The return of the Women’s Australian Open as a standalone event and the re-emergence of the WPGA Championship of Australia have triggered an exciting revamp of the upcoming summer season of women’s professional golf.
A new dawn breaks with the redefined and revitalised 2026 WPGA season. More than just a different – and bigger, brighter – schedule, it’s another stage in the metamorphosis of a tour that began with small opportunity but big dreams.
The biggest changes to the new schedule are the return of the Women’s Australian Open to a standalone format at a more favourable time of year and the re-emergence of the WPGA Championship of Australia. Neither has been fractured by what some see as chequered histories, but rather strengthened and now ready to reclaim their rightful position as pillars of the women’s Australian tournament season.
In the past three years, the Women’s Australian Open has been held as part of a combined format with the men’s Australian Open and the Australian All Abilities Championship. In February this year, when it was announced that the three events would be separated, there was a sigh of relief from some. Not so, WPGA chief executive Karen Lunn. There had been conjecture about the combined format, some labelling it a ‘failed experiment’ and asserting that it did nothing for the women’s championship and tarnished the men’s. Lunn doesn’t see it that way. For her, it’s all about taking the positives and stepping into the future.
“Scheduling was the biggest issue; it was always going to be a problem and it was. If we could find a date that would fit both men and women, I still think it could work. But it was a real positive for women’s golf for the three years. It elevated women onto the same stage as the men, brought new fans to the sport, and it created greater visibility
for sponsors.”
The 2026 Women’s Australian Open will be played at Kooyonga Golf Club in Adelaide from March 12-15. The Open has been played at Kooyonga once before, in 2018 when won by South Korean Jin Young Ko, and returns to Adelaide as part of a three-year agreement with the South Australian Government.
The change of date to March won widespread approval from players after the championship was played last year just days after the LPGA’s season-ending CME Group Tour Championship, meaning the Australian players and a handful of internationals arrived the day before the tournament jet-lagged and unprepared. The rejigged timing of the tournament means it has clear space around it from the LPGA schedule, coming at the end of the LPGA’s Asian swing and opening the possibility of attracting more international players.
A week after the Australian Open comes the WPGA Championship of Australia, from March 19-22 on the Palms course at Sanctuary Cove Golf & Country Club. The WPGA Championship has had its own travails in its shorter history. First held in 2022 as the Fortinet Australian WPGA Championship alongside the men’s Fortinet Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland – with Su Oh claiming the Karrie Webb Cup from Grace Kim – it then went into hiatus while the WPGA sought appropriate partners. This it found in a joint relationship with the PGA of Australia, Mulpha Events Gold Coast, Tourism & Events Queensland and Experience Gold Coast, and the 2025 edition was set to be a beauty. Until Cyclone Alfred arrived and ruined the party, that is.
“It was horrendous. I don’t think I’ll ever get over that,” Lunn says of her disappointment at its last-minute cancellation. But her outlook on the event is positive – and ambitious.
“We want to do an event of which we can be proud. It’s our championship, and our goal is to have it sit alongside the men’s PGA Championship of Australia as our two flagship events from a tour perspective.”
The WPGA Championship will, like the Australian Open, have a standalone format in 2026, and will also form a central part of a Festival of Golf. Billed as a high energy celebration and with free entry, the Festival of Golf encapsulates a week of festivities that includes food, fashion and shopping around championship golf and with the T100 Triathlon on the weekend [see page 62].
Both the Australian Open and the WPGA Championship will be co-sanctioned with the Ladies European Tour, part of a significant four-week swing for that circuit in Australia that includes the Australian Women’s Classic and the Ford NSW Open. Although the LPGA has scheduled the significant Founders Cup the same week as the WPGA Championship, Lunn is nonetheless confident of a great field.
“We have around 28 players on the main and secondary tours, many of whom are playing very well, and we’re very hopeful of getting our leading players to play,” she says. “2026 is also a Solheim Cup year, so potential European team players will be keen to get some points early in the season.”
The revamped schedule for 2026 kicks off on January 8 at the Webex Players Series Perth, with the ‘early season’ concluding with the World Sand Greens Championship at Binalong Golf Club in NSW from March 29-30.
The Vic Open returns to a January spot, where it was played in its first gender-equal format in 2012, followed by three Webex Players Series events (Victoria, Murray River and Sydney).
Golf NSW has six qualifying events as a pathway into the 2026 Ford NSW Open, the last two of which will be played as part of the 2026 season in mid-February at Moss Vale and The Links Shell Cove.
The NSW Open and the Australian Women’s Classic then lead in to the two premier events, the Australian Open and the WPGA Championship, but are anything but support acts. Their outstanding honour rolls between them include names such as Celine Boutier, Maja Stark, Caroline Hedwall and the legendary Dame Laura Davies as well as 2025 winners, rising stars Mimi Rhodes and Manon de Roey.
