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Karen Lunn: Making Strides - Australian Golf Digest Karen Lunn: Making Strides - Australian Golf Digest

Karen Lunn, the WPGA Tour of Australasia’s chief executive and ‘International Woman of the Year’, speaks about some of the game’s most pertinent issues, including the immediate future of the Women’s Australian Open.

Karen Lunn is far from a token on any board. She is a key player and integral piece to developing strategies for the future and longevity of golf in Australia. With more than 40 years in the sport, including her professional playing career on the LPGA Tour, in Europe and Asia, Lunn now sits at the helm of continuing to grow the game as the chief executive of the WPGA Tour of Australasia as well as the chair of the Australian Golf Industry Council – the collaboration of the main stakeholders in the sport.

Recognised for her contribution to golf’s engagement with women and girls, in late 2024 she was named “International Woman of the Year” at the annual awards presented by Women In Golf UK. While every small success is celebrated, the bigger picture of securing the sustainability of women’s golf is forefront in Lunn’s mind. With the return of the Australian WPGA Championship in March at Sanctuary Cove on the Gold Coast, now is a great time to check the climate of the game with Lunn and find out what her next big plans are.

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Australian Golf Digest: Where is the women’s pro game in Australia right now?

Karen Lunn: I think we’re in a good place. We’ve got a good offering of events for our members to play in, from January through to April every year, which is good. And obviously it’s enough to entice some overseas players to come. In terms of the tour, we’re providing some really good playing opportunities and working on some pathways with the other tours as well.

I’m never one to sit on my hands and say, “We’re in a good place,” but I think we’ve made some good strides. The work we’ve been doing with the PGA on our tour, and introducing the Webex Players Series events, along with all our other events, is providing a nice platform for our Aussie players to play early in the year and then head across to the other tours around the world.

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How long has it taken to reach this point?

I think we’ve always had some really good events, but to try to create a tour that’s going to attract players from overseas to come here is challenging.

We’re a small country, we’re a small economy and obviously getting sponsorship dollars and money from governments to run events isn’t easy, and we have to rely on some commercial sponsorship. We know that pie isn’t as big as we’d all like it to be in every sport, particularly now women’s sport is really at the forefront and there’s a lot of women’s sports vying for those sponsorship and government dollars. We’re in there, we’re in the hunt, but there’s a lot of competition and, like I said, we’re only a small economy, so we have to manage those expectations.

When you look at some of the prizemoney that the men and women play for overseas, it’s just crazy. We can’t match that; we know that, but what we want to do for our younger players is provide them with a platform.

Our players, Hannah Green – three wins last year in the US – she had a great year, but she started off playing our tour events when she was 15, 16 years old. So by the time she got to the LPGA Tour, she was almost a seasoned veteran. She’d played in professional events, playing with some of the best players in the world sometimes at some of our major events. We consider this as a pathway tour among other things, to provide our members with a platform to send them off and really excel on the world stage, which many of them have done.

If you look at how many women we have playing golf in Australia, and how well the women are doing playing on the overseas tours and how many players we have on the LPGA Tour, we’re really batting above our average, so we must be doing something right.

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manuel Queimadelos alonso/getty images

What are you most proud of during your time at the helm of the WPGA?

Probably the collaboration that’s going on now with Golf Australia and the PGA of Australia and the other industry bodies – not just those organisations, the work at the Australian Golf Industry Council, which I’m fortunate enough to chair at the moment.

There’s some really good stuff going on with the industry, and that was not the case when I first came in 2013. People weren’t working together, there was every man for himself, or every woman for herself. There’s been changes in leadership across a lot of the organisations and I think that’s really prompted a willingness to work together for the betterment of our sport.

That’s probably the thing I’m proudest of, is to have played my small part in bringing the WPGA Tour under this bigger umbrella of Golf Australia, PGA and the other industry bodies.

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How receptive is everyone to working with each other? Is it now an attitude of: everyone is stronger together?

Pretty much, absolutely. If you look back, only five years ago – which is not very long – the WPGA would have a proposal to government, so would the PGA and so would Golf Australia. We’d have proposals in front of Foxtel and the other networks, and we were all fighting among ourselves for airtime and for sponsorship dollars. Now, with the Australian Golf commercial team – the PGA, Golf Australia and ourselves – under the one umbrella, Michael McDonald, who heads up that department, he’s going out selling industry sponsorship not just for men’s golf, but women’s golf or the amateur game. That’s been really beneficial to all of us, and I think most people I work with are really open and have shown a real willingness to work together.

We all love the game, and the game’s bigger than any of us individually, so my goal has always been – in whatever I’ve done in the game – to try to leave it in a better place. I think we all have that role, as administrators in the game, to try to do our bit to keep growing the game.

From my angle, particularly for women and girls, where there’s been a real shift with the junior girls scholarship starting – it feels like only yesterday but may be four years ago now – there’s a lot of positives going on.

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What are some of the challenges facing you and the WPGA at present?

The lack of players. I mean, we just don’t have many players, and it’s hard to run events when we don’t have players. At the moment we’re relying on the events we’re doing with the men, the Webex Players Series events, where we have basically half the field and the men have the other half, playing for one trophy.

It’s really difficult, and that’s where we rely on players to come from overseas to get events where we can have a big enough field. We’ll co-sanction three events with the Ladies European Tour this year, which is fantastic.

