Australia’s Robyn Choi topped the field with a 29-under total over the course of six rounds.
A total of 50 players earned LPGA status for the 2024 season at Q-Series. Australia’s Robyn Choi topped the field with a 29-under total over the course of six rounds, earning $15,000.
This year’s event, cut down from the traditional eight rounds, was held at Robert Trent Jones’ Magnolia Grove Golf Course in Mobile, Alabama. A field of 104 players began the week and a cut was made after 72 holes. Players who finished in the top 20 and ties earned Category 14 status, while those who finished from T-23 to T-45 earned Category 15.
The big move of the day belonged to Lauren Hartlage, who skyrocketed from T-60 to 16th with a closing 63.
“The last two years I had to come back to Q-School to earn my card back,” said Hartlage. “This time I feel like I’m getting better in learning the ropes of how the LPGA works, so I’m super excited to get back out there.”
LPGA veteran Jennifer Song had good friend Amy Yang on the bag this week. Yang, of course, won the CME Group Tour Championship last month and a $2 million first-place prize. Song finished tied for 17th to earn her card back.
“I think I got like 200 percent confidence from her,” said Song. “You know, just having a close friend, it’s a long week, and I knew I had the game to play well, but I just needed to feel relaxed out there, and then a friend was just what I needed out there.”
Added Yang: “You know, Jennifer, she prepared everything. Her game was so ready to go already at home. I just needed to carry the bag and just talk other stuff and make her feel comfortable.
“I really didn’t do enough other than that.”
Here’s a closer look at the 50 players who earned LPGA status for 2024:
Two rounds remain in the 108-hole marathon at RTJ’s Magnolia Grove.
The field at LPGA Q-Series was cut to the top 65 and ties after the fourth round in Mobile, Alabama. A total of 70 players advanced. Two rounds remain in the 108-hole marathon at RTJ’s Magnolia Grove.
Australia’s Robyn Choi, No. 339 in the Rolex Rankings, leads the field by three strokes after carding back-to-back 64s. Choi, who hasn’t made a bogey in her last 57 holes, paces the field at 21-under 265. Japan’s Yuri Yoshida and Korea’s So Mi Lee both shot 65 in the fourth round and are tied for second at 18 under.
“I think I hit most greens,” said Choi, who last played on the LPGA in 2020. “I’m hitting them close as well, making the putts. Definitely making more than I have the last few months, so that’s good … just everything in general is clicking together, I think.”
Former U.S. Solheim Cup player Mina Harigae, who finished 101st on the CME points list, missing her full card by a single position, holds a share of fifth at 14 under.
Mina Harigae/LPGA photo
Former Clemson fifth-year senior Savannah Grewal shot 67 to remain in the top 10 at 13 under. Grewal, who recently turned professional to compete in Q-Series, medaled at the first stage of qualifying school and then opted to leave college after sailing through the second stage.
Over the past year, Grewal dropped four strokes off her scoring average in college golf.
“I think honestly, just knowing that I’m good enough to compete out here is a big thing,” said Grewal. “I think that helps with the confidence for sure.”
The top 45 and ties after 108 holes will earn 2024 LPGA eligibility, with players finishing 1-20 receiving a higher category of status.
The cut fell at 3 under. Notable players who missed the cut include Natthakritta Vongtaveelap, Emma Talley, Christina Kim, Emma Spitz and Su Oh.
The final round, originally scheduled for Tuesday, was pushed to Wednesday after three inches of rain fell on Saturday in Mobile, forcing Saturday’s third round to be postponed to Sunday.
The 108-hole grind that is the 2023 LPGA Q-Series will go to a seventh day.
The 108-hole grind that is the 2023 LPGA Q-Series will go to a seventh day.
Three inches of rain Saturday in Mobile, Alabama, led to the postponement of the third round, which had to roll over to Sunday. The final round will now happen Wednesday.
