It's a new year so it's natural to start talking about new faces on the LPGA Tour (The Constructivist is already doing just that).  I'll begin with a discussion on previous rookies - specifically, the best ones ever.  My longtime readers have probably wondered why I've never put together a Greatest Rookie Seasons list.  I've started working on it a couple of times but had never figured out how to get past one hurdle.  Over its history, the LPGA's definition of a rookie and the processes which allow new players to join the Tour have changed.  Finding documentation of what those definitions and processes were (and the exact years each was used) has been next to impossible.

You might wonder why this would really be a problem, given that each player with an entry on the Players page at LPGA.com has their official rookie year listed.  OK, check out Nancy Lopez' page - her rookie year was 1977.  Now look at the list of LPGA Rookies of the Year.  How can Lopez be Rookie of the Year in 1978 when 1977 was her official rookie season?  The same thing happened with Patty Sheehan, Juli Inkster, Stephanie Farwig and Bonnie Lauer.  It seems that from about 1975 to 1985, there were two Q-Schools per year (January and July) which enabled these players (and many others, I'm sure) to join the Tour in late summer and still be eligible for ROY the following season.  After playing 6-8 events in their official rookie season, all five players had much better "second" seasons.  Lopez in '78 had one of the greatest seasons any player has ever had.

Here's the hurdle - if Lopez was a 1977 rookie and she won 1978 ROY, which year do I evaluate for the Greatest Rookie Seasons list?  Both choices are correct in one respect, incorrect in another.  The simple solution is to choose the official rookie year for this study but that will automatically disqualify the season that people have been talking about for 30 years as "the greatest rookie season in LPGA history".  Who would take my list seriously if I leave Lopez '78 off of it?  Conversely - if I allow Lopez, Sheehan and Inkster to make this list with their ROY seasons, does that force me to consider the "second seasons" of other players who (because of low priority or other circumstances) played short schedules in their official rookie season?

My decision was to utilize the ROY seasons of these five players, plus the "second seasons" of Betsy King ('78) and Lori Garbacz ('80) since they were Top 20 players the year after they qualified at summer Q-School.  Because those summer Q-Schools are the cause of this quandary, I chose to ignore the short rookie seasons of these seven for the purposes of ranking them against the other "true" rookies.  Look at it this way - if you assume the summer Q-Schools were never held, these players would have most likely qualified the next January and would have been rookies in that following season anyway.

My Greatest Rookie Seasons post will be out tomorrow.