Over at Mostly Harmless, I just put together a first draft of a worldwide women's golf schedule for 2010.  As far as I can tell, the KLPGA has not released its final schedule and it's pretty clear that the LPGA, JLPGA, and LET are still working on the finishing touches on theirs.  Still, my post provides some insight into the options open for those players with dual LPGA-JLPGA or LPGA-LET membership next season (the latter list is still to be finalized, as LET Q-School ends in a few days and there are a good number of LPGAers in it).

Depending on how much these players want to travel, a good number of them may literally be globetrotting and tourhopping all season.  They certainly have some huge incentive to do so in late winter, as they could scrape off the off-season rust in up to 5 events across the Asian Pacific before flying to the U.S. West Coast for the LPGA's J Golf and Kraft Nabisco Championship at the end of March and start of April.  After that, we might not see those with JLPGA membership back on the LPGA until June, as they have little incentive to fight jet lag for the Tres Marias and Bell Micro events in late April and mid-May and break their momentum leading up to the JLPGA's first major, the Salonpas Cup, in early May.  LETers might decide to spend May travelling through Turkey, Germany, Slovakia, and the Netherlands to warm up for the LPGA's summer stretch from mid-June through mid-July before returning with the rest of the top LPGAers to France and England for the traditional European swing.  And who knows how many will decide to stay in the UK for the next 3 weeks, as well?  Or how many JLPGAers will decide to skip the Safeway Classic, the Canadian Open, and the NW Arkansas Classic to prepare for their tour's major season in September?  And if you're playing well, why not just wait for the LPGA to come to Asia in late October and early November?  A good number of LETers who don't qualify for those events will still be coming to Asia, as the LET now has its own late fall Asian swing at the same time as the LPGA and is actually making faster inroads into China.  With only Lorena's invitational and the LPGA Tour Championship remaining in November, I wouldn't be surprised if a good number of JLPGAers decided not to come back to North America the rest of the season.

What this suggests to me is that we may be seeing a major shift in the way female professional golfers put together their schedules next decade.  It used to be that anyone with LPGA membership would play a very limited schedule on their "other" tour--maybe 5-10 events.  But with possibly 35 JLPGA events and 26 individual LET ones next season vs. hopefully 24 for the LPGA, it's possible that some players with dual membership might decide to make the LPGA their "other" tour instead--and soon.  If the LPGA doesn't get its act together and start serious negotiations with the JLPGA, KLPGA, and LET to jointly sponsor more events and coordinate their schedules so the best players in the world can play in each tour's major events, it may lose its status as the world's top tour in women's golf sometime next decade, as its best golfers play more and more events on other tours.

Which is to say that the criticism the LPGA is facing in most quarters of the U.S. media over its approach to globalization is even more wrongheaded than it may at first appear.  The LPGA is in serious danger of falling behind in the Asian Pacific and Indian Ocean basin to the LET and the JLPGA.  The LET by its nature is virtually a transnational tour with a geographic base fairly close to the Middle East and South Asia.  It can put on tournaments at a cost of something like a fifth to a third of a typical LPGA event, so it has much more potential for explosive growth in those regions, even in a bad economy.  We may start seeing up-and-coming Korean players looking to flesh out their schedules by playing in more LET events outside of Asia before trying to move up to the JLPGA and LPGA--or even instead of making that move.  Speaking of the JLPGA, it can put on events at about half to two-thirds the cost of an LPGA event, so if it ever decided to start putting together tournaments outside Japan, it would have more opportunities to do so than the LPGA, as well.  And if it ever simplified its Q-School to make it easier for foreigners to try to join, its purses could rise and it could become the top tour in the world by 2020.

The world's top women's tours need to decide fairly quickly how they're going to approach next decade.  Will they move in the direction of creating one world tour for the best female golfers on the planet, as Ron Sirak and Dave Seanor have envisioned?  Will they follow my advice and get into jointly-sponsoring events and better coordinating their schedules, while still retaining their different core geographic bases for their rank-and-file players?  Or will they each try to go it alone and race to beat each other into China, India, and the Middle East?