Ten of the top 20 players in the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings are set to compete in the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship presented by P&G. The second stop on a brief Midwest run of events in the fall, the LPGA has been coming to Pinnacle Country Club since 2007. It’s a 54-hole event that begins on Friday with an average winning score over the past five years of 18-under.

Most see that stat line and think this course plays easy, but when it comes to golf, there are different levels of easy. Pinnacle Country Club has water in play on 15 of the 18 holes. There are 62 bunkers to avoid, and the greens average just about 6,000 square feet in size. Accuracy will be the key in Rogers, Ark., and as some of the best players in the world, the 144 athletes in this week’s field are very precise. The course features favor their strengths. The following three keys should indicate who has the best chance to take home the trophy on Sunday.

This is a three-round sprint. To get inside the last two top 10s, players averaged 16.5 sub-par scores over 54 holes. That’s more than five birdies per round to reach the top of the leaderboard. Haeran Ryu, Lauren Coughlin and Yuka Saso are the most prolific scorers in this field. Ryu and Coughlin have both had great summers, and Saso showed some savvy last week in Cincinnati after finishing fourth, her first top 10 since winning the U.S. Women’s Open in early June.

From a ball-striking perspective, Pinnacle Country Club has five par 3s. That extra one-shot hole emphasizes approach play. Ryu and Coughlin are incredible iron players, and that translates to their par-3 scoring. Ryu is first on Tour in that metric, and Coughlin is ninth, but also keep an eye on Lexi Thompson and Sei Young Kim on the par 3s. Could Lexi give us one more trophy run before the end of the season? Kim should be in the conversation as well as she has had two top-five results in Arkansas over the last four years.

Let’s go back to the last two top 10s. Over the past two years, those athletes hit an average of 84 percent of their greens in regulation and 81 percent of their fairways. Any elite player can get hot with their ball striking and check both of those boxes, but Allisen Corpuz, Megan Khang and Coughlin are the top three performers when it comes to both of those ball-striking categories. Corpuz finished fourth in Boston a month ago, and Khang was fifth at the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship presented by P&G in 2022.

As for Lauren Coughlin, she has two wins in the last two months on Tour. As one of the betting favorites in this race, she and Haeran Ryu make the most sense from multiple perspectives, so one or both of them should be in contention late on Sunday.

Who do you think will win? Jot down a name or two and keep track of how they do. If they can make birdies on par 3s and hit a ton of fairways and greens, chances are they will be in the conversation on Sunday afternoon as well.

Keith Stewart is an award-winning PGA Professional. He covers the LPGA and PGA TOUR for Golf Digest, SportsGrid, The Sporting News, LPGA, and PGA TOUR. If you are looking to raise your golf acumen and love inside information about the game, check out his weekly newsletter called Read The Line.

What It Will Take to Contend at Pinnacle Country Club?

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