There are 104 golfers at the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail competing for LPGA cards for the 2024 season. Robyn Choi of Australia leads the way at 13 under after 54 holes. She shot the lone 64 (7 under) at the Falls Course on Sunday. Three golfers – India’s Diksha Dagar, American Lauren Stephenson and Colombia’s Mariajo Uribe – posted 8-under 64s on the Crossings Course on Sunday.
Tied for second at 12 under, a shot back, are Japan’s Mao Saigo, Korea’s Hyo Joon Jang and Mira Harigae of the U.S., who finished 101st in the CME points, one spot out of earning a 2024 card. She also dropped from 49th to 120th in the Rolex Rankings. Rounds of 68-66-68 so far this week have her in solid position at Q-Series.
There will be a cut after the fourth round, which is now going to be on Monday, with the low 65 and ties advancing. The projected cut as of Sunday night is 3 under. Come Wednesday, the top 45 and ties will earn their cards. Any player who completes 72 holes will receive Epson Tour status.
The LPGA is sticking to the six-round schedule and also wants to “allow maintenance crews to prepare the golf courses and provide the fairest course conditions for the competition,” the tour said in a release.
The re-worked daily schedule, according to the LPGA, now looks like this:
Round 4 will start at 7:30 a.m. ET on Monday from No. 1 tee only
After round 4, the cut will be made of the top 65 players and ties
Round 5 will start at 7:30 a.m. ET on Tuesday on Crossings Course from No. 1 and 10 tee
Round 6 will start at 7:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday on Crossings Course from No. 1 and 10 tees
Ross Bridge near Birmingham, Alabama, is slated to reopen this fall with new putting surfaces.
Ross Bridge, one of the highest-ranked golf courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, will reopen Oct. 13 after a complete renovation of its greens and bunkers.
The layout just outside Birmingham ranks No. 4 in Alabama on Golfweek’s Best list of top public-access courses in each state. The course wraps around the Renaissance Birmingham Ross Bridge Golf Resort and Spa, a gorgeous AAA 4-Diamond Approved Hotel. With plenty of ground movement in its valley setting, Ross Bridge can be stretched to more than 8,100 yards off the back tee, making it one of the longest courses in the world.
The work to the greens was necessitated by an accidental poisoning of many of the greens a year ago. The operators of the Trail opted to start from scratch, switching the putting surfaces from bent grass to a much more heat-tolerant TifEagle Bermuda grass. That switch should result in much firmer and smoother green surfaces.
Every bunker on the course also was renovated with fresh drainage systems, and several cart paths were relocated. Architectural changes were also made to Nos. 1, 2, 10, 14 and 18, but details of those changes weren’t specified in a media release announcing the opening date.
10 destinations have three or more highly ranked courses on Golfweek’s Best Top 200 Resort Courses list.
What do you really want in a golf trip? If your answer is golf, golf, then more golf in one spot, sometimes followed by a wee bit of extra golf, we have you covered.
Golfweek’s Best ranks courses around the world by various categories, ranging from modern courses to the best in each state. One of our most popular rankings is the top 200 resort courses in the U.S.
Any of the layouts on the list would make for a great getaway. More than three dozen resorts have two courses on the list, always begging for a comparison between layouts over a nice cold drink and dinner after a full day of golf.
But if you’re looking for more, keep reading. Because 10 resorts are home to three or more courses on Golfweek’s Best ranking of top resorts in the U.S. From coastal Oregon to inland Florida, these destinations have the holes — and the pedigrees — to keep golfers swinging for days.
Pinehurst No. 4 (Courtesy of Pinehurst Resort)
Six of these resorts have three courses ranked among the top 200. They are Big Cedar Lodge in Missouri, Firestone Country Club in Ohio, Pebble Beach Resorts in California, the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, Sea Pines in South Carolina and Streamsong in Florida.
Two of these are not traditional resorts. The first is Firestone, which for the most part is a private members club. But Firestone offers stay-and-play packages open to the public. That qualifies it as a resort based on Golfweek’s Best standards in which any course that offers tee times to the public, even if the club is mostly a private facility, is deemed to be public-access.
