What If the Audience Came First?

I’ve been thinking about the recent announcement that Lancaster Country Club will host five USGA women’s championships between 2028 and 2044. For me, there is a lot of history wrapped up in that.

I was a member at Lancaster Country Club for nearly 30 years, and I watched what happened when the U.S. Women’s Open came to Lancaster for the first time in 2015.

That matters because Lancaster was not Pinehurst or Oakmont or a whole host of other legacy venues. Those places come with built-in championship history. Fans already associate them with major golf, so the event arrives with a certain level of expectation before anyone starts promoting it.

Lancaster did not have that advantage. This was the community’s first major golf championship of the modern era, so the local team had to help create the significance of the event before the event itself arrived.

Jerry Hostetter, Rory Connaughton, Ted Bloom, who was LCC president at the time, and others involved with the championship started engaging Lancaster early. Really early. Local business leaders were brought into the conversation. Political leaders were involved. There were community meetings and outreach efforts long before most people would normally start thinking about a golf tournament.

Even the local identity of the event was deliberate. The team created a logo built around Lancaster, not Lancaster Country Club. There was no reference to LCC in the logo, and that was intentional. The message was clear: this was supposed to be Lancaster’s U.S. Women’s Open, not simply Lancaster Country Club’s U.S. Women’s Open. I think that mattered. Lancaster could not rely on decades of championship history to create interest. It had to create a sense of ownership instead.

The 2015 U.S. Women’s Open drew 134,016 spectators, setting the championship attendance record at the time. Players talked about hearing roars across the golf course, and the USGA was clearly impressed by the way the community showed up. I don’t think that happened by accident. A lot of work went into making the community care before anyone teed off, and that is the part of the story I keep coming back to now.

The tournament starts years before we see it

Major golf championships are built over a long period of time. The golf course is evaluated and prepared. Infrastructure gets planned. Hospitality starts taking shape. Volunteers are recruited. Sponsors get involved. Local government, transportation, security and dozens of other pieces slowly come together.

By the time the average fan hears a lot about the event, the championship has already been in production for years. Lancaster showed in 2015 that the audience can start being built early too, and that may matter even more in places that do not have the built-in gravity of a Pinehurst, Oakmont or Pebble Beach.

At those venues, the history itself helps create anticipation. In a market without that history, the local relationship has to do more of the work. Lancaster’s answer was to make the event feel local before it felt national.

The interesting question today is how much further that idea could go.

I wrote in the last issue about being a golf fan the PGA TOUR may not know especially well. I watch a lot of professional golf. I play. I spend money around the game. But I am probably not leaving behind much of a digital trail that tells the TOUR who I am or how interested I actually am. A local championship changes that.

If the USGA tells me a championship is coming to a course near me three or four years from now, I already have a reason to pay attention. They shouldn’t have to wait until I buy a ticket to know that.

Give me a simple way to say, “I’m interested. Keep me connected.” That one action tells them something useful. I care about this event, and now we have somewhere to start.

Then give me a reason to stay involved

This is where it can easily go wrong. If I raise my hand and immediately start getting ticket offers for an event that is still years away, I’m probably tuning out pretty quickly. There has to be some value in the relationship for me too.

Show me what is happening at the golf course. Tell me why certain changes are being made. Introduce me to some of the people putting the championship together. Let me know when volunteers start getting involved. Show me what it actually takes to turn a golf course I may drive past every week into the site of a national championship. That kind of content would interest me.

While I am engaging with it, the USGA can start learning a little more about why I care. Maybe I attended in 2015 or 2024. Maybe I play golf three times a week. Maybe my daughter plays. Maybe I want to volunteer. Maybe I would entertain clients there. Maybe I just like the idea of seeing an important sporting event in my hometown.

Those are different motivations, and they should probably lead to different conversations over time. That is where personalization becomes useful. The organization gets better at understanding why someone is interested and what might keep them engaged, while the fan gets something more relevant than another generic marketing message.

Lancaster is an interesting place to try it

The new USGA commitment makes Lancaster a pretty unusual case. Lancaster Country Club will host the U.S. Girls’ Junior in 2028, the U.S. Senior Women’s Open in 2033, the U.S. Women’s Mid-Amateur in 2037, the U.S. Women’s Amateur in 2040 and the U.S. Women’s Open in 2044. That is a 16-year relationship between the USGA, the club and the community, and I’m not sure it makes sense to think about those only as five separate tournaments.

Imagine a family that gets introduced to the USGA through the Girls’ Junior in 2028. Maybe they have a daughter who plays. Maybe they volunteer. Maybe they attend simply because the event is nearby. If the USGA learns something about that family in 2028, there is no reason for the relationship to end when the tents come down.

Five years later, the Senior Women’s Open arrives. Then the Mid-Amateur. Then the Women’s Amateur. Eventually the Women’s Open comes back. A person could first raise a hand in 2028 and still be part of the story in 2044.

That starts to look very different from selling a ticket to a tournament. It looks more like building a relationship with a golf fan, and Lancaster may be an especially good place to test that idea because the market already proved something important once before.

It proved that championship relevance can be built. You do not necessarily need generations of major-championship history if the community feels invested enough in what is coming.

We already know the basic idea can work

That is why I keep going back to 2015. There was nothing particularly sophisticated about what Lancaster did. People got out into the community early. They talked to people. They brought local leaders into the process. They made sure the event looked and felt like Lancaster’s event, right down to the logo.

They gave the community time to get interested and become invested in what was coming. For a place without a long major-championship tradition, that mattered.

The tools available today make it possible to extend that same idea. In 2015, the question was largely, “How do we get Lancaster behind the U.S. Women’s Open?” Today the USGA can also ask, “Who are the people in Lancaster who care about this, and how do we get to know them?”

Some of those people will buy tickets. Some will volunteer. Some will bring their kids. Some may become much more interested in women’s golf than they were before. Others may simply follow along, and that is fine too. The point is to begin the relationship earlier and give people a reason to stay connected.

Lancaster proved years ago that a community without a long history of hosting major championships could still create enormous energy around one by making the event feel like Lancaster’s event. With the USGA now committed to the community through 2044, there is a chance to build on that same idea at the individual level and start creating those connections years before championship week arrives.