Your 2009 LPGA Tour Schedule Preview

UPDATE: The 2009 LPGA Tour Schedule has been announced.  Golf News Net has the details.

On Wednesday, the LPGA Tour will announce its 2009 season schedule.  Most observers are expecting a lot of missing names and TBDs on the schedule compared to this season.

Jon Show offers his preview that pretty well sums up the situation and offers some additional insights.

First, what we know for sure:

The LPGA schedule consisted of 34 official money events this year and should get close to that number in 2009, depending on the outcome of sponsor searches for three tournaments. The former Safeway International in Phoenix and the SemGroup Championship in Tulsa, Okla., are trying to find new sponsors so that they can stay on the schedule, and the Wegmans LPGA in upstate New York is working on an extension. The tour is expected to leave slots open for those events.

The Fields Open in Hawaii and Ginn Tribute in South Carolina will not return in 2009 because title sponsors opted not to continue. The future of the LPGA-owned ADT Championship in Florida, which lost its title sponsor, is also uncertain.

I haven't spoken with Jon or the LPGA Tour on the subject in recent days, but we definitely know Fields and Ginn are gone.  The former Safeway event will likely be played using LPGA Tour funding.  There are rumors that SemGroup has managed to find a substitute sponsor since it filed for Chapter 11 earlier this year.  Wegmans is barely holding on, as Show mentions.

So, what is the proposition to fill these sponsor gaps?  $4 million, please.

While most tournaments cited the economy as the main obstacle to finding new title sponsors, the LPGA’s rising sponsorship and sanctioning fees under Commissioner Carolyn Bivens, who took the post in September 2005, have created some obstacles in small to medium-size markets.

“It was a tough sell at $2 million a year and now you’re coming back two years later with a $4 million price tag?” said a source close to the tournament. “That’s not an easy proposition.”

Agreed, and it appears that the LPGA Tour may be realizing this - considering that a television contract for 2010 forward is still in limbo.

[LPGA Tour COO Chris] Higgs said it was too early to predict whether the economy would force reductions in title sponsorship fees but hinted that was a possibility.

“The cream of the crop of English Premier League football are looking at corrections and retractions in their sponsorships, and you realize that nothing is immune,” he said.

Speaking of the television deal, it appears that the Golf Channel may be warming to a weekend programming schedule that features the LPGA Tour.  This could be a win for TGC considering that they have will only have limited early weekend coverage of the PGA Tour this season, thanks to a deal between Comcast and CBS.  The question would be whether TGC commits to improving its LPGA Tour broadcasts that leave many LPGA fans left wanting.