Of interest is the Wagga Wagga Pro-Am, to be played from March 26-27, the only pro-am on the official schedule and a reminder of the early days of professional golf in this country.
In 1972, South Australian businessman and keen golfer Alan Gillott, reading about women’s professional golf in the US, hit on the notion that it should be played in Australia too. The then Ladies Professional Golf Association of Australia (LPGAA) was born later that year and its first event, the Simpson Pope Classic, played in March 1973 by its 12 founding members.
Two name changes later and now with a close working relationship with the PGA Tour of Australasia, the WPGA Tour of Australasia hosts its 2026 schedule with about 300 members and 16-18 events, a number that is getting close to those of the Epson Tour and LET Access Tour, the secondary tours of the behemoth LPGA Tour and the Ladies European Tour, respectively. The import of that is not lost on Lunn.
“It’s been a really interesting journey and I’ve been really fortunate to have been involved for quite a bit of it,” she said.
A former LET player and LET board chairman between 2003 and 2013, when Lunn took on the role as CEO of then Australian Ladies Professional Golf (ALPG), she recalled that “there weren’t any big events back when I turned pro in 1985. We used to traipse around the country playing pro-ams for around $5,000.” Wagga Wagga in 2026 is a $50,000 event.
The WPGA Tour has come a long way from its first days, that’s for sure. Last year, women professionals were playing the biggest events for prize funds up to $500,000 for the Australian Women’s Classic and Ford NSW Open while the purse for the Women’s Australian Open was $1.7 million. But beyond the dollars is the greater opportunity now afforded young players.
“Before, we just had a few events and the other tours didn’t really consider us a tour, but now having 12 events with Rolex ranking points, people are saying, ‘Well, that’s a genuine pathway to the bigger tours, rather than just a country that stages some really good events but not many of them.’”
Burgeoning co-sanctioning with the LET (and at times with the LPGA) through the past 20 years has been a big part of that recognition.
“It’s hard yakka down here,” Lunn says. “We’re a small country, a small economy, and if you look at some of the Asian events or the LPGA, they’ve got massive economies, so it’s a very different ask for us. The exchange rate doesn’t help us to compete. And many women’s sports are really popular now, so we’re fighting them for sponsorship dollars too.
“We’re far better to align with a strong tour like the LET where the prizemoney is certainly more sustainable in the long term. And if we’ve got any additional money in the budget, we can look to pay a couple of superstars to come out. We’re keen to build on the schedule and elevate the events we’ve got.”
Co-sanctioning with the LET not only brings better prizemoney and excellent players to our events, it also creates opportunities for emerging players, both here and from abroad. Take the example of Steph Kyriacou. As an amateur, Kyriacou won the 2020 Australian Women’s Classic, the first event of that LET season, by eight shots over then world No.35 Ayean Cho. After turning pro two days later, Kyriacou won again on the LET in 2021 and qualified for the LPGA Tour for 2022, where she had two top-10 finishes in majors – tied seventh at the Women’s Open and tied 10th at the Women’s PGA Championship – and was runner-up in the 2024 Amundi Evian Championship.
Now Kyriacou is one of the world’s better-ranked players. All on the back of an Australian tournament backed by the LET. And she’s not the only one.
“I think it’s a great pathway for our girls in that when they get to those bigger events, they’re not proper ‘rookies’; they’re fairly hardened professionals who are not overawed by playing against the best players,” Lunn says. “And they get three bites of the cherry getting into those bigger events; either they do well enough by their play this year to get in, or they play well at qualifying or at the beginning of 2026 to earn their opportunity.”
It works the other way, too.
“Aside from the four-week swing, we’re a really valid opportunity for players to come here for nearly three months to earn prizemoney. And the players love coming here; nearly all the clubs we go to offer billeting, so that cuts their costs, which for younger players is really important. And they develop friendships with the people with whom they stay. It’s very different to other places in the world.”
Seeing top players live is also important in creating heroes for young fans.
“It’s great for young girls in Australia to be able to watch their heroes like Minjee, Hannah or Grace or Charley play here because they can’t get up in the middle of the night to watch overseas coverage and when it comes on in the morning, most of them are at school.
“There’s also so much diversity for fans, to see players from all over the world. I think the fields we had this year with the LET, there were something like 38 different countries represented.”
One of the other features of the WPGA schedule is the number of innovative events it hosts. Four of the first five events are part of the Webex Players Series in which men and women compete for the one trophy, while the second tournament played is the one that started it all, the Vic Open, whereby men and women play for separate championships but equal prizemoney.
From 2024, the World Sand Green Championships has been included, likely one of very few sand-green events hosted by a tour around the world and certainly not one of the major ones.
Then, The Athena. Named after the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, it offers a series of skills challenges on the first day with qualifiers moving through to matchplay for the second and final
day. At the time of writing, The Athena was still to be officially confirmed but
is tabled for February, just prior to the
NSW Open.
