Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Wegman’s LPGA Preview

The ladies return to action this week at the Wegman’s LPGA in Pittsford, New York. Following their first week off in nearly two months, they’ll be teeing it up at Locust Hill Country Club just southeast of Rochester. Jeong Jang is the defending champion. The 72-hole event begins Thursday with television coverage starting Friday at 2pm EDT on ESPN2.

This tournament is the final one in the official “first half of the 2007 LPGA Playoffs”. The top 11 players in ADT points after this week will qualify for the ADT Championship. Four players – Pressel, Lincicome, Pettersen and Castrale – have already qualified by winning selected “winner events”. Wegman is not a winner’s event, but the $270,000 winner’s check could easily vault a player from the lower levels into the Top 11. The players who would be most likely to get knocked out this weekend are #11 Young Kim and #10 Angela Park.

Locust Hill is on the short side – 6221 yards and par of 72 – with the usual tighter fairways that go along with shorter courses. For most of the weekend, winds are expected to be in the 10-20 mph range so (depending on the rough) scores might not be very low.

With the US Open coming up next week and off-weeks surrounding these two events, you would expect a
fairly strong field and Wegman delivers. Annika Sorenstam is the only top player not in attendance. Although she’s only won once in the nine straight times I’ve picked her, Lorena Ochoa keeps on finishing Top 10 so I’m going to make it ten straight. Just so you’ll know – I’m planning on breaking that streak next week at the Open. This week’s CYA picks are Paula Creamer and Mi Hyun Kim.

Stats: Winners 1-13 (2-13 with CYAs), Top Tens 22-39.

3 comments:

The Constructivist said...

You may (or may not) be interested to see why I rank Seon Hwa Lee ahead of Ai Miyazato and both Kyeong Bae and Brittany Lang ahead of Meaghan Francella in my June Super Soph rankings....

Hound Dog said...

Of course I was interested and it's great stuff! If anybody else wants to check it out, click on the Mostly Harmless link on the right side of my home page.

I show Miyazato just ahead of Lee in my current rankings, but that was prior to the LPGA Championship. My stats at the moment have Miyazato behind Seon Hwa.

The Constructivist said...

It's amazing how two bad events in a row can kill someone's momentum. A few weeks ago I was thinking Ai-chan was finally going to break out and start contending regularly, but now I'm still waiting. Hopefully the rest will have done her some good.