Months later, Solheim Cup parking fiasco reverberations still felt

The past 12 months had it all — crazy winning streaks, new major champs, a major-week arrest (!) and more. With 2025 on the horizon, our writers are looking back at the most memorable moments from 2024.

No. 15 — Charley Hull goes viral
No. 14 — LIV, LPGA CEOs say goodbye

Long before the subject of parking entered the fray, the LPGA had staked the 2024 Solheim Cup as a reputation-altering event.

For good reason, too. The 2023 iteration of the Solheim Cup, held in Andalucia, Spain, featured maybe the most thrilling finish in Cup history — a final-day comeback for the Europeans punctuated by hometown hero Carlota Ciganda’s birdie-birdie finish to vanquish Nelly Korda and the Americans. Korda had followed up that experience with the best season of her professional life, winning every event she played in for the better part of six months and establishing herself as the sport’s long-sought dominant force. Now, with the attention shifting back stateside to Robert Trent Jones Golf Club near the nation’s capital in 2024, the stakes were set. The Americans and Europeans were ready to lock horns, and the LPGA faced a golden opportunity to show it could capture the attention of the pro sports world, not to mention provide a much-needed boon for commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan.

And then the sun rose on the morning of the first day, and the juice escaped from the event like a needle prick to a balloon. The first-tee grandstands, a universal indicator of a match-play event’s energy and virility, sat half-empty. The first matches of tournament week were sent off with limited fanfare. And then, just as the disappointment set in among those expecting a spectacle, news emerged from a few miles away, where thousands of fans had been stranded since before dawn in the tournament parking lots.

Eventually, the golf world learned that the LPGA had bungled the logistics, failing to line up enough shuttle buses to get fans to the golf course until well after the tournament had started. We learned little about specifics, including how, exactly, a tournament with an already-written logistics playbook — RTJ Golf Club hosted four PGA Tour events and a Presidents Cup before the Solheim — failed to properly account for two of the principle problems of golf tournaments: people and parking.

The oversight was costly. The LPGA had lost the trust of at least some fans, and players weren’t far behind. All the shuttle buses in the world for the following two days of competition weren’t enough to salvage that first, critical error. Reputations are earned in drops and lost in buckets.

A little more than two months later, Marcoux Samaan stepped down, leaving golf’s largest women’s professional tour after just three years in the post. Liz Moore, the LPGA’s chief legal officer, became interim commissioner in her stead. The Solheim Cup parking fiasco was not the sole reason for Marcoux Samaan’s departure, but there was little question it played a role.

Marcoux Samaan left her post having dramatically increased earnings for LPGA professionals, boosted purse sizes, and hammered out expanded broadcast agreements with broadcast partners like ESPN. But her legacy was swiftly and perhaps irrevocably tied to the missteps that plagued her time in office: not addressing pace of play, struggles with star-building in a time of explosive growth for women’s sports and, of course, the Solheim Cup.

Now the LPGA heads into another pivotal offseason with a fully clear slate. The runway is clear for a new chief executive with a new vision to reshape the future before the women’s sports boom passes golf by.

The LPGA has a chance to rewrite its reputation once again. This time, with the Solheim Cup serving as the prologue.