After more than 135,000 spectators viewed the tournament in the bucolic setting of central Pennsylvania, work began, even with a few hours left in the competition, to return the course to members in two days.
Officials of the LPGA said that Lancaster (Pa.) Country Club set an attendance record for the U.S. Women’s Open Championship, the Associated Press reported, with more than 135,000 spectators viewing the tournament in central Pennsylvania throughout the week of July 6-12.
The tournament ended on Sunday, July 12th, with South Korea’s In Gee Chun scoring birdies on four of the last seven holes for a one-stroke, come-from-behind victory. The 20-year old Chun shot a 4-under 66 in the final round and finished at 8-under, to become the first player to win her U.S. Open debut since Birdie Kim in 2005.
Third-round leader Amy Yang struggled in the middle of her final round and then pulled within one by going eagle-birdie at Nos. 16 and 17. But Yang then bogeyed the 18th and fell a stroke short.
Playing in the final group on the last day of the championship for the third time in four years, Yang squandered a three-stroke lead and settled for a 1-over 71 and was second at 273.
On the day after the tournament, PennLive.com, a news website for central Pennsylvania, described how the turnaround of the club, to prepare it for the July 14th reopening for member play, began even as the final round still had hours to go.
As soon as the final pairing of Yang and Stacy Lewis walked off the first green on Sunday afternoon, Aaron Kasinitz of PennLive.com reported, fans and Fox television staff “[scampered] behind the duo to document their path to the next tee,” leaving the entire first hole “suddenly vacant from tee box to flag stick.” But that “newfound emptiness” after a week of tournament-related activity, lasted “all of 25 minutes,” PennLive.com noted.
“With the championship’s final grouping of golfers and fans strutting to a new part of the course, a United States Golf Association worker sporting a gray collared shirt trotted onto the green to grab the flagstick,” PennLive.com reported. “Several others followed minutes later to yank up wires, curl ropes and scoop everything from wooden signs to loose trash. [And] so began the cleanup of the 70th U.S. Women’s Open.
“USGA employees began working to remove equipment from holes well before In Gee Chun hoisted the championship trophy,” PennLive.com reported. “It’s part of the plan to abolish traces of the event from Lancaster Country Club more quickly than they appeared. Members will be able to play golf on the course as soon as Tuesday [July 14], and most of the cleanup will take about two weeks to finish.”
“If it took us 30 days to put everything up, it’ll take us 15 or 20 days to pull it down,” Barry Deach, USGA’s director of the U.S. Women’s Open, told PennLive.com.
The entire departing process will extend longer than 20 days, PennLive.com reported. Deach will hang around Lancaster until the end of September to restore things around the club to the way they were before the championship arrived. And structures like grandstands and television towers might take close to a month to be fully removed from the property.
Mostly, though, the USGA will aim to get things out of the area with urgency.
Both Deach and Jerry Hostetter, a Lancaster Country Club member and former President, expect things to return to the status quo by this time next month, PennLive.com reported.
The process will include about 100 workers and will be fully paid for by the USGA as part of the total championship expenses. Deach said the cleanup moves more smoothly than the buildup, because a system is already in place to transport materials and direct trucks that ship them away.
“What we do is play traffic cops,” Deach said. “It’s, ‘Where do I position things so trucks can pick it up?’ For that, we’ll just mirror what we did for the inbound.”
On the Monday after the tournament, the USGA was going to allow corporate sponsors and some national media to play the Lancaster CC course before it was then reopened to members, PennLive.com reported. Starting on Tuesday, the club was scheduled to run as usual, though any golfers on the course would notice Deach’s staff deconstructing what it had built leading up to the championship.
“We’re back playing golf Tuesday,” Hostetter said. “It’s not going to be without inconvenience. Trucks will be coming in here and all the structures around, they’ve got to be torn down. So if it’s two or three weeks, there will still be that inconvenience. But as far as the golf course itself and the members being able to come down and use their club and have dinner and start playing golf, that’s going to happen quickly.”
When the course reopens to members, Hostetter added, it will play more easily than it did during the Women’s Open.
The club spent all spring and summer preparing the course to peak for the past four days, Hostetter explained to PennLive.com, but making the course less difficult is an easier process. The long, thick roughs typical of a USGA championship can be mowed in an afternoon, and the club won’t place the pins in the challenging locations where they were found during the tournament.
Though the USGA shoulders the bill and the brunt of the work in restoring the course to its normal state, PennLive.com reported, Lancaster Country Club workers will help vendors and workers determine things like where to park and how to store equipment. The groups had what Deach called “a teardown meeting” Saturday morning to finaliz a planned course of action.
For the most part, Deach and the USGA handle the workload, and the club members watch as things begin to look familiar again.
“Things have been very efficient,” Deach said, “and I think we’ll get things out of here in a hurry.”
Lancaster CC’s William Flynn-designed course drew much acclaim from those who competed in the tournament and from fans who viewed the competition on site and on television. The consensus was that holding the tournament in a smaller city like Lancaster generated special excitement. And the club’s picturesque setting and surroundings, complete with the bucolic farmland and scenes of Amish families, horses and buggies made famous by “Witness,” were hailed as particularly appealing, in contrast to what viewers had seen at Chambers Bay in Washington state during the men’s U.S. Open two weeks prior.
Frank Fitzpatrick, covering the tournament for The Philadelphia Inquirer, wrote that “in the soft, still light of a perfect Sunday morning, the map that said Paradise [Pa.] was 10 miles east appeared to be mistaken. In golf, the aesthetics are as important as the athletics—[and] Lancaster Country Club was as visually appealing as a sports venue gets.”
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