Lpga

When the United States Golf Association packed up its corporate tents after the 2002 Senior Open concluded, Caves Valley returned to its roots as a private club that was selective in the tournaments it hosted. Mandated to promote the amateur ranks, the Owings Mills club welcomed a handful of events in the intervening years - none involving professionals. That will change in the summer of 2014, when the Ladies Professional Golf Association's inaugural International Crown comes to Baltimore County for a four-day, match-play event featuring four-player teams from eight different countries.

When the United States Golf Association packed up its corporate tents after the 2002 Senior Open concluded, Caves Valley returned to its roots as a private club that was selective in the tournaments it hosted. Mandated to promote the amateur ranks, the Owings Mills club welcomed a handful of events in the intervening years - none involving professionals. That will change in the summer of 2014, when the Ladies Professional Golf Association's inaugural International Crown comes to Baltimore County for a four-day, match-play event featuring four-player teams from eight different countries.

Cindy Davis of Owings Mills and Paula Wagasky, formerly of Odenton, are in the national golf spotlight as a result of recent announcements by the Ladies Professional Golf Association.Davis has been named executive director of the LPGA's Teaching Division, a newly created position, and one where the job description appears written for a person of her skills. Wagasky, a teaching professional at Buffalo Grove (Ill.) Golf Club, has been named LPGA National Golf Professional of the Year.The two are best remembered in this area for their competitive excellence, as they are among six women to have won consecutive Middle Atlantic Women's Amateur championships, and Davis added a third Middle Atlantic, plus Maryland State and Women's District titles.

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Annika Sorenstam will be going after her fourth straight LPGA Champ- ionship, Karrie Webb will be trying to win her third event of the year and Michelle Wie is in pursuit of her first professional victory. They will be the favorites at Bulle Rock, but others have a chance: Lorena Ochoa After three wins in her first three seasons, the 24-year-old from Mexico (above) has become the No. 1 player on the tour in 2006. She already has won twice and finished second five times. Paula Creamer Last year's top rookie (and No. 2 player overall)

BETHESDA -- Pat Bradley remembers the good old days on tour. "You'd come to a tournament and you could count the number of players on one hand who would be there [contending] on Sunday afternoon," said the 17-year LPGA veteran.No more.Already this year, there have been 15 different winners since the women teed it up in Jamaica five months ago, with just Jane Geddes and Beth Daniel making it to the winner's circle twice.The same applies in men's golf and throughout tennis. There's more depth in tournament fields, and they're getting deeper all the time.

BETHESDA -- The theme for this year's LPGA Championship seemed to be established oh, maybe a day or two before the first woman reared back and hammered a drive off the first tee of the Bethesda Country Club yesterday.For days -- no, make that weeks -- the whisper on the tour has been out with the old and in with the new. Pat Bradley, Amy Alcott, Betsy King, Beth Daniel, Jan Stephenson, et al, step aside; henceforth, you are to be known as the fairway version of the over-the-hill gang.First player in with a 3-under-par 68 was King.

BETHESDA -- Hollis Stacy, buoyed by the confidence only a victory can bring, shot a 2-under par 69 in the first round of the LPGA Championship at Bethesda Country Club yesterday. It was a total bettered by only seven players.Stacy, in her 18th LPGA tour season, has won four majors including three U.S. Women's Opens, and ended a six-year victory drought when she shot 69 the last day to take the Crestar-Farm Fresh Classic in Chesapeake, Va., earlier this year."I'm very happy," she said at the time, as she collected th $60,000 check.

She was 22, a virtual unknown rookie on the LPGA Tour, playing in her first U.S. Women's Open. When Liselotte Neumann came to the Five Farms course at Baltimore Country Club that July week in 1988, she didn't realize that she would soon become one of the LPGA's up-and-coming stars. "I was just so happy to be there, I had to qualify to even get there," Neumann, now 39, recalled earlier this year. "We came down from Boston and I had actually quite a good finish there, so I knew I was hitting the ball pretty good.

Nineteen-year-old Paula Creamer - perhaps the most polished member of the LPGA's much publicized youth movement - won't have it easy this week as she tries to capture her first major championship. Creamer walked into her afternoon news conference yesterday with her right wrist wrapped in a bandage, and admitted that she's been playing in pain recently. "I went and got an MRI and an X-ray this morning," Creamer said. "I couldn't play [Tuesday]. My tendons and ligaments aren't torn, so that's good.

More than a decade after the U.S. Senior Open was played at Caves Valley Golf Club, and five years since both the LPGA Championship at Bulle Rock and the Senior Players Championship at Baltimore Country Club left the area, professional golf will be returning to Baltimore in 2014. Second-year LPGA commissioner Michael Whan announced Thursday afternoon at the PGA merchandise show in Orlando, Fla., that a new $1.6 million team event -- The International Crown -- will be held at Caves Valley in Owings Mills.

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They're half a world away, but the enthusiasm greeting the start of the LPGA's 63rd season appears as high as any time in recent memory. The season opener comes Thursday at the Women's Australian Open, one of five new events for 2012 — though "new" might be a relative term. Four of the five, including Australia, are a return to old territory that went without the LPGA for a while. Also back on the schedule: Hawaii, Toledo and Kingsmill Resort in Virginia. "We have loyal fan bases in these places that we've been," player Morgan Pressel said.

The LPGA Futures Tour announced Tuesday that it has added a tournament to its 2012 schedule in Frederick. The Challenge at Musket Ridge will be held Aug. 20-26 at Musket Ridge Golf Club. The inaugural event will be the only current women's professional golf tournament in Maryland. The LPGA Futures Tour will partner with the Frederick County Commission for Women to run the event, which will help support local women's and children's charities. The LPGA Futures Tour hosted two previous tournaments in Maryland: in Queenstown from 2004 to 2007 and in Beltsville in 2004 and 2005.

That 12-day lag time notwithstanding, Mike Whan acknowledges it wasn't a tough call to welcome Lexi Thompson as the LPGA's youngest member in 44 years. The commissioner's pivotal decision actually had come in June, when Thompson was given the green light to enter the LPGA's qualifying process at age 16. That's when Whan determined the Florida teen would be treated as any 18-and-older hopeful. When Thompson won her way into the tour's record book by capturing the Navistar LPGA Classic, it simply eliminated the intermediate steps.

WILMINGTON, Del. -- Laura Davies spent part of last week shuttling back and forth between here and Atlantic City, between gambling on the golf course and betting in the casinos.The 30-year-old from Great Britain admittedly didn't do well during her nightly jaunts, and was a little coy about how many times she went. "More than once, but not more than twice," she said.Davies recouped all of her losses and more here yesterday -- $165,000 to be exact -- by winning the $1.1 million McDonald's LPGA Championship at Du Pont Country Club.

BETHESDA -- The past two months on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour have turned into the sport's version of Kids R Us, but the first two rounds of this year's $1 million Mazda LPGA Championship have returned with a blast to the past.Two-time U.S. Open champion and first-round co-leader Betsy King continued to regain her form yesterday at Bethesda Country Club with a 5-under-par 66 and a 36-hole total of 8-under 134. But if the lead belonged solely to King, the spotlight was shared with Hall of Famer JoAnne Carner.