US Women’s Open golf ticket sales soar for 2022 in North Carolina

SOUTHERN PINES — Maintain it, and they’re going to come.

And are available, they’ve, by the 1000’s every day this week to the Pine Needles Lodge and Golf Membership to witness the premier gamers compete for probably the most prestigious titles in girls’s golf.

The 77th U.S. Girls’s Open is at Pine Needles for the fourth time and has added one other memorable chapter to the course’s huge event historical past. Already this week we have seen the emotional return of Corridor of Famer Annika Sorenstam to the US Open. We have witnessed former No. 1-ranked Nelly Korda come again after surviving a blood clot in her proper arm. And we have watched with nice curiosity to see if Lexi Thompson may overcome the frustration of final 12 months’s US Open setback to contend once more.

The ultimate chapter of this 12 months’s US Open will likely be written Sunday, however the ending may have a bigger reside viewers than ever earlier than.

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The crowds at this 77th model of the US Girls’s Open have been among the many largest lately, and presumably ever.

The US Golf Affiliation, which sponsors the Girls’s Open, does not usually reveal attendance figures. However they did say ticket gross sales for the Pine Needles event are up 50 p.c in comparison with the three-year pre-COVID interval.

In fact, followers weren’t allowed on the 2020 Open attributable to pandemic considerations and attendance was restricted on the 2021 event. So perhaps the bounce in attendance at Pine Needles is because of followers being hungry to expertise skilled golf in particular person once more.

Both method, the gamers on this 12 months’s Open have seen the bigger crowds following them across the course.

“I believe, total, that is most likely one of many greatest crowds that I’ve seen on the U.S. Girls’s Open,” Lydia Ko mentioned after Saturday’s third spherical. “This can be a large {golfing} group. I do know that even when there aren’t championships right here, lots of people come within the space to play Pinehurst or play right here.

“It is truly good to go to these sorts of locations the place folks adore it, individuals are enthusiastic about girls’s golf being right here, and individuals are enthusiastic about golf generally. I believe that is why the followers aren’t in a single particular gap or one particular group. They’re simply type of scattered throughout. Like even once I noticed teams teeing off at 10:00 (a.m.), there have been a bunch of individuals.”

Tons of of followers may very well be seen following Korda and Thompson’s teams on Saturday. As Thompson performed the par-4 fourth gap, the group following her stretched from the tee field all the way in which up the left aspect of the golf green.

Korda, who’s enjoying in her first event since surgical procedure in February to take away a blood clot, additionally had an enormous gallery that yelled encouragement after each shot.

“It was actually cool,” Korda mentioned. “Actually, tremendous particular. I do not assume I’ve ever had that huge of a crowd following me at a Girls’s Open, or generally, on a Saturday, not even being within the final pairing. In order that was actually cool to listen to everybody shout my title. And for everybody to say that they are pleased that I am again, it felt very nice, too.”

Gamers resembling Korda, Sorenstam and plenty of others repaid the help by signing autographs on the course and after play ended.

“I actually, actually love when, like, the little youngsters and little ladies type of scream my title,” Korda mentioned. “A few of them even ask me for an autograph through the spherical, and I simply cannot say no.”

And that accessibility and graciousness of the ladies’s gamers is one other huge purpose the crowds have come to Pine Needles this week, together with the good golf being performed.

Let’s hope the USGA continues to incorporate Pine Needles as a US Girls’s Open web site transferring ahead. Perhaps even contemplate it as a part of the Girls’s Open rotation like its neighbor, the Pinehurst Resort’s famed No. 2 Course, which has been named an anchor web site for future males’s US Opens.