{"id":340406,"date":"2025-12-12T12:31:14","date_gmt":"2025-12-12T12:31:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/340406\/"},"modified":"2025-12-12T12:31:14","modified_gmt":"2025-12-12T12:31:14","slug":"mixed-team-tournament-a-prelude-to-golfs-more-coed-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/340406\/","title":{"rendered":"Mixed-Team Tournament A Prelude To Golf\u2019s More Coed Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jake<\/p>\n

NAPLES, FLORIDA -Last year’s champs Patty Tavatanakit of Thailand and Jake Knapp of the United States react after winning on the 18th green during the final round of the Grant Thornton Invitational (Photo by Carmen Mandato\/Getty Images)<\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n

Three years after it was hatched, the Grant Thornton Invitational<\/a>, where PGA Tour and LPGA Tour players come together to trade putts in a true mixed-team showdown, feels more apropos in a world where women\u2019s sports are inching closer to the same footing as men\u2019s. <\/p>\n

What began three years back as a fun feel-good idea now reads like a prelude to where golf may be headed, as a sport long defined by guys\u2019 trips and male-centric traditions slowly sheds its boys\u2019 club past and moves toward greater inclusion and a more egalitarian era. And this week at Tibur\u00f3n Golf Club in Naples, both players and Grant Thornton executives said the event captures a contemporary version of team golf the sport rarely puts on display.<\/p>\n

That future is already taking shape at the highest levels: coed golf will debut as a medal event at the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles\u2014a watershed moment for the format and one that mirrors golf\u2019s evolving recreational participation patterns.<\/p>\n

According to the National Golf Foundation, female participation recently hit a record high\u2014 with women now accounting for 28% of the golf population, a number set to grow considering the female cohort has driven 60% of the sports growth<\/a> since 2019 and young women are the game\u2019s fastest growing segment.<\/p>\n

That wave of new participation has been filtering from the grass roots into the professional ranks, where mixed-team golf is beginning to look less like a social sports experiment and more like a reflection of golf\u2019s new reality.<\/p>\n

Players are already feeling the knock-on effect of that momentum inside the ropes. \u201cWith it being in the Olympics I think that is a big deal,\u201d six-time PGA Tour winner Tony Finau said, noting how Los Angeles 2028 will give mixed-team golf its biggest spotlight yet, bringing \u201cinternational appeal\u201d and helping \u201cpush the way forward for more events like this.\u201d His partner, two-time major champion Lilia Vu put it more plainly: \u201cwhat\u2019s better than the crowd seeing their favorite players play on one stage together?\u201d<\/p>\n

Vu competed in Paris and while she was part of a U.S. contingent of golfers, she felt the experience was missing a key element. \u201cWe had three players from the U.S.A. playing, but it didn\u2019t really feel like a team,\u201d she said. \u201cBringing that aspect to future Olympics will be really cool.\u201d At Tibur\u00f3n this week, Vu and Finau said the partnership and collaboration between the two tours is also a draw. \u201cTony\u2019s personality is going to help me feel more relaxed,\u201d Vu said. \u201cWhen I\u2019m even keel, that\u2019s when my momentum is the best.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI like being a cheerleader. Hopefully I\u2019m watching her making a lot of putts,\u201d Finau said. \u201cI\u2019m not used to cheering for someone in my group but now that I have a partner I want her to hit great shots, and every time she hits it, I\u2019m like \u2018hit it in the hole so I don\u2019t have to play,\u2019 he joked.<\/p>\n

Those interwoven themes of collaboration, equality and shared ground don\u2019t just resonate with players\u2014they\u2019re central to why Grant Thornton, the official professional services provider of the PGA Tour, has thrown its heft behind this event. CEO Jim Peko sees the mixed-team format not as a novelty, but a harbinger of where both golf and global leadership are headed.<\/p>\n

That spirit of collaboration isn\u2019t just happening inside the ropes. Backed by New Mountain Capital, Grant Thornton Advisors has spent the past year stitching together a more unified multinational advisory platform, acquiring 16 Grant Thornton\u2013branded firms including Ireland, the Netherlands and the UAE. Grant Thornton isn\u2019t trying to acquire every GT network office worldwide. It is targeting major business hubs where many of their clients already operate and where integrated leadership makes cross-border service far more seamless.<\/p>\n

Peko said the shift to an umbrella structure, rather than a loose network of independent offices, has given the firm far more agility and alignment in serving multinational clients. That emphasis on alignment is also why Peko sees a clear connection between the mixed-team format of the Invitational and the culture he is trying to build inside the firm.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to celebrate one another for our differences. We feed off those different strengths and use them to offset weaknesses, because nobody is perfect,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we see that when somebody has a bad shot and their teammate picks them up,\u201d a hallmark of alternate shot play. For Peko, that balance and complementary skill sets are exactly what Grant Thornton hopes to champion as both golf and the company he heads continue to evolve.<\/p>\n

If the action in Naples offers a clue, the future of golf may belong not to the separate tours that defined its past, but to the shared stages where players and organizations learn to win together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NAPLES, FLORIDA -Last year’s champs Patty Tavatanakit of Thailand and Jake Knapp of the United States react after…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":340407,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,149042,149043,622,127612,82602,149044,3747,82,33229],"class_list":{"0":"post-340406","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-coed-golf","11":"tag-coed-sports","12":"tag-golf","13":"tag-lilia-vu","14":"tag-lpga-tour","15":"tag-mixed-team-golf","16":"tag-pga-tour","17":"tag-sports","18":"tag-tony-finau"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340406","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=340406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/340406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/340407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=340406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=340406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=340406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}