Two players battling for precious LPGA status were penalized for a rules infraction at LPGA Q-Series last week — even though one of them did nothing wrong.
Kendall Dye and Dewi Weber were both penalized two strokes for violating Rule 10-2, Advice and Other Help, during the sixth of the eight-round event at Pinehurst No. 9. As Weber was preparing to hit her tee shot on the par-3 17th hole, Dye flashed three fingers toward Weber’s caddie, Jacqueline Schram, confirming her club selection. Schram confirmed Dye’s request, a violation of the rule. Fellow pro Christina Kim was the other player in the group and informed a rules official after the round, 10 holes later, of the infraction. Neither party denied the incident and both had two strokes added to their final scores for the round. Dye’s 71 became a 73, and Weber’s 69 a 71.
On Sunday Dye took to Twitter to “take 100 percent responsibility for the infraction and shame on me for not knowing this was a rule. I am completely gutted for causing another innocent player two strokes during the incident.”
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For Weber, 23, things got worse. She was T27 without the penalty but went to T37 with the two strokes tacked on. Luckily she was still on the right side of the cut line with two rounds to play, since the top 45 get LPGA status for 2020. (She was a Symetra Tour rookie in 2019.) But Golfweek’s Beth Ann Nichols reported neither Weber nor her caddie, Schram, slept or ate that night. And the next day, in the seventh round of the crucial qualifying series, Weber plummeted down the leaderboard, and out of contention, with an 82.
“It affected me way too much,” Weber told Golfweek. “It shouldn’t have. That’s absolutely, 100 percent on me.”
Weber closed with a 76 in the eighth round to shoot 14 over overall, nine strokes out of the top 45. Dye finished nine over for the event.
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