The other in question is the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, which offers golf at 11 sites around the state. Because all the facilities are managed under one umbrella and offer great opportunities to bounce from one site to another with relative ease, we opted to include the Trail on this list.
Next up are the resorts with four courses ranked among the top 200 — rarefied air. They are Destination Kohler in Wisconsin (Whistling Straits and Blackwolf Run are two clubs, each with two courses, that are part of one resort) and Reynolds Lake Oconee in Georgia, which is a sprawling resort and residential community.
Only two resorts in the U.S. have five courses among the top 200 in the U.S.: Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon and Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina. Both of them are bucket-list destinations that every golfer should see, hopefully more than once. They offer all the golf most players would ever want on one vacation — playing one round on each course would take days, and one round on each course is never enough.
The resorts with three or more ranked courses have gone about their development in multiple ways. Some were established more than a century ago and have added courses through the decades — these resorts often feature courses designed by multiple architects, offering an array of styles and architectural features. Others feature several courses by one designer, with the resorts sticking with the architects who proved to work best for them.
Either way, you can’t go wrong with a trip to any of these locations listed on the following pages. Included for each resort are its top-200 courses listed with their average rating on a scale of 1 to 10 as assigned by Golfweek’s Best rater program, their designers, the years they opened and their rankings on various Golfweek’s Best lists. We hope you enjoy perusing these elite resorts, both on these pages and in real life.
And it’s worth noting, there is one more resort destination that is very likely to join this list of 10 in the coming years. Pine Needles in North Carolina, not far from Pinehurst Resort, operates three courses, two of which are on the 2023 list of top 200 resorts: Pine Needles (No. 47) and Mid Pines (T-35). The company’s third course, the recently renovated Southern Pines, didn’t have the requisite number of votes to qualify for this year’s list but is almost a lock to appear on the list in upcoming years.
After a chemical-application mishap, renovation of the greens at Ross Bridge will commence as early as April 2023.
Ross Bridge, one of the top-ranked golf courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail in Alabama, has suffered a debilitating chemical mishap that poisoned most of the greens on the layout in Hoover near Birmingham.
Much of the 18-hole course is closed indefinitely as crews attempt to save portions of the putting surfaces in hopes of operating the course at some capacity over the fall, winter and early spring.
Earlier in September, the maintenance staff mistook a 1-ton bag of herbicide and fertilizer mix for a bag of green sand that was to be applied to the putting surfaces. The herbicide was spread across the greens of Nos. 5-18, killing much of the bent grass on those surfaces. The bag of herbicide had been stored in the wrong building before the mishap, said John Cannon, chairman of Sunbelt Golf Corporation that operates the Trail’s 26 courses at 11 sites. He said the herbicide mix could appear as being green to the naked eye, similar to the mix that was supposed to be spread across the greens.
“It was just the wrong product in the wrong place, and it should never have happened,” Cannon said. “It’s pilot error, no doubt about it.”
Charcoal will be injected into the greens this week to try to form a filter layer, giving the surviving grass a better chance to spread. If that method works, the course could reopen in some capacity for this winter. In the meantime, holes 1-4 were undamaged and are open now, forming a playable loop that returns to the clubhouse. The practice facilities remain open.
The ninth (right) and 18th green at Ross Bridge on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail near Birmingham (Courtesy of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail/Michael Clemmer)
“Ross Bridge has very large greens, so we know we’re not going to get 100-percent coverage even in the best circumstances,” Cannon said. “It really is about seeing what progress we can make in the next month or so without having play on the golf course.”
Regardless of those efforts, the course will be renovated with new putting surfaces starting in the spring of 2023. Operators already planned to renovate the greens from bent grass to Ultradwarf Bermuda grass at Ross Bridge in 2024, and those plans have been accelerated. The greens will be cored out and regrassed, and other improvement projects such as tree clearing in key areas will commence ahead of schedule.
