticism and to use that platform to elevate, empower, and advance opportunities for girls and women on and off the golf course.