Galleri Classic biding its time before rolling out for desert golf fans
As the desert’s oldest professional golf tournament, The American Express, prepares for its 64th event, the desert’s newest tournament, the PGA Tour Champions’ Galleri Classic, is happy to wait in the wings for a new more weeks.
“They will have their event and we will quickly show up in many ways right as they are finished so we can keep the audience in tune to what other golf is going on,” said Michelle DeLancy, the tournament director for the Galleri Classic that will debut in Rancho Mirage in March.
It make sense for the Galleri Classic to keep a bit of a low profile, at least until the final day of The American Express Jan. 22. First is that the senior events doesn’t want to get lost in the message of the regular PGA Tour event.
“We don’t want to confuse the audience, saying that (Fred) Couples is coming and then people go to The American Express and expect Couples and then realize that it was Galleri Classic information that they saw instead,” DeLancy said.
Second, the Galleri Classic is still putting together the nuts and bolts for a brand new tournament, even if the host course of the Dinah Shore Tournament Course at Mission Hills Country Club is a familiar setting for fans and players.
More:Desert's PGA Tour Champions event puts tickets on sale, seeks volunteers
With less than 100 days until the Galleri Classic debuts, DeLancy and the tournament staff are making progress toward getting everything ready for March 22, the day of the first of two one-day pro-ams that week at Mission Hills. The $2.2 million pros-only portion of the tournament begins March 24. DeLancy, whose past experience running a PGA Tour Champions event was in Seattle, is learning more and more about the golf-crazed Coachella Valley.
“The great thing about the area is that people love golf and they want to be involved,” DeLancy said. “The LPGA event (the major championship that was held at Mission Hills for 51 years) had a great group of volunteers and a lot of them have reached out to us to say they want to be a part of this event as well.”
Putting a tournament together
Around 500 volunteers will be needed, but not all of them will come from the desert. DeLancy said there is a group of volunteers from her days at the Boeing Classic in Seattle who want to come to the desert as kind of a week-long summer camp experience of volunteering in the Coachella Valley. But even people who volunteered for the LPGA event – last known as the Chevron Championship – will have a learning curve.
“They are learning what the differences are between an LPGA event and a PGA Tour Champions event and what we set up on the course different and what we might need that is different,” DeLancy said. “But overall people will have a great time volunteering.”
The tournament has just in the last week put tickets on sale for the event while also selling berths into the two pro-ams.
“As you know the PGA Tour Champions players do such a great job of playing with the amateurs and speaking with the volunteers,” DeLancy said. “And we always like to say they rub elbows with the volunteers and the amateurs, being interactive on the course with fans, as I’m sure the LPGA players were as well.”
That comparison, between the new PGA Tour Champions event and the LPGA event that was played at Mission Hills for 51 years, is certainly something that will be part of the new event. How will the course setup be different? Will the seniors actually outdraw the LPGA, or was the LPGA major always going to draw more fans even in its later days of fewer fans? How will the scoring be different between the senior male players and the LPGA players?
“I hope that people will hopefully be pleasantly surprised to attend the event and see that while it looks familiar, the PGA Tour Champions plays a whole lot different than what the LPGA did,” DeLancy said.
DeLancy said she has talked to and received notes from most of the top PGA Tour Champions players telling her their interest in being part of the 78-player field at Mission Hills. She said it might actually be tough to fill all the requests because so many players want to be in the first official event in the desert since 1993.
“It’s in an area a lot of those guys are familiar with as you've seen them at the Bob Hope (now The American Express) and everything else in the past,” DeLancy said. “There are guys who have lived in the area, including Mission Hills, who are just happy to be back.”
Larry Bohannan is the golf writer for The Desert Sun. You can contact him at (760) 778-4633 or at larry.bohannan@desertsun.com. Follow him on Facebook or on Twitter at @larry_bohannan. Support local journalism. Subscribe to The Desert Sun.
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: With tickets on sale, Galleri Classic edging closer to debut event in 2023