It is just the shortage of high-performance players, but that goes down to grassroots. If we look at the MyGolf figures, they’re up 30 percent for girls and boys, so then you’ve got that transition into the junior scholarship and other pathways. In five years, hopefully we’ll be seeing some of the benefits of that.

It’s not just playing, it’s coaching and it’s women working in the industry, because we’re not just an ageing population in terms of golfers, we’re an ageing population in terms of the golf workforce. We want to get young girls into golf clubs and working in all areas of the game, whether it be a greenkeeper or a food and beverage manager. If you’ve got a passion for the game, working in a golf club is a great place to work.

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courtesy of pga of australia

What’s making the WPGA in Australia an attractive option for players?

It’s just building a run of events that makes it worthwhile for them to come here. We had our qualifying, which was the 30th and 31st of December – not an ideal date; we know that – but starting so early in January with our Webex Players Series event in Perth, we had to do it at that time of the year.

We’ve got a really good run of events. It’s 13 or 14 weeks in a row we’ve got tournaments. Particularly for some of the girls that play in Korea and Japan, it’s very cold at that time of the year up there, so for them, they can come down here, do their winter training and play some golf.

We’ve got quite a few Thai players. We’ve got some women from the Ladies European Tour who want to play before their season starts. It’s a great window for us, because there’s not much else going on in the world of women’s golf at this time of year.

We are realistic. We know that when we come to March, April, the players will head off to the other major tours. That’s our challenge. Hopefully one day when we have enough players, we can keep on playing later in the year and we’ve got enough players to fill fields.

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Why did the Australian WPGA Championship disappear briefly, and what happened to bring it back this March?

It was an interesting time because it was in COVID. The men’s PGA Championship, they couldn’t get some of the stars of the game back down to play, so it was a [forced] decision.

We wanted to launch the Australian WPGA Championship, and we thought, Well, this is a really good time. Obviously then it was a couple of years later, we were working really hard, but the key has been finding the right partners for an event, and I think we’ve found wonderful partners for it. We’ve got a three-year deal with Sanctuary Cove, which is obviously a wonderful facility, and two fantastic golf courses on the Gold Coast. We’ve got Tourism and Events Queensland, Experience Gold Coast and Mulpha as our event partners.

There’s a lot of moving parts to the event, but I think we’ve got the right people involved, and having the Gold Coast Festival of Golf alongside to complement, well, they’ll complement each other really [well]. It will make it a really special event. It won’t be just another golf tournament, there’ll be a lot to do. We’ve got to attract families, and we want everyone to feel welcome at the festival and to come to the golf tournament.

It was a while putting all the pieces together, but I think we’ve got a really good structure and, like I said, having the event partners we’ve got, those key partners have been crucial.

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What have been the benefits and disadvantages of the dual-gender Australian Open that we’ve seen the past three years? And what would you like to see going forward?

I love the format; I absolutely love it. Bringing men and women together on that stage to play our national opens, and obviously the All Abilities on top of that, I think it’s just such a great thing for growing our game.

We have to be realistic; there are some challenges. The date for the women is really difficult. The date suits the men, because they’ve obviously got the PGA Championship, which is a DP World Tour event, the week before leading into the Australian Open. So the date probably is the biggest challenge.

The date that suits the men really doesn’t suit the women, and we’ve been lucky to have the support of our leading women the past few years, but it’s a lot to ask of them after a really long year – to arrive on a Wednesday and not have practice rounds and have jetlag and try to perform playing in front of the public that don’t care that they’re jetlagged. They [should] want to see them at their best.

It’s a really tough ask. I know Hannah Green was in contention until the last day [of the 2024 championship], but she looked really jaded on the final day. I really felt for her.

I don’t know what the solution is, but there’s a lot of discussions going on behind the scenes. It’s been great for the women to be elevated onto the same platform as the men. Just watching the crowds at the Australian Open just recently in Melbourne, there were so many families, young people, old people – it was such a great mix of people that came to celebrate the tournament. It felt like a celebration of golf.

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courtesy of golf australia

Do you think there are any specific qualities or traits Aussie female golfers have that set them apart?

We’re just very determined, and I think when you want to get to the top in golf or tennis or whatever it is, you have to spend extended periods away from home.

That’s really tough, particularly for young women, being away from your family and your friends and your support network. You’re away for six months, and all of a sudden your friends are talking about weddings and all the things they’ve been doing, and you’ve been doing something completely different.

It’s hard to keep those friendships and those relationships strong when you’re away for so long, and I think for young women that’s so important.

To live [a tour] life, it’s not easy, but there are benefits of doing something you love for a living, and now the girls are making some really serious cash.

It’s tough, and I think sometimes the Aussies are just tougher. I’m not just talking about the golfers. If you look at our tennis players and the women that did so well at the Olympics, they’ve all done the hard yards and spent so much time away from their families. It’s, I’m going to get this opportunity and I’m going to run with it. I’m not doing all this for nothing. It’s also the camaraderie. The Aussies playing in the States are a tight-knit group and they really support each other, which I think helps.

We’ve got such great golf coaches here in Australia. We’ve got some of the best coaches in the world, so that really goes a long way to help. I think we’re very lucky on a number of fronts.