‘Triage mode’: LPGA commish addresses Solheim Cup shuttle fiasco

GAINESVILLE, Va. — Just as the sun peaked over the horizon Saturday morning at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, the grandstands surrounding the 1st tee were rocking. Music blared over the loudspeakers as fans danced and sang along from their seats. By the time the first match of the day teed off, it was standing room only.

The scene was a stark contrast to the one we saw 24 hours earlier. When the 19th Solheim Cup officially kicked off Friday, finding seating wasn’t a problem. Of the 2,000 seats available in the massive buildout surrounding the tee, just over half were filled.

Five miles away, at the main spectator parking lot, fans were stranded. There were not enough buses to meet the demand of fans hoping to see the opening tee shots. Even for those who arrived well ahead of time, it was taking roughly two hours to get from the lot to the main gate.

The LPGA released a statement later in the morning, and eventually offered free tickets to weekend days as a token of goodwill. But after the disastrous start to the biggest event in women’s golf, plenty of damage was already done.

In addition to the nightmarish trek from the parking lot to the venue, there were plenty of criticisms levied over the lack of communication about the problem. The LPGA Tour issued its first statement at 9:30 a.m. and sent a letter to fans apologizing for the failures just before 9 p.m.

“We certainly weren’t trying to avoid the questions, and we were trying to be transparent, but I think at the end of the day we really needed to move into sort of triage mode,” LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan said when she met with the media Saturday morning. “It was really, I’ll say, an all hands on deck with many of our senior staff to figure out exactly kind of where we were, what happened, and how we were going to solve the problem.”

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To the LPGA’s credit, the shuttle-bus situation was much improved for the second day of competition. However, while Samaan pledged transparency on the root cause of the problem, her answers were light on specifics.

When asked how many buses were used Friday — and how many were added for Saturday — she called it a “complicated question.” She was later asked how the event did not have a more robust transportation plan when this event had recorded record ticket sales. Her only explanation was that there were “miscalculations and the planning was not sufficient.”

She stated that the staffing at the parking lot was another issue, but stopped short of delving into the details of the plan entering the week.

“I don’t want to get into exactly who, the details of the responsibility,” she said. “At the end of the day, I’m the leader of the organization and I have to own it. We have a tournament team that runs all of this, but I’m sitting up here in front of you as the leader of the LPGA, and I need to own that.”

Robert Trent Jones Golf Club previously hosted four Presidents Cups — as well as the 2015 Quicken Loans National — and did not run into the same logistical problems that fans met this week. The LPGA Tour operates the Solheim Cup every four years when the biennial event is hosted on U.S. soil.

“This was an LPGA issue,” she said.