KPMG WOMEN'S PGA CHAMPIONSHIP

October 9, 2020

Alison Curdt

Aronimink Golf Club

Quick Quotes

Q. Alison, thanks for joining us today. Played well the last two days and really held in there into the back nine with a pretty good shot there, holding steady, maybe had the cut line in mind. How much of a factor was that? And just assess your game in two days here at Aronimink.

ALISON CURDT: Yeah, I think that I played okay compared to where I've been playing this past month. The cut line wasn't in my mind at all. I don't find that that's important for me. It's just for me to play my best and hit great shots when I can and try to manage everything as best as possible.

I'm disappointed in my last nine holes, but leading off the day I was really feeling confident and solid and hitting some great shots and hitting some great putts, and then just didn't quite have it on the back nine.

But over the past two days I think that I'm pretty pleased with my showing for being a club professional here, and still had a great week, loved the golf course, really enjoyed my time.

Q. Your real job, let's call it, is to promote club professionals and kind of help them balance teaching and playing, at the same time playing at a high level. To get an inside look here which you've done seven times in the last nine years, been in this championship, that's pretty unique. Maybe talk about that, how you've taken your job and it's part of who you are as you've gone out there the last two days.

ALISON CURDT: Yeah, I definitely separate my job from when I'm here, so when I'm here I'm more focused on myself and my own game so I really put the player hat back on. I don't put the teaching hat on. Certainly my experiences here I can bring back to my students and use them as teachings for them and to show some empathy about what they might experience. I also experience the same thing, as well.

But I do a really good job of when I come here to make sure that the teacher hat is off and that I focus on me and my own game because that's what I'm here for.

Q. What is it about the opportunity that a club professional has in this championship, to measure yourself against the best players in the world? That's pretty unique, and that's probably also daunting at the same time.

ALISON CURDT: I think it can be daunting. I'm not one in terms of comparisons, so I don't compare myself to anyone out here. I compare myself to me and where I've been in terms of my competition. So I look at how I've done in the past, I look at my most recent tournaments and then I compare the quality of this golf course, the difficulty of this golf course with what I know I can do.

So I do a really good job of not comparing myself to other players, and I think that's really healthy as a player to not do that so that we can always strive to be our best and use our self as the baseline for how good we can be.

Q. You played as a full-time player, correct?

ALISON CURDT: No.

Q. You never did? I thought you had.

ALISON CURDT: Nope, as soon as college was over I was right into the work force.

Q. What's the challenge? A lot of the best pros in the world talk about how difficult this golf course is this week, and as someone who doesn't get to compete nearly as much, what's the challenge of that, to step right in and try to play so well?

ALISON CURDT: Well, I think the quality of the golf course is unlike something that a club professional might see, unless we go to a PGA professional championship or an LPGA National Championship. So certainly the quickness of the greens, the firmness of the fairways, the length of the rough, those are all different obstacles to try to navigate. I just think that when someone is working full time, 40, 50 hours a week, being able to manage your schedule and being able to partition out practice time can be challenging. Certainly coming into this event we all had quite a few months off from teaching, so that was a nice opportunity to have a little bit of extra time to prepare.

But it's challenging to prepare for this type of quality golf course because it's just unique and very special in its own, but certainly very fun when we have the opportunity to play it.

Q. How lasting are the relationships within the eight players, the eight club professionals that are here? There were others that you played with at Hazeltine and beyond, but talk about those relationships and how you've held on to some and how endearing they are.

ALISON CURDT: Yeah, it's definitely special to have different club professionals here. We've seen each other at different events. I think for me personally, what's most special is to have a couple of teammates from the PGA Women's Cup here, so there's five of us on the Women's Cup team and three of us are here this particular week, and that's really special for us because we had such a bond at that event last October. But it's great to be able to network and meet some of the club professionals that I'm not friends with and make new friends and always great to feel like you know somebody here like you can belong because there's some other people like me out here.

Q. What should recreational golfers take away from watching LPGA Tour players that they can plug into their own game?

ALISON CURDT: That's a good question. Because I'm not a big believer of comparison, taking an amateur and comparing them to an LPGA professional, I would say that the things that I was able to observe of what separated someone from being under par versus over par is the quality of ball-striking. There's not a lot of curvature on the best ball strikers in the world, and I was able to play with one today. It is very rare to see any sort of curvature on a golf ball.

If an amateur is having tons of curvature, they're hooking it, they're slicing it, they're fading it and drawing it, I think what they can really take away is the quality of ball-striking is so pure. The misses are so minimal, and that allows someone to really shoot low, especially out here.