“We just hope to take what we have, which internally is a real tragedy, and end up 12 months from now with a better product,” Cannon said. “You have to find the bright spot somewhere when you’re going through difficult times like this.”
The timeline for the greens renovation has not been set, but work could begin in April or even earlier if the current surfaces don’t recover sufficiently after the charcoal injections. Cannon said the greens renovation would need to be completed with full grow-in before October next year to get ahead of any possible cold weather and early freezes.
Ross Bridge ranks No. 4 in Alabama on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list of public-access layouts in the U.S. It is adjacent to the AAA Four Diamond Renaissance Ross Bridge Resort and Spa, just minutes down the street from Oxmoor Valley, another Trail facility that features two full-size 18-hole courses (Ridge and Valley) with a revamped short course scheduled to come online this year.
The chemical mishap will not only affect tee times at Ross Bridge, Cannon said, it will affect bookings at the hotel and send more play to Oxmoor Valley. The accident’s total economic impact for the Trail cannot yet be projected, but it could reach into the millions of dollars. “Accelerating (the greens renovation) by a year changes the whole capital plan for the Trail for the next two years,” Cannon said.
The Trail was conceived by David Bronner, CEO of the Retirement Systems of Alabama, in the 1980s as a way to boost economic growth and diversify the state’s pension fund. It has expanded in the ensuing decades as one of the most popular buddies-trip destinations in the U.S., with golfers able to bounce from site to site with consistently solid golf courses, hotels, restaurants and other amenities.
The Trail’s operators are experienced in converting original bent grass greens to Ultradwarf Bermuda, strains of which have been greatly improved in recent decades. Only four courses on the Trail, not counting Ross Bridge, still have bent grass greens, Cannon said. His team has overseen the renovation of more than a dozen courses to Bermuda greens, which he said provide a better putting surface year-round without suffering as much stress as do bent greens in Alabama’s hot summers.
“We know we can build high-quality Ultradwarf greens that our customers will appreciate all year round, and at the same time while we’re closed we have the opportunity to do some other projects,” Cannon said. “That’s our final goal in this project, and it’s not about what already happened but what we can make out of it that’s the most important to us. …
“This is the biggest accident we’ve ever had to any of the golf courses on the Trail in my 25 years, and things like this happen, but we’re going to make the most of it and we’re going to improve Ross Bridge.”
The Robert Trent Jones Trail takes up most of the spots for best public-access golf courses in Alabama, but the No. 1 spot is elsewhere.
The Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail grabs much of the spotlight for best courses in Alabama, and rightfully so. The Trail operates 26 courses at 11 sites across the state, and eight of the top 10 public-access courses in the Yellowhammer State are on the Trail.
FarmLinks at Pursell Farms in Sylacauga grabs the top spot on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list for Alabama, and alongside Kiva Dunes is one of only two non-Trail courses on the list.
Constructed as a living laboratory of sorts by Michael Hurdzan and Dana Fry in 2002, with various types of grasses in use around the property, FarmLinks features one of the prettiest holes in the state. The 210-yard, par-3 fifth plunges 172 feet off the side of a small mountain to a picturesque green, providing views for miles. Most of the other holes feature wide fairways with sometimes hilly terrain before descending into gently rolling landscapes.
Golfweek’s Best offers many lists of course rankings, with the list of top public-access courses among the most popular. All the courses on this list allow public access in some fashion, be it standard daily green fees, through a resort or by staying at an affiliated hotel. If there’s a will, there’s a tee time.
The golf course designer has thoughts about trees, Chambers Bay, distance and changing fashions.
Robert Trent Jones Jr., designer of more than 250 golf courses around the world, has plenty of strong views on architecture and the state of the game. The 82-year-old is the son of famed architect Robert Trent Jones Sr., and he’s seen many changes and trends in design over his six decades in the business – some he loves, others he would love to see discarded.
