[Photo: Logan Whitton]
For all of the time that Riviera Country Club was considered as a host site for the 2026 US Women’s Open, and in the aftermath of it being selected, USGA senior director of championships Shannon Rouillard had to be thinking about one quirk at the famous layout.
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A round at Riviera begins spectacularly, on an elevated tee box right under the windows of the clubhouse, and the par-5 opener can be reachable in two shots, depending on where the tee is placed. Then there is the renowned par-4 10th—drivable depending on the tees and depending on a player’s appetite for risk and reward.
Those are wondering holes for Rouillard to consider setting up, but also present a pace-of-play challenge. In each case, it’s possible that players could be left waiting for long periods on the tee, and that creates all kinds of issues. The main concern is getting all 156 players around the course before sunset at just after 8; hence, the first tee times on Thursday are set for 6:45 a.m. local.
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“I wouldn’t say we have concerns about the pace of play, but obviously, when you think about the first hole, going in, I knew the majority of the field was going to be able to hit that green in two,” Rouillard said on Wednesday in the USGA press conference at Riviera. “So keeping that in mind, I couldn’t have two starting holes where we could have a pace of play issue just getting the round started. So that definitely played into my thinking there.”
So we can expect that Nos. 1 and 10 will play at near their full length for the first two rounds, and then there’ll be more room for excitement once the field is trimmed to the top 60 and ties for the weekend.
The LPGA Tour has recently begun publicly cracking down on slow play, and the most recent incident was this past Saturday, when Apichaya Yubol, while contending in the ShopRite Classic, was assessed a one-stroke penalty for slow playing in the second round. The LPGA said she was penalised for exceeding her maximum time allowed for her total strokes on the 13th hole.”
Yubol ultimately shot 66 in the final round, but finished one stroke behind the winner, Celine Boutier, in the 54-hole event.
At the JM Eagle in April, Jin Hee Im was given a one-stroke slow-play penalty during the third round, and it was also costly because she finished one shot behind the winner, Hannah Green.
Related: US Women’s Open next target on Hannah Green’s hit list
As noted by Rouillard, the LPGA and USGA have slightly different place-of-play policies, and the U.S. Women’s Open faces interesting challenges that the professional tour does not: players come from various forms of competition, including the LET, Epson Tour, JLPGA, college, and amateur competitions. “So not everybody is playing under the same pace of play policy week in and week out,” Roulliard said.
The USGA’s stated rules are that “a player should make a stroke in no more than 40 seconds once it’s their turn to play without interference.” Also, “if a group falls out of position (e.g., finishes a hole behind the maximum allowable time and falls a full hole behind the group ahead), they are placed “on the clock.” Accumulating “bad times” for exceeding the 40-second limit results in progressive penalties. The first penalty is one stroke, followed by two strokes and then disqualification.
“A player has to be over time and out of position prior to necessarily going on the clock, but recognising, too, that we also don’t want to put them on the clock if there’s a wait up ahead,” Rouillard said. “So we’re looking at a lot of different information before we start putting a group on the clock, right? There’s an ebb and flow to that pace of play and just making sure that we are monitoring that appropriately.”
The USGA goes to great lengths to understand where the issues will be on each course it holds championships. It takes into consideration the time it takes golfers to play the hole, based on yardage, walking from the green to the tee, and walking between the nine holes.
“We’ll look at all of that, and we’ll predict where the bottlenecks are going to be. We’ll predict how certain holes will play. And that’s how we get to a certain allotted time,” John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s chief championships officer.
“It’s pretty intentional. We put a lot of effort into it, but it’s a scientific process that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t because of the weather, but we do put a lot of effort into it, which leads to our policy.”
The biggest thing that is on the USGA’s upside for the week, and California is one of the few places it can count on for it: the weather. Other than the low clouds referred to as “June Gloom” here, the forecasted high temperatures for Thursday through Sunday vary by two degrees, 70 to 72, with the highest chance for rain at 20 per cent on Thursday.