The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) is a U.S. sports organization for professional female golfers. The worlds longest-running sports association for females (57 years), it is the premier women’s golfing association in the world. Unlike U.S. men’s professional golf where the PGA Tour runs the top professional tours and the PGA of America runs the club and teaching professionals, the LPGA runs both the LPGA Tour and the LPGA Teaching & Club Professional (T&CP). Similar to the PGA Tour, the LPGA also holds an annual Qualifying School that golfers enter to in an attempt to earn their tour card. The LPGA also operates the Futures Tour, a developmental league for golfers unable to earn a tour card. The top golfers at the end of each Futures Tour year earn the ability to play on the LPGA Tour the subsequent year.
The LPGA Tour season is split into two halves and consists of tournaments that take place from February to December every year. The Tour has four majors: the Kraft Nabisco Championship, McDonald’s LPGA Championship, U.S. Women’s Open, and the Ricoh Women’s British Open. The season consists of standard, winners, and unofficial tournaments. Standard tournaments earn the winner points toward the ADT Playoffs, winners earn the victor an automatic spot in the ADT Playoffs, and the unofficial tournaments are not official LPGA Tour events and have no bearing on the ADT Playoffs. The LPGA Playoffs at the ADT is a tournament of three rounds and a championship round taking place in November of each year. The top fifteen golfers are chosen at the end of each half to play for the ADT Championship with two golfers also qualifying as wild-cards. The winner of the ADT Championship receives $1 million dollars in prize money.
