What Does LPGA Stand For?

Quick answer: LPGA stands for the Ladies Professional Golf Association. It is the American organization that runs the top professional golf tour for women, the LPGA Tour. It was founded in 1950, it is based in Daytona Beach, Florida, and it is the oldest continuing women's professional sports organization in the United States.

That clears up the acronym. The more useful question is what the LPGA actually does, and how it differs from the alphabet soup of other golf bodies. Here is the whole thing in plain English.

What Is the LPGA?

The LPGA is two things at once, which is where some of the confusion starts.

First, and most visibly, it runs the LPGA Tour, the week-to-week schedule of tournaments where the best female golfers on earth compete for prize money. When you turn on women's pro golf and see players like Nelly Korda or Lydia Ko, you are watching the LPGA Tour. There are more than 30 events a season, held across multiple countries.

Second, it is an organization for female club and teaching professionals, the women who run pro shops and give lessons at courses near you. That side, the LPGA Professionals, has over 1,800 members. So the LPGA is both the elite tour you watch on TV and a professional body for the people teaching the game on the ground.

When Was the LPGA Founded?

In 1950. It was incorporated that year, and the founding meeting took place on September 13, 1950 in Wichita, Kansas.

Thirteen women started it. A few of the names still echo around the sport: Patty Berg, Louise Suggs, Betty Jameson, and the multi-sport legend Babe Didrikson Zaharias, who had already won Olympic track medals before she ever picked up a pro golf career. The early days were rough. Purses were so thin that the players themselves often handled the organizing and even some of the course chores just to keep events running. It grew from that into the premier women's golf body in the world.

There is a small bit of history worth knowing, too. The LPGA replaced an earlier group, the Women's Professional Golf Association, which had launched in 1944 and folded by 1949. So the LPGA was the second swing at building a women's tour, and this time it stuck.

What Is the Difference Between the LPGA and the PGA?

This trips up almost everyone, so let me keep it simple. The difference is mostly who plays.

The LPGA runs the top tour for women.

The PGA Tour runs the top tour for men in North America. That is where Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy play.

The PGA of America is a separate body again, the organization of club and teaching professionals, the people who run your local course and might give you a lesson. It also puts on the men's PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup.

So "PGA" by itself is genuinely ambiguous. It stands for Professional Golfers' Association, and more than one organization uses the name. "LPGA," on the other hand, is clean. It is the women's tour, full stop. One easy way to hold it together: the LPGA is to women's pro golf roughly what the PGA Tour is to men's.

What Are the LPGA Major Championships?

Here is a fact that surprises a lot of fans. Women's golf has five majors, not four like the men.

The five, in the order they are usually played, are:

• The Chevron Championship, the first major of the season.
• The U.S. Women's Open, run by the USGA.
• The KPMG Women's PGA Championship, run with the PGA of America.
• The Amundi Evian Championship, played in France.
• The AIG Women's Open, the women's British Open, run by the R&A.

Each major sits under a different organization, which is unusual, and the Evian was only added as the fifth major in 2013. That five-major setup is part of why a women's career Grand Slam is so rare and so impressive. Inbee Park is recognized as the first to complete it in the five-major era.

How Do Players Get on the LPGA Tour?

Nobody just signs up. You earn your way on, and there are two main roads.

The first is Q-School, officially the LPGA Qualifying Tournament. It runs in stages, building up to a grueling 90-hole Final Stage held at LPGA International in December. Survive that, and you earn status to play on tour. It is one of the most pressure-soaked weeks in the sport, because your whole next season can hinge on a few putts.

The second road is the Epson Tour, nicknamed the "Road to the LPGA." It is the developmental circuit, the minor leagues of women's pro golf. Play well there across a season and the top finishers on the money list graduate straight to the LPGA Tour. Plenty of stars came up this way, including former world number ones like Inbee Park, Lorena Ochoa, and Nelly Korda. It is a grind, but it is a proven path.

Why Does the LPGA Matter?

Beyond the trophies, the LPGA has spent 75 years proving women could build and sustain a professional sport on their own terms. It started with 13 players doing their own grunt work for tiny purses. It is now a global tour with players from dozens of countries and a serious developmental pipeline feeding it.

I think that is the part worth sitting with. The acronym is just four letters, but behind it is the longest-running women's pro sports organization in America, older than most of the leagues people assume came first. Not bad for a group that started by maintaining its own courses because nobody else would.

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