For most LPGA members, the 2010 season gets underway at the Kia Classic near San Diego on March 25.  The events in Thailand and Singapore were limited-field affairs with only the 50-55 highest-priority players in action.  For Category-1 players like Jane Park, Karen Stupples and Shiho Oyama, the late start is a disadvantage in that their competition had two extra events to rack up official winnings which set the Priority Status list for 2011.

The good news for those Cat-1 unfortunates - the players behind them didn't get to play in Asia either.  Yes, Amanda Blumenherst and Laura Davies did play but their winnings don't count as official money because they were playing on sponsor's exemptions.  So everybody below Position #56 tees off at LaCosta on equal footing.  Well, not quite everybody...

The average full-field event last year saw the cut-off point around Position #160.  Most of them were a few positions higher than that - two or three events saw the cut-off drop much lower than that, skewing the average a bit.  With fewer total events and more off-weeks in 2010, I expect that average to come up at least a couple of spots.  Anybody at #155 or higher is very likely to miss out on any given event (sorry, Lisa Strom).  You may wonder why the average cut-off hasn't been closer to 144, seeing as that is the usual full-field size.  Every week, anywhere from eight to a dozen players in the upper categories don't start - sometimes lots more than that, if the schedule runs several weeks in a row or the jet lag from the previous event is rather large.  Aside from logistical reasons, players generally miss events because of injury (long-term like Grace Park and short-term like Paula Creamer did a couple of times in '09), pregnancy or commitment to an event on another tour.

According to this year's edition of the Priority Status document, players can improve their current priority during a season three different ways:

1. Win an event.  Player would move up to Cat-5 (#94).

2. Rank in the money list Top 40 following the eighth event of the season (State Farm in June) and the 15^th event (Safeway Classic in August).  Player would move up to Cat-8 (#97).  Note that this is different from last year - standings after every seventh event were used in 2009.

3. Players in Categories 14 through 20 will be reordered by their money-list standings through the eighth and 15^th events (again, different from last year) beginning at Position #145.

While Numbers 1 and 2 aren't impossible tasks (Michelle Wie moved up via #2 early last year), the most players are affected by #3.  Anna Nordqvist set up her brilliant rookie season by playing well enough in two events - T60 at SBS and T17 at Corona - to move up from #225 to #154.  Without that move forward, she would not have even been in the field at the LPGA Championship - her first of two 2009 victories.  There are four full-field events among the first eight on the schedule - Kia, Tres Marias, Bell Micro and State Farm.  The Kia Classic, being the first LPGA event for four weeks and the lead-in to the Kraft Nabisco, will likely boast a very strong field which leaves fewer spots for the 150-ish players.  Bell Micro and State Farm will probably have an average cut-off point of 155-160.  Tres Marias is probably the only event that players from #160 on down will have to improve themselves.  For various reasons, many top players refuse to go South of the Border more often than the minimum requirement so those events are often the only chance for the lower-priority players to get a start.  Those players will get only this one shot while the players numbered 145-160 will get two, three or even four attempts to earn some cash.  Like Nordqvist a year ago, the 160-plusses probably need a Top 20 finish in Mexico to help themselves enough to make a real difference.

To wrap this up, I have a different Priority-related subject for you to consider.  Let's be pessimistic and say Paula Creamer's thumb problem doesn't get better with rest and she has to have surgery.  Let's also say that she rehabs slowly and doesn't make the money-list Top 80 at the end of the year.  Under those circumstances she would certainly file for and receive a medical extension, which would place her at the bottom of Category-1.  Here's my point - at Priority Position #81 or so (or if she can play several events and finishes worse than 60^th in money), Paula would not be eligible for ANY of next year's limited-field events in Asia or the Ochoa Invitational.  The Priority list isn't used to set the U.S. Open field but she would also have to go through qualifying for the U.S. Open (like Natalie Gulbis failed to do in 2009).  None of the in-season promotions could boost her above #60 so even if she qualified for the Open, there are six events in 2011 (maybe more by then) that would automatically shut out Paula Creamer.  I imagine that most of those events would offer up a sponsor's exemption to one of the world's best and most popular players but the flaw in the process is that a Top 10 player can get injured or pregnant and a medical extension can't place her anywhere close to the level she deserves to be.  Jeong Jang and to a lesser extent Mi Hyun Kim were plenty good enough to be eligible for every event a year ago and although they didn't claim extensions for 2009, they could have and probably would have had that extension been worth a damn to them.  I bet if that same injustice happens to Creamer, the process will get changed.