Yealimi Noh after winning the 2025 Fortinet Founders Cup (Photo: LPGA/Getty Images)
Sharon Heights Golf & Country Club | Menlo Park, California | March 19–22, 2026 | Purse: $3,000,000
The Bay Area hasn’t hosted LPGA Tour golf since Yealimi Noh walked off the 18th green last spring with tears in her eyes and a trophy in her hands. Now the Tour is back — at a new venue, with a new title sponsor, and with the woman who won the whole thing having to do it all over again in front of the people who watched her grow up.
Welcome to the 2026 Fortinet Founders Cup.
Sharon Heights Golf and Country Club in Menlo Park hosts the event for the first time this week, giving the 15th edition of the Founders Cup a fresh backdrop. The private club sits tucked into the Peninsula hills just minutes from the Stanford campus, and by all accounts it is ready. Seven of the top 10 players in the Rolex Rankings are in the field. The purse sits at $3 million. And the storylines stacked up heading into Thursday’s opening round would fill a weekend of television on their own.
Sharon Heights: A Course That Demands Respect
Sharon Heights is not a course that punishes one bad swing. It punishes inattention. The layout stretches to 6,542 yards at a par 72, but raw distance off the tee is secondary to accuracy. There is no first cut at Sharon Heights — you are either in the fairway or you are in the rough, and the rough is not forgiving. Bunkers are positioned to punish, particularly around the greens. The putting surfaces, recently resodded and watered heavily in the days leading up to competition, are playing soft early in the week, but expect them to firm up as the tournament progresses.
World No. 1 Jeeno Thitikul, who completed two practice rounds before Tuesday’s press conferences, summed it up cleanly: the rough is genuinely rough, and the hills add a layer of difficulty you do not feel on paper. Nelly Korda called it demanding off the tee and noted that ball-strikers who are on their game will have legitimate birdie looks — but the margin for error is thin.
That combination — course that rewards precision, greens that will quicken by Sunday, and a field stacked with elite iron players — sets the table for a compelling week.
The Defending Champion Comes Home
Yealimi Noh does not just have to defend a title this week. She has to defend it 20 miles from where she learned to play golf.
Noh grew up in Concord, played most of her junior golf around the East Bay and down in Monterey, and has spent her offseasons practicing daily at the Olympic Club’s Lake Course. She called Sharon Heights “incredible” this week and said the Bay Area is simply the best place in the world — comments that carry more weight when you realize she lives in Dallas now and is back here only because the Tour came to her.
Last year at this event — then played at a different course — Noh ended years of close calls with her first LPGA victory, defeating Jin Young Ko by four strokes to become a Rolex First-Time Winner. She was calm walking up 18, she said, almost surprisingly so. The weeks after were a blur of flights and celebrations. The moment has settled into something more permanent now: she is a winner, and she knows it. That confidence, she said, carries into bad rounds in a way it never used to.
The pressure of defending on home turf is real. She acknowledged it — the extra nerves, the extra meaning, the extra weight of expectations from family and friends who will be watching every shot. Her plan is straightforward: trust the process, ignore the scoreboard, and play the golf that got her here. Whether she can execute that plan under the specific emotional circumstances of this week is the question only four rounds can answer.
She is currently ranked No. 40 in the Rolex Rankings and tees off Thursday afternoon alongside Nelly Korda and Chizzy Iwai, beginning at 12:48 PM from the first tee.
Storylines to Watch at the 2026 Fortinet Founders Cup
Jeeno Thitikul Is Running
World No. 1 Jeeno Thitikul already has a win on the 2026 season — her home event, the Honda LPGA Thailand — and leads the Race to the CME Globe with 618 points. She is making her fourth appearance at the Founders Cup (T8 in 2022, T5 in 2023, missed the cut in 2024), and she is playing some of the most mature golf of her career.
What stands out about Thitikul right now is not just the results — it is the process behind them. She talked Tuesday about reading mental performance books, about learning to quiet the 80 percent negative thoughts that race through a human brain under pressure, about the experience of winning in front of a Thai crowd in the final group and channeling that chaos into focus. She is 23 years old and sounds like someone twice that age when she talks about the game.
She opened this week paired with Lydia Ko and Linn Grant off the 10th tee at 7:58 AM — an early wave that will set the morning scoring tone.
The Stanford Factor
This tournament has turned into something of a homecoming for Stanford Cardinal alumnae, and that is not a coincidence given the school sits approximately two miles from the golf course.
Rose Zhang, the 2023 LPGA champion and two-time event winner, is finishing her final quarter at Stanford — a communication degree, international relations coursework, and a 10-page paper on beer brewing archaeology due Thursday. She is playing in finals week. She did not blink. Zhang has spent the offseason practicing in Stanford’s facilities, staying connected to the program, and she said this week carries a particular electricity for her that no other event on the schedule can replicate. She tees off Thursday morning at 7:47 AM alongside Aditi Ashok and Albane Valenzuela — the latter also a Cardinal.
