Partnership with Golf Saudi, Aramco has pushed women’s game forward, says LET CEO Alexandra Armas

The Ladies European Tour remains open to embracing new and unique approaches to elite-level tournament golf as a means of elevating the women’s game, says Tour CEO Alexandra Armas.

This year’s season calendar is the most lucrative in LET history, with 34 events across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and as far afield as the US and Australia, where back-to-back events got underway last week in New South Wales.

Following on from the pandemic, 2022 has heralded an exciting new dawn for the tour, which for the first time since 2019 is enjoying a crowded season of events without any potential cancelations, and the return of live crowds.

In many aspects, the Ladies European Tour returned from the pandemic stronger than it went in.

Last season’s introduction of the Aramco Team Series events brought four new $1 million prize-fund tournaments to the calendar, taking the tour to London, Sotogrande in Spain, New York and Jeddah for three days of team competition intertwined with individual scoring.

Its format brought something entirely new and different to the game. Each ATS event sees up to 36 team captains pick a teammate, then be assigned a randomly selected third teammate and an amateur golfer, who plays with a handicap. Together, they then compete over Thursday and Friday as a fourball, with the two lowest scores per hole recorded and the lowest total score winning.

The team events were played for the first time on any professional tour circuit — with the unique twist that the amateur golfer had the opportunity to sink the putts contributing to the team prize money.

Many of the game’s biggest stars played last year, including world No. 5 Atthaya Thitikul, Georgia Hall, Charley Hull, Anna Nordqvist, the Korda