[PHOTO: Hunter Martin]
Another major champion has decided 2024 will be her final year playing a full schedule on LPGA Tour. In accepting a sponsor’s exemption into The Annika driven by Gainbridge at Pelican, the penultimate event on the LPGA calendar this year, Brittany Lincicome also announced on Friday that she is making a change after playing 20 seasons on tour.
“I’ve had a tremendous career on and off the golf course on the LPGA Tour,” the 39-year-old from St Petersburg in Florida said in a press release, “and I’m incredibly honoured and humbled to have the opportunity to finish my final full-time season where everything started for me here in the Tampa Bay region.”
Lincicome showed her talent at an early age, securing AJGA All-American honours on multiple occasions while also making an impression at the amateur level thanks to her impressive power off the tee. As an 18-year-old amateur, she shot an opening-round 66 to grab the lead the 2004 US Women’s Open at The Orchards. She finished tied for 55th that week, a performance that helped her make the decision to bypass college golf and turn pro later that year.
She quickly proved she was ready to make the jump, earning her LPGA card at Q-School that year and then becoming a fixture on tour for the next two decades. Lincicome won eight LPGA titles, including the 2009 Kraft Nabisco Championship and the 2015 ANA Inspiration, the LPGA major that’s now called the Chevron Championship. In 400 career starts, she had posted 151 top-25 finishes and 66 top-10s, earning $US9.8 million along the way. She also played on six US Solheim Cup teams, working as an assistant captain this year with the Americans winning back the Cup at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in September.
Another career highlight came in 2018 when Lincicome accepted a sponsor’s exemption and played in the Barbasol Championship, becoming the fifth woman to play in a PGA Tour-sanctioned event. While missing the cut by nine shots, her second-round 71 made her just the second woman to break par in a PGA Tour event.
Lincicome, a mother to daughters Emery, 5, and Sophia, 2, said that it became obvious to her this season that the time was right to make the career transition after volunteering at her elder daughter’s school.
“Kindergarten came around and I was like, You know what,” Lincicome told Golfweek, “there’s more to life than chasing a dream.”
Lincicome isn’t the first major champion to announce that she was making a career change. Earlier this year, Lexi Thompson also reveal that she was be playing a reduced schedule on tour beginning in 2025. And several other prominent players are also walking away at the end of this season, including Ally Ewing, So Yeon Ryu, I.K. Kim, Angela Stanford, Laura Davies, Catriona Matthew, Mariajo Uribe, Amy Olsen and Gerina Mendoza.