Andrea Lee, who played her college golf at Stanford before turning professional, is also in the field and tees off at 12:59 PM on Thursday. The local roots run deep in this field, and the galleries will feel it.
Nelly Korda: Fresh and Hungry
Rolex No. 2 Nelly Korda is making her eighth Founders Cup start and has never won the event — her best finish was a T2 in 2019. She arrives this week off six weeks away from competition following her Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions victory in January, which she described as essentially a second offseason. She spent the time cooking clean at home, hitting personal records in the gym (a 36-inch box jump, for the record), and grinding with her coach David Whelan.
She acknowledged the typical soreness that comes with getting back to tournament walking, but also the mental freshness of someone eager to compete again. The stat sheet supports her: Korda currently leads the LPGA Tour in scoring average at 67.67 and is tied for the top spot in greens in regulation at 83.33 percent. If the greens at Sharon Heights firm up by the weekend, those numbers become especially relevant.
Lydia Ko’s Backyard
Hall of Famer and Rolex No. 6 Lydia Ko is a Bay Area resident. She attended the Solheim Cup team gathering at Juli Inkster’s home last weekend and played Los Altos. She is locked in on this stretch of the schedule. Ko has 10 appearances in the history of this event and a career scoring average of 69.289 at the Founders Cup — she has been consistently excellent here. A win this week on her home turf would be one of the more satisfying moments of her post-gold-medal career chapter.
The Founders: Why This Tournament Carries Extra Weight
Every LPGA event carries history, but the Founders Cup is the one that stops to reckon with it explicitly. The tournament honors the 13 women who sat down in 1950 and decided to build a professional women’s golf tour from scratch — before television deals, before title sponsorships, before anyone was guaranteed a paycheck.
This week’s Pioneer honorees are Juli Inkster and Meg Mallon, both Hall of Famers, both Bay Area connected. Inkster, a San Jose native, hosted the U.S. Solheim Cup team at her home last weekend, and she walked the range at Sharon Heights this week watching the modern game with the perspective of someone who helped create the conditions for it to exist. She talked about watching the Founders travel in cars across the country with a flag as a rest stop signal, marking golf courses themselves if no one else would. The things they built — the infrastructure, the prize money, the attention — none of it was handed to them.
Rose Zhang put it directly: 13 women who dove into a male-dominated sport and pulled off something incredible. Jeeno Thitikul talked about the obligation to give back to youth in Thailand the same way the Founders gave to those who followed them. Nelly Korda said the tournament is a useful early-season reminder of why representing the Tour and its history matters.
The Founders Cup is the one week when all of that gets said out loud.
Notable First-Round Pairings
- Jeeno Thitikul, Lydia Ko, Linn Grant — Tee 10, 7:58 AM
- Nelly Korda, Yealimi Noh, Chizzy Iwai — Tee 1, 12:48 PM
- Rose Zhang, Aditi Ashok, Albane Valenzuela — Tee 10, 7:47 AM
- Auston Kim, Julia Lopez Ramirez, Pajaree Anannarukarn — Tee 1, 8:42 AM
- Natasha Oon, Isabella Fierro, Chella Choi — Tee 1, 7:25 AM
Key Stats Entering the Week
- Race to CME Globe leaders: Jeeno Thitikul (618 pts), Hannah Green (600), Auston Kim (569)
- 2026 scoring average leader: Nelly Korda, 67.67
- Greens in regulation leaders: Andrea Lee and Nelly Korda, 83.33%
- Average driving distance leader: Riley Smyth, 297.50 yards
- Field: Seven of the top 10 in the Rolex Rankings — Thitikul (1), Korda (2), Minjee Lee (4), Miyu Yamashita (5), Lydia Ko (6), Hyo Joo Kim (7), Lottie Woad (8)
How to Watch
Golf Channel will carry all four rounds of the 2026 Fortinet Founders Cup.
- Thursday–Sunday, March 19–22
- Television: Golf Channel, 3:00–6:00 PM PDT / 6:00–9:00 PM EDT
- Streaming: Peacock, NBC Sports App, GolfChannel.com
Sharon Heights will televise well — tree-lined, old-school in the best way, with enough elevation change to create compelling camera angles. The Peninsula light on a clear California afternoon does not hurt.
Tee times begin at 7:25 AM Thursday. By Sunday afternoon, someone will have figured out this golf course. Whether it is the world’s best player, the defending champion who grew up down the road, or someone we have not discussed yet — that is what makes the Founders Cup worth watching every single year.
