This story appears in the May 2025 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe.
The growth of golf as an economic driver in southern Utah is a story that took 60 years to write. The city of St. George built its first golf course in 1965, and today, its metropolitan area is a formidable golf tourism destination, with 14 golf courses generating more than $150 million in economic impact.
The rise of women’s golf, on the other hand, has happened like a bolt of lightning. It is a story written over the past four years, channeling the passion of leaders at Black Desert Resort in Ivins and Copper Rock Golf Course in Hurricane.
This month, Washington County is making history by becoming the first county to host all three levels of women’s professional golf in the same month. The marquee LPGA Tour returned to Utah for the first time since 1964, part of a five-year contract with Black Desert Resort. The developmental LPGA Epson Tour returns to Copper Rock later in May for its fifth year, and the LPGA Legends Championship — one of just two major championships for women tour professionals over the age of 45 — returns to Copper Rock for its second year.
“It’s the past, the present and the future of women’s professional golf in one month, in one Utah county,” says Penny James-Garcia, event coordinator for Copper Rock. “I think it’s groundbreaking.”
The investment in women’s golf is smart business for southern Utah. For one, the St. George metropolitan area receives more than 446,000 golf visitors annually, and golf’s economic impact in the region is second only to that of Zion National Park. According to the National Golf Foundation, 60 percent of new golfers are women, and the female golfing population reached an all-time high of nearly 7.9 million in 2024.
Gina Higbee, an LPGA teaching professional who runs one of Utah’s largest golf academies, says she expects women’s interest in golf to boom in coming years as families get exposure to the world’s top-ranked players at the LPGA Black Desert Championship.
“The impact is happening right now, full throttle,” Higbee says. “I see women’s golf rapidly growing here in Utah, and that’s before we even have the best golfers in the world coming to Black Desert. If I were a big business, I’d be super interested in being a sponsor or being part of the tournament at Black Desert.”
A passion for equity in golf
In 2023, Patrick Manning, Black Desert Resort’s visionary developer and managing director, found himself in a unique position. Within the space of two months, before the full Black Desert golf course had even opened for play, he’d secured contracts with both the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour. Now he and his team had to simultaneously plan premier men’s and women’s tournaments. During an early planning meeting, someone suggested the women’s event would be “easier” since LPGA professionals typically receive fewer amenities than their male counterparts. Manning bristled.
“One of the things I know about golf is that no matter what path in life you take, you can use golf in your business.”
— Penny James-Garcia
“We are doing it all for the women,” Manning told the group. “They’re getting courtesy cars. We’re going to house them. They’re going to stay in our best rooms at the resort.” Then, on the spot, Manning committed to covering the players’ full travel costs, despite warnings from his planning team about the impact on the event budget.
Thanks to a partnership Manning negotiated with St. George-based SkyWest Airlines, Black Desert Resort was the first LPGA title sponsor in the United States to provide private charter flights for all participants and a guest. Manning housed all 144 players in resort rooms steps from the first tee, and players enjoyed top-of-the-line fitness facilities, onsite dining and transportation.
Manning also insisted on offering top-tier prize money. The LPGA Black Desert Championship committed to paying out a purse of $3 million, with the champion taking home $450,000.
“It just didn’t seem fair,” Manning says. “The men and women both put in all this work. They both travel and are away from their families. They both make super big sacrifices. And if you’re a man, you’re going to get this incredible treatment, and if you’re a woman, you’re a little bit of an afterthought.”
Casey Ceman, VP of tournament business affairs for the LPGA Tour, says that Black Desert’s commitment — which made it possible to draw the world’s top-ranked golfers for a first-year event — is prompting other sponsors to reevaluate the amenities they provide.
“Every time I see my phone ring with Patrick’s name on it,” Ceman says, “I get excited because I don’t know what crazy idea he’s going to have about what we can do for the players, but they almost always pan out to be pretty good. … Patrick has made it a point from day one that he wants these ladies to be treated just as well as, if not better than, the men.”
Laying the groundwork
Manning isn’t the only advocate for equity in southern Utah who turned passion into action.
Since 2021, James-Garcia has coordinated the Epson Tour’s Copper Rock Championship in southern Utah. Impressed by the strong support from volunteers and business partners for its emerging players, the LPGA awarded Copper Rock the 2024 LPGA Legends Championship (originally named the LPGA Senior Championship). It was the first golf major championship ever hosted in Utah.
