LPGA Founders Cup — On Site: Sheridan Heights GOLF & COUNTRY CLUB

There’s a moment in golf that asks for stillness.

Not silence as a rigid rule, but silence as a shared understanding. It is an agreement between athlete and audience that what is about to happen matters. You can feel it settle across the course like a shift in air pressure.

I watched that moment get broken more than once.

A player steps up to tee off and someone nearby starts talking. They didn’t whisper but talked casually, as if the timing didn’t matter. A few holes later, a man pulls a photograph out of his bag right as a player is lining up a putt, admiring like he’s in his living room. It wasn’t malicious. It was something else. A lack of awareness. A lack of relationship to the moment itself.

I call that misalignment.

Golf is a sport built on precision. And precision doesn’t only belong to the athlete. It belongs to the environment. When the pace of movement, the soundscape, and crowd behavior are in sync, the experience feels elevated. When they’re not, you feel the break immediately.

And right now, that alignment isn’t consistent.

There were “Quiet Please” signs. There were pauses before swings. There were all the visible cues that signal how to move through a space like this. And still—mulch crunching underfoot at the wrong moment, chips cracking open in plastic bags, bodies shifting during a backswing. Golf is quiet…until it isn’t. And when it isn’t, everything carries.

That’s the part most people don’t fully understand. In most sports, the crowd adds energy. In golf, the crowd shapes the conditions. That’s a different kind of responsibility. One that hasn’t fully settled into the culture of women’s golf yet. And what was interesting is that the misaligned behaviors I witnessed were done by men.

I spent most of the day following a group I care about—Lydia Ko, Jeeno Thitikul, and Linn Grant. I watched their play but also everything happening around them. At one point, I was standing close enough to Lydia to notice her arm tattoos. Small details but not insignificant. Golf has historically presented a very controlled image of who belongs: the clean, polished, almost untouched ones. And here she is, one of the best in the world, carrying a slightly different visual language. No announcement. No disruption. Just presence. As a tatted athlete myself, I loved it.

That’s how culture shifts sometimes. Quietly. Without asking for permission.

The course itself—Sheridan Heights—was stunning. It was my first time there, and you could feel the intention in how it was built. The scale, the spacing, the flow of movement from hole to hole. It’s a place designed to feel composed. Considered. Elevated.

There were things that worked. Access to food and beverage was easy. Movement between holes felt fluid. Following a group didn’t feel restricted or overly controlled. That matters more than people think. Because for a long time, golf hasn’t been designed with ease in mind especially not for women, newer fans, or anyone who doesn’t already feel like they belong. So there is some progress here.

But access and attunement are not the same thing.

You can open the gates. You can make the experience more navigable. And still not shape how people show up once they arrive.

That part is cultural. And culture, whether people realize it or not, is designed over time.

As a Black lesbian woman moving through this space, as both a fan and a founder, I notice something else layered underneath all of this. Not just what people are doing, but how they’re doing it. Who feels comfortable disrupting a shared moment. Who moves with awareness. Who understands that being present in a space like this comes with a kind of responsibility to it. Yes, I got the “I see you” stare from the one Black man volunteer.

When you’ve had to to read rooms, adjust, and calibrate, you don’t take environments for granted. You study them. You feel the difference between being allowed in and actually being considered. And women’s golf, right now, is sitting in that in-between. Expanding access, while still defining its culture.

I didn’t rush out when it ended.

I took my time leaving the course, let the day settle, and then got into an Uber Black back across the bay. Quiet. Controlled. A return to myself.

That part is often overlooked, but it matters. Because the experience of sport doesn’t end when the final putt drops. There’s a transition. A decompression. A moment where your body and mind come down from what you’ve just witnessed. Most systems don’t account for that. They end the experience at the exit gate and leave you to figure out the rest.

We don’t do that here at PARLO.

What I saw at the Founders Cup wasn’t a problem. It was a signal.

Women’s golf is evolving at the level of athlete, visibility, and access. Though we still have a diversity issue at the highest level, there is some progress in who’s playing, how fans are moving, what the experience is starting to allow. But the audience is still forming. Still learning how to be present. Still deciding what kind of crowd it wants to be.

And until that becomes intentional, the experience will continue to feel uneven.

If the athletes are precise, the environment should meet them there. If the space is elevated, the behavior should rise with it. That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s shaped through design, through cues, through culture that is modeled and reinforced over time.

You get to be a part of shaping how it evolves here at PARLO.

Not just the game.
But everything around it that determines how it’s felt.