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Rookie Britney Yada will make her second LPGA start next week at the LPGA Lotte Championship at Ko Olina Golf Club. Yada, 26, graduated from Waiakea and Portland State, where she won the 2011 Big Sky Championship.
Yada played on the Symetra Tour the past two years, earning $22,000 and finishing fourth at last year’s Guardian Retirement Championship.
She tied for 35th at the 2016 LPGA Final Qualifying Tournament to earn conditional status this year and got into Lotte Wednesday when Sydnee Michaels withdrew.
2017 LOTTE CHAMPIONSHIP
What: Full-field LPGA tour event
When: April 12-13 from 7 a.m., April 14-15 from 8 a.m.
Where: Ko Olina Golf Club (Par 36-3672, 6,383 yards)
Purse: $2 million ($300,000 first prize)
Defending champion: Minjee Lee (16-under-par 272)
Tickets: $10 daily Wednesday to Saturday, or $25 for season (all week) badge. Children 16-under free with paid adult. Active duty and retired military free with official military ID.
TV: Golf Channel, 1-5 p.m. daily, with repeats
Michelle Wie’s sixth-place finish at the LPGA’s first major last weekend brought her back into the Top 100 in the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings. Wie moved up 30 spots, to No. 75.
The Punahou graduate won the Lotte in 2014 and also won the U.S. Women’s Open that year. She hasn’t won since, but has three Top-25s in six starts this year and is 26th on the money list with $127,578.
Lydia Ko, So Yeon Ryu and Ariya Jutanugarn, the top three in the Rolex Rankings, will all be at Ko Olina, along with In Gee Chun, Inbee Park, defending champion Minjee Lee and Ai Miyazato, who won the inaugural event at Ko Olina in 2012.
Sunday’s qualifier list includes Honolulu’s Marissa Chow, Alice Kim and Karissa Kilby, a 14-year-old St. Andrews Priory student working with Hawaii Golf Hall of Famer Casey Nakama.
Chow, 22, went to ‘Iolani and Pepperdine, where she was a four-time all-conference golfer, a three-time honorable mention All-American and the 2015 WCC player of the year.
Kim, a University Lab graduate who played for Gonzaga, now lives in Arizona. She was All-WCC three years, winning the WCC championship in 2014, and Gonzaga’s co-senior female athlete of the year in 2015.
The qualifier begins at 8 a.m.
Okino steps up in Japan
Punahou alum Cyd Okino earned a share of 37th place at her first Japan LPGA Step Up Tour event last week. She shot rounds of 74-76 in the RKB Ladies at Fukuoka to win about $1,000.
ALOHA SECTION PGA GOLF TIP
If you want to maintain your golf swing flexibility, try to do at least 50 to 75 practice swings on a daily basis. What’s great about this exercise is that you do this without striking a golf ball. This task allows the body to quantify important factors in the golf swing. Factors like sequencing, rhythm and speed are created by building a repetitive pattern compared to none at all. Pundits will say that this only builds bad swing habits. I disagree, remember we are not hitting the ball for the sake of ball flight, face contact awareness or ball curve. All we are doing is building golf swing movement factors to loosen and strengthen the body.
– Eddie Lee, Director of Instruction at Wailea Golf Academy
The winner was Eri Fukuyama, who shot 68-74 and won a playoff with Kotomi Dohi. Only three golfers finished under par in the 15 million yen (about $136,000) tournament.
Okino tees off again Friday in a 30 million yen event. There are 21 tournaments on the schedule.
USGA retires championships
Following nearly a two-year review process, the USGA will retire the Men’s and Women’s State Team Championships, effective following this year’s women’s event.
As part of its evaluation process, the USGA also considered the future of its overall championship program. It created men’s and women’s Four-Ball championships recently. The inaugural U.S. Senior Women’s Open will be in July of 2018. The USGA also announced that it will create a new national championship for golfers with disabilities.
The USGA State Team Championships were first conducted in 1995 as part of the centennial celebration and were originally intended to be one-time only events.
Nine of next year’s 14 USGA Championships will be held east of Colorado.
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