In fall 2024, the LPGA Legends board was weighing a 2025 return to Copper Rock against competing bids from Portland, Oregon, and Atlanta, Georgia. James-Garcia was driving when she saw a call come in from the Legends’ board president, and she remembers pulling over to the side of the road.
“I saw the call coming in, and my heart kind of stopped,” James-Garcia recalls. “I pulled over because I knew I would probably end up in tears one way or the other. And the president of the Legends board said, ‘Penny, we just got done with the board meeting and not only did they vote to come back to Copper Rock in 2025, they voted unanimously to do so.’”
James-Garcia knows how unusual it is to have the same major championship played at the same venue in back-to-back years. When she asked what prompted the unusual decision to return to Copper Rock, Legends officials pointed to Utah’s hospitality.
“It was the volunteer game,” they told her. “It was the venue. It was the course. It was the flat-out passion that was exuded the moment we stepped onto the course until the moment we left Utah.”
Higbee, who has led women’s golf clinics during tournament weeks at Copper Rock, says she believes that passion is a reflection of the surge in Utah women taking up the game and an active retiree population in southern Utah that readily volunteers. She remembers hanging pictures of LPGA stars on her bedroom wall after she fell in love with the game at age 12. There were no Utah golfers on the LPGA Tour at the time and no professional tournaments close enough to attend.
“It’s absolutely incredible for women’s golf,” Higbee says. “I never would have imagined in my lifetime that we would have all three women’s tour events here in Utah.”
Greatest impact may be yet to come
The impacts of southern Utah as a new women’s golf powerhouse are not hypothetical. The ripple effects extend to women in business, youth development across Utah and the growth of golf as an economic driver for the state.
For example, the Copper Rock Championship’s charity beneficiary, the Women’s Leadership Institute, has received nearly $300,000 over the past four years. The Institute hosts a networking luncheon for businesswomen as part of tournament week. Some of the attendees who took up golf after attending the first luncheon are now teeing it up with other sponsors in the pro-am outing that precedes the tournament.
“I like to say that we at Copper Rock support women from the fairways to the board rooms,” James-Garcia says, “because you never know where these young women will go. One of the things I know about golf is that no matter what path in life you take, you can use golf in your business.”
James-Garcia says Copper Rock has been deliberate about creating space for young women to serve as volunteers. She loves sharing a particular story about the Beaver High School girls’ golf team.
Coach Marilee Eyre and her team volunteered for each of the first three Epson Tour events from 2021 to 2023. But in 2024, with the regional qualifier for the Utah 2A state golf championship scheduled for the following week, she struggled with the prospect of her players missing three critical days of practice and two days of school for a long weekend in Hurricane.
After much angst, Eyre decided to take her team to Copper Rock. Some volunteered as caddies, some walked with players as standard bearers, and some worked on the practice greens and driving range. They stayed at the home of the Hurricane mayor and her husband, who invited Epson Tour players to the house in the evening to talk about how they prepare for competition.
“We got [the students] up close and personal with the players every chance we got,” James-Garcia says.
Over the next two weeks, Beaver High — a heavy underdog — qualified for and won the state golf championship, shooting a staggering 24 strokes better than its season average.
Afterward, Eyre wrote to James-Garcia about the team‘s practice on the Monday they returned: “The girls worked on modeling what they had learned from the Epson players. I was thrilled to see smoother, more confident swings. The Epson players had reinforced the same fundamentals we had tried to teach all spring.”
With the inaugural LPGA Tour event hosted at Black Desert Resort just earlier this month, it’s still early to assess economic impact — but Manning is counting on golfers around the world being drawn to the otherworldly beauty of southern Utah they see on the television broadcast. Golf Channel has the potential to reach nearly 500 million households in nearly 80 countries, and the LPGA Tour has a huge fan following in countries like South Korea, Thailand and Japan. Whether that translates into a wave of international travelers visiting the golf courses of Washington County remains to be seen, but Manning says he was encouraged by the videos and comments that went viral on social media after the PGA Black Desert Championship last October.
“The comments were hilarious,” Manning says. “It was everything from, ‘Where are they playing? On Mars?’ to, ‘Where is this place? I didn’t know a place like this existed in the world.’” One viewer even accused the P
GA Tour of using artificial intelligence to create a fake background for the broadcast.
James-Garcia says she has heard similar reactions from LPGA Legends players.
“These ladies have literally traveled the world and played on the most exclusive courses and venues,” James-Garcia says, “and they tell us they’ve never seen anything like this. ... It’s the whole Utah package.”