Its theme of the strong warrior in golf is echoed in the separate brandings released in early September for the Australian Opens, recognising that they remain connected but exist in their own right. This is further reflected by using the colour purple for the women’s championship, a symbol of feminine strength.
The announcements around the 2026 Australian Open and WPGA Championship came just as local golf fans were celebrating the first time two Australian players – male or female – had ever won successive majors. First came Minjee Lee at the 2025 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship and then Grace Kim, performing a late run of extraordinary proportion to win the Evian Championship. The only other time Australia had celebrated back-to-back majors was when Karrie Webb claimed both the LPGA Championship and US Women’s Open titles in 2001.
We’re living in an exciting time in women’s professional golf in Australia and around the world. With the strength of the LPGA nowadays, there is flow-on depth in the Epson Tour, the LET and the LET Access Tour. All this bodes very well for the future of women’s professional golf globally, and our players are right among it. There is something in the air, and Lunn feels it too.
“I really do. I think it shows the energy that women’s golf has,” she says. “I think there’s a real shift in momentum for women’s golf and that’s probably part of the shift in women’s sport generally. But we know the benefits that golf has to offer and we have to celebrate our difference to other sports. We need to showcase the talent that women have.
“I think we’re in a very good place right now.”
| DATE | EVENT | VENUE |
| January 8-11 | Webex Players Series Perth | Royal Fremantle Golf Club, WA |
| January 15-18 | Vic Open | 13th Beach Golf Links (Beach and Creek courses), Vic |
| January 22-25 | Webex Players Series Victoria | Rosebud Country Club (Composite course), Vic |
| January 29-February 1 | Webex Players Series Murray River | Cobram Barooga Golf Club (Old course), NSW |
| February 5-8 | Webex Players Series Sydney | Castle Hill Country Club, NSW |
| February 11-13 | NSW Open qualifying event | Moss Vale Golf Club, NSW |
| February 17-19 | NSW Open qualifying event | The Links Shell Cove, NSW |
| February 21-22 | The Athena (TBC) | Peninsula Kingswood Country Golf Club (North course TBC), Vic |
| February 26-March 1 | NSW Open | Wollongong Golf Club, NSW |
| March 5-8 | Australian Women’s Classic | Magenta Shores Golf & Country Club, NSW |
| March 12-15 | Australian Open | Kooyonga Golf Club, SA |
| March 19-22 | WPGA Championship of Australia | Sanctuary Cove Golf & Country Club (Palms course), Qld |
| March 26-27 | Wagga Wagga Pro Am | Wagga Wagga Country Club |
| March 29-30 | World Sand Greens Championship | Binalong Community Club |
Take Two: The Festival of Golf is back
Just as the Australian WPGA Championship will get a second chance at a revival on the Gold Coast from March 19-22, so too will the Festival of Golf.
The championship will form a central part of the Festival of Golf, which is a joint initiative by the PGA of Australia, Mulpha Australia, Tourism & Events Queensland and Experience Gold Coast. The festival is set to redefine what golf can be, transforming it into a high-energy celebration where everyone is welcome.
Hosted in Sanctuary Cove’s Marine Village precinct, the Festival of Golf will bring together golf, food, fashion, fun and community spirit in one dynamic experience. Whether you’re a die-hard golf fan, a curious local or a first-time player, it will be a chance to eat, drink, watch, play, learn and shop – all while feeling part of something inspiring and unforgettable.
The event will form a key part in what is shaping up to be a week of full festivities on the Gold Coast, with the T100 Triathlon event also scheduled for the same weekend.
“This event is a unique and innovative one that provides a platform to showcase some of the best female golfers from around the world alongside an event for all at the Festival of Golf,” said PGA of Australia chief executive Gavin Kirkman. “It offers something for everyone, and we can’t wait to continue to work with Mulpha Australia, Tourism & Events Queensland and Experience Gold Coast to bring this special celebration of golf and fantastic region to life.”
“Adding the Festival of Golf will elevate this event to another level and celebrate the advances being made both in women’s golf and women’s sport in general,” added seven-time major winner Karrie Webb. “Having played regularly on the Gold Coast throughout my career, it will be very satisfying to see top-level golf return, and I’m personally excited to present the trophy to the winner on Sunday afternoon.”
Known for its outstanding work on many international events on the Gold Coast, Mulpha Australia will continue to further its connection to golf through the Festival of Golf.
“With a detailed blueprint and Sanctuary Cove’s reputation as a world-class events destination, we’re thrilled to once again partner with the WPGA Tour of Australasia, PGA of Australia, Tourism & Events Queensland and Experience Gold Coast to host the Festival of Golf and Australian WPGA Championship,” said Mulpha Australia chief executive Greg Shaw. “Mulpha Events is known for delivering some of Australia’s most iconic experiences, and we’re incredibly excited to bring the nation’s biggest celebration of golf to life at Sanctuary Cove.”