Jones Jr., a past president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, recently spent several days with Golfweek’s course raters at the Golfweek’s Best Architecture Summit at Ross Bridge near Birmingham, Alabama. Ross Bridge is part of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, an ambitious project largely designed by the senior Jones that now includes 26 courses at 11 sites. Jones Jr. attended the summit to speak about his father’s legacy on the Trail and beyond.
Jones Jr. graciously answered many questions after playing one round of golf at Ross Bridge and another at nearby Alpine Bay Golf Club – which is not part of the Trail but which was designed by Jones Sr. and reopened in 2016 after having been shuttered for nearly two years. Following are selections of his replies. Editor’s note: These responses are not shown in their entirety and have been edited for brevity.
The top 45 players and ties will receive LPGA status for the 2022 season.
With no LPGA Qualifying School in 2020, the depth of this year’s Q-Series is particularly strong. Consider that there are six players in the top 75 of the Rolex Rankings in the field, including No. 14 Ayaka Furue, No. 18 Atthaya Thitikul, No. 38 Hinako Shibuno, No. 53 Hye-Jin Choi, No. 67 Na Rin An and No. 71 Emily Kristine Pedersen (pictured above).
The field of 110 players will play eight rounds over the course of two weeks at two courses on the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. The first week (Dec. 2-5) will take place at Magnolia Grove (Crossing and Falls courses) in Mobile, Alabama, followed by a hybrid course at Highland Oaks Golf Course in Dothan (Highland and Marshwood courses) on Dec. 9-12.
The top 45 players and ties will receive LPGA status for the 2022 season. Those who do not receive LPGA status will have Symetra Tour status for next year.
Scores will carry over from the first week to the second. There will be a cut after the first week to 70 and ties. College players in the field who enter as amateurs can defer LPGA membership and accept at any point until July 1, 2022.
Players who finished in the top 45 at Q-Series in 2019 were seeded Nos. 129 to 174 on the initial LPGA Priority List. Most full-field events range from 120 to 140 players.
Conecuh Sausage has taken over Alabama. You’ll find it at breakfast next to the eggs on your plate and in the white gravy. It’s there again on your lunch flatbread. You can wrap up a long day of golf with a serving of sausage in your shrimp and grits. Name a recipe, and the cooks in Alabama will find a way to inject a little Conecuh Sausage. Vegans beware.
The sausages are made in the small town of Evergreen in the southern reaches of this very Southern state, and the brand has become an icon of civic pride. Judging from my recent week of golf in Alabama, it would be safe to say the little bundles of meat make up a sizable percentage of the entire state’s total caloric intake. I sampled nine meals on the trip that didn’t come through a drive-through window, and seven of them included at least one Conecuh Sausage concoction on the plate.
About the only thing more prevalent in Alabama than the sausage is the tasty golf along the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. With 26 courses at 11 sites stretched across the state – 468 holes in all – the Trail pretty much dominates the golf scene in the state. Eight of the top 10 courses on Golfweek’s Best Courses You Can Play list of top public-access layouts in the state are part of the Trail.
Many of the best of those stretch across the middle of the state, beginning with the Lake Course at Grand National in Opelika, which ranks No. 4 on Golfweek’s Best 2021 list for Alabama. Take Interstate 85 southwest to Prattville near Montgomery for the Judge at Capitol Hill, which is No. 3 in the state. Then jump onto I-65 for the ride north to Hoover near Birmingham for 36 more at No. 2 Ross Bridge and No. 6 Oxmoor Valley’s Ridge Course.
That was the majority of my itinerary in early January as I set out to lay eyes on the best of public-access golf in the state, all with the burning intent of settling this question: Where should I play golf in Alabama? There were scenic mountain holes, lakeside par 3s, incredibly long layouts for those foolish enough to play from the wrong tees, even a few birdie putts that found the cup. Did I mention the Conecuh Sausage? It really is everywhere.
About the only thing missing from the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail is the No. 1 public-access layout in the state.
