LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan met with the media Saturday morning to debate the Solheim Cup shuttle fiasco.
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GAINESVILLE, Va. — Simply because the solar peaked over the horizon Saturday morning at Robert Trent Jones Golf Membership, the grandstands surrounding the first tee had been rocking. Music blared over the loudspeakers as followers danced and sang alongside from their seats. By the point the primary match of the day teed off, it was standing room solely.
The scene was a stark distinction to the one we noticed 24 hours earlier. When the nineteenth Solheim Cup formally kicked off Friday, discovering seating wasn’t an issue. Of the two,000 seats out there within the large buildout surrounding the tee, simply over half had been crammed.
5 miles away, on the principal spectator parking zone, followers had been stranded. There weren’t sufficient buses to fulfill the demand of followers hoping to see the opening tee photographs. Even for many who arrived nicely forward of time, it was taking roughly two hours to get from the lot to the principle gate.
The LPGA launched an announcement later within the morning, and ultimately supplied free tickets to weekend days as a token of goodwill. However after the disastrous begin to the most important occasion in girls’s golf, loads of harm was already accomplished.
Along with the nightmarish trek from the parking zone to the venue, there have been loads of criticisms levied over the shortage of communication about the issue. The LPGA Tour issued its first assertion at 9:30 a.m. and despatched a letter to followers apologizing for the failures simply earlier than 9 p.m.
“We actually weren’t attempting to keep away from the questions, and we had been attempting to be clear, however I feel on the finish of the day we actually wanted to maneuver into form of triage mode,” LPGA commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan mentioned when she met with the media Saturday morning. “It was actually, I’ll say, an all fingers on deck with lots of our senior workers to determine precisely type of the place we had been, what occurred, and the way we had been going to unravel the issue.”
What went unsuitable with Solheim Cup ‘nightmare’ shuttle bus state of affairs?
To the LPGA’s credit score, the shuttle-bus state of affairs was a lot improved for the second day of competitors. Nonetheless, whereas Samaan pledged transparency on the foundation explanation for the issue, her solutions had been mild on specifics.
When requested what number of buses had been used Friday — and what number of had been added for Saturday — she known as it a “difficult query.” She was later requested how the occasion didn’t have a extra sturdy transportation plan when this occasion had recorded file ticket gross sales. Her solely rationalization was that there have been “miscalculations and the planning was not adequate.”
She acknowledged that the staffing on the parking zone was one other problem, however stopped in need of delving into the small print of the plan getting into the week.
“I don’t wish to get into precisely who, the small print of the accountability,” she mentioned. “On the finish of the day, I’m the chief of the group and I’ve to personal it. We now have a match group that runs all of this, however I’m sitting up right here in entrance of you because the chief of the LPGA, and I must personal that.”
Robert Trent Jones Golf Membership beforehand hosted 4 Presidents Cups — in addition to the 2015 Quicken Loans Nationwide — and didn’t run into the identical logistical issues that followers met this week. The LPGA Tour operates the Solheim Cup each 4 years when the biennial occasion is hosted on U.S. soil.
“This was an LPGA problem,” she mentioned.
