Amid recent LPGA slow-play penalties, USGA has a plan at Riviera; now we'll see if the players do their part

LOS ANGELES — For all of the time that Riviera Country Club was considered as a host site for the 2026 U.S. Women’s Open, and in the aftermath of it being selected, USGA senior director of championships Shannon Rouillard had to be thinking about one quirk at the famous layout.

A round at Riviera begins spectacularly, on an elevated tee box right under the windows of the clubhouse, and the par-5 opener can be reachable in two shots, depending on where the tee is place. Then there is the renowned par-4 10th—drivable depending on the tees and depending on a player’s appetite for risk and reward.

Those are wondering holes for Rouillard to consider setting up, but also present a pace-of-play challenge. In each case, it’s possible that players could be left waiting for long periods on the tee, and that creates all kinds of issues. The main concern is getting all 156 players around the course before sunset at just after 8; hence, the reason that the first tee times on Thursday are set for 6:45 a.m. local.

“I wouldn't say we have concerns about pace of play, but obviously when you think about the first hole, going in I knew the majority of the field was going to be able to hit that green in two,” Rouillard said on Wednesday in the USGA press conference at Riviera. “So keeping that in mind, I couldn't have two starting holes where we could have a pace of play issue just getting the round started. So that definitely played into my thinking there.”

So we can expect that Nos. 1 and 10 will play at near its full length for the first two round, and then they’ll be more room for excitement once the field is trimmed to the top 60 and ties for the weekend.

The LPGA Tour has recently begun publicly cracking down on slow play, and the most recent incident was this past Saturday, when Apichaya Yubol, while contending in the ShopRite Classic, was assessed a one-stroke penalty for slow slow playing in the second round. The LPGA said she was penalized for exceeded her maximum time allowed for her total strokes on the 13th hole.”

Yubol ultimately shot 66 in the final round, but finished one stroke behind winner Celine Boutier in the 54-hole event.

At the JM Eagle in April, Jin Hee Im was given a one-stroke slow-play penalty during the third round, and it also was costly because she finished one shot behind winner Hannah Green.

As noted by Rouillard, the LPGA and USGA have slightly different place-of-play policies, and the U.S. Women’s Open faces interesting challenges that the professional tour does not: The players are coming from various forms of competition, including the LET, Epson Tour, JLPGA, college and amateur competitions. “So not everybody is playing under the same pace of play policy week in and week out,” Roulliard said.

The USGA’s stated rules are that “a player should make a stroke in no more than 40 seconds once it’s their turn to play without interference.” Also, “if a group falls out of position (e.g., finishes a hole behind the maximum allowable time and falls a full hole behind the group ahead), they are placed "on the clock." Accumulating "bad times" for exceeding the 40-second limit results in progressive penalties. The first penalty is one stroke, followed by two strokes and then disqualification.

“A player has to be over time and out of position prior to necessarily going on the clock, but recognizing, too, that we also don't want to put them on the clock if there's a wait up ahead,” Rouillard said. “So we're looking at a lot of different information before we start putting a group on the clock, right? There's an ebb and flow to that pace of play and just making sure that we are monitoring that appropriately.”

The USGA goes to great lengths to understand where the issues will be on each course it holds championships. It takes into consideration the amount of time it takes for golfers to play the hole, based on yardage, walking from green to tee and walking between the nine holes.

“We'll look at all of that, and we'll predict where the bottlenecks are going to be. We'll predict how certain holes will play. And that's how we get to a certain allotted time,” John Bodenhamer, the USGA’s chief championships officer.

“It's pretty intentional. We put a lot of effort into it, but it's a scientific process that sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't because of the weather, but we do put a lot of effort into it that leads to our policy.”

The biggest thing that is on the USGA’s upside for the week, and California is one of the few places it can count on for it: the weather. Other than the low clouds referred to as “June Gloom” here, the forecasted high temperatures for Thursday through Sunday vary by two degrees, 70 to 72, with the highest chance for rain at 20 percent on Thursday.