Official 2011 Priority Status List

2011 Priority Status List

The official list was posted at LPGA.com this morning.  Here are my first impressions:

Thirteen players received medical extensions - Nicole Castrale, Anna Grzebien, Shiho Oyama and Wendy Doolan in Cat-1, Birdie Kim and Grace Park in Cat-3, Song Yi Choi in Cat-9, Jin Young Pak and Minea Blomqvist in Cat-11, and Michelle Ellis, Dina Ammaccapane, Marcy Hart and Young-A Yang in Cat-15.  The Tour decided to list the medicals with an "a" suffix instead of assigning them their own number.  While I understand the desire to keep them tagged in some way, this decision just makes it even tougher to pinpoint whether or not a player is in good shape to make an event.  For example, Alison Whitaker is listed as player #150 which nearly always makes a full-field event.  Except that there are 157 active players listed ahead of her, not 149.  Assigning them a regular number and bolding the medicals would have been good enough, guys.

Five players in the top 15 categories are listed as retired, four of whom I was already aware.  The sad surprise is Gloria Park, who must have decided that raising a family was more important at this point in her life.  Gloria won twice on Tour in the early 2000s, at the '01 Williams Championship and the '02 Sybase.  Her best season however was 2005 when she finished ninth in my rankings and on the money list, collecting ten Top 10s along the way.  Congratulations on a fine career, Gloria - we'll miss you.

Category 4 is for players who have won twice in the previous four seasons.  A mystery surrounds the listing of Mi Hyun Kim in Cat-4 when she has only won once in the last four seasons.  She did win three times in the four-year span from 2006 through 2009 and for that was placed in this category last season, from which she made 14 starts.  Unless Kimmie was retroactively awarded a medical for her 2009 maternity leave (and if so, why wasn't that noted by her name like the other medicals), I have no explanation for this.  The decision to place her here improves her status by about 20 positions.

As expected, 17 players are listed in Cat-20 but oddly enough, the wording in the category description hasn't been amended to reflect last week's decision of adding nine players.  Also of interest - the wording for in-season reordering has been removed, tagged "TBD" and been highlighted in red.  So expect the "every seven events" reordering we saw in 2008 and 2009 to be modified.