It’s a stacked field this week at the Texas Women’s Open with Stacy Lewis, Brittany Lang, Gerina Piller and more all competing.
Can we get some television cameras out to next week’s Energy Producers, Inc. Texas Women’s Open? The field has become a who’s who list of playing professionals. Former World No. 1 and Texas resident Stacy Lewis is competing for the first time, along with former U.S. Women’s Open champion Brittany Lang, Gerina Piller, Celine Boutier, Cheyenne Knight, Maria Fassi, Yu Liu, Lindsey Weaver and two-time U.S. Women’s Amateur champion Kristen Gillman.
The event takes place June 2-4 at the Old American Golf Club in The Colony, Texas. Knight won the LPGA’s Volunteers of America Classic last year at the venue. This year’s LPGA stop has been pushed back to Dec. 3-6, leading into the U.S. Women’s Open in Houston.
The projected purse is $50,000. First played in 1933, past champions of the Texas Women’s Open include LPGA founders Babe Zaharias and Betty Jameson as well as fellow Hall of Famer Betsy Rawls. The event stopped after the 1946 edition and was resurrected in 2001. It’s run by the North Texas Section PGA.
Two-time champion Savannah Vilaubi, who won in 2016 and 2019, is in the field as is 2015 champ Maddie McCrary and Chirapat Jao-Javanil (2017).
Texas All-American Kaitlyn Papp highlights the amateurs in the field.
For Gerina Piller, telling the story of where she came from and how her mother sacrificed caused the tears to well up in her eyes.
BOCA RATON, Fla. – Gerina Piller teared up seconds into the airing of her Drive On commercial. She’d seen the clip before. Lived it. But telling the story of where she comes from, what she’s done, how her mother sacrificed to make it happen, well, the appreciation welled up in her eyes.
The LPGA launched its new brand positioning last spring, and Piller is the latest pro to tell her story. It’s a unique story. One that the LPGA hopes will give new fans a reason to connect.
“I’m just hoping to get one little girl, one little boy, one woman, one mom, one athlete,” said Piller, who begins her 10th year on the LPGA this week at the Gainbridge LPGA at Boca Rio.
After her parents got divorced, Piller’s family relied on welfare to get by until her mother, Rita Stevenson, enrolled in Eastern New Mexico University. She wanted to be a P.E. teacher, and the closer she got to finishing her degree, the family moved into a dorm room to be closer to her student teaching. Piller was 9 years old at the time and remembers that one of her mother’s three jobs was at a doughnut shop, a real treat.
“I thought that was like the thing you did was you went to college with your parents,” said Piller. “To this day it’s so special. When my mom graduated, at the top of her graduation cap she put ‘We Did It.’ As a kid, you’re just like, ‘Good job, Mom,’ like where’s the cookies or are we going to get some cake?”
Now that she’s approaching 35 and is a mother to her own son, A.J., Piller is beginning to fully grasp the road her mother paved for her family.
Piller, an all-round athlete in Roswell, New Mexico, didn’t pick up the game until age 15, and knew that the only way she could get to college was if she landed a full scholarship. Her stepfather got out a video camera and they made VHS tapes to send to schools as she was still an unknown junior player. Piller ultimately landed an opportunity at UTEP, where she won four times her senior year and was Conference USA Player of the Year. She earned a degree in mathematics.
Gerina Piller with her son, A.J., at the 2019 Bank of Hope Founders Cup in Phoenix. Photo by USA TODAY Sports
Roswell already boasted one of the most beloved golfers of all-time in Nancy Lopez. Piller’s elementary school was named after the icon and her high school, Goddard, had a wooden blue sign in the cafeteria that read “Nancy Lopez ate here.”
Piller couldn’t possibly have known back then that she’d grew up to sink the winning putt for Team USA in the greatest comeback in Solheim Cup history. Or that the next year she’d represent the U.S. in the Olympics.
Her mother used to tell her P.E. classes that two kids out of each class might one day be Olympic athletes. Piller teared up again as she noted that for three years her mother had the chance to tell her classes that her daughter is an Olympian.
Rita retired last May and now travels with Gerina to most domestic events to look after A.J., whose dad, Martin Piller, bounces back and forth between the PGA Tour and Korn Ferry Tour.
Gerina is still searching for her first tour victory and has no plans to slow down. Not after what mom taught her.
“You know, I’ve always saw myself and pictured myself as someone who wins on tour,” said Gerina, “but now that I have my son, and it’s not like I wasn’t motivated before, but to have him, be on the 18th green when I hole out or just … I don’t want him to say like, ‘Yeah, mom, I heard you were a pretty good golfer.’ Like I still want to compete, and I want to show him that girls, women, females are strong, and that I can still beat his dad.”
