Mickey a la Cart

Lisa D. Mickey will offer an inside view of the Duramed FUTURES Tour and its players throughout the 2007 season. Visit "Mickey a la Cart" for an "extra" view of the Tour from her own "mobile office".

Looking for the Next Francella

By Lisa D. Mickey
Director of Communications, Duramed FUTURES Tour

Behind closed doors at the Duramed FUTURES Tour, there’s a lot of talk about “branding” ourselves better and elevating the Tour in the eyes of the public and media. And when we ask ourselves who or what our brand is, it’s easier to see it than to define it in marketing-speak. Our “brand” is that talented, young, determined woman professional who is kicking down the door of the LPGA Tour to get in. And once she’s in, she’s that same hard-charging pro who’s determined to move her way up.

None of our 2007 “graduates” to the LPGA Tour exemplifies that better than Meaghan Francella. A native of Port Chester, N.Y., she turned pro after her final All-American season at the University of North Carolina and spent two and a half seasons on the Duramed FUTURES Tour learning a lot of lessons. This year, in her first full year on the LPGA Tour, she has already won her first tournament – beating Annika Sorenstam in a four-hole playoff – and showed that it wasn’t a fluke when she played in the final Sunday pairing at the Kraft Nabisco Championship – the LPGA’s first major championship of the season. Francella finished tied for fifth in her first major.

All of that is gravy on the potatoes now. Francella is in Part II of her professional career. She’s still in the climbing mode that never really stops. And while she’s the toast of her hometown, she’s also the embodiment of all young professionals at the start of their careers.

“When you’re a fighter and you see something you want, you go out and get it,” said her father, Joe Francella. “I can tell you that we never went on family vacations. We put it all into helping Meaghan get to where she wanted to be. And she did what she had to do.”

That’s it. Each player does what she has to do. That’s the intrinsic motivation that burns deep in the gut of every player who has what it takes to make it to the next level, then to succeed on the next tier among the world’s best. Francella was a middle-class kid who learned the value of a buck early. She knew it was expensive to travel and play tournament golf, so she sold “shares” of herself to businesspeople in her hometown who helped get her out on tour.  At the end of last year, she sat down and wrote checks to pay everybody back. This year on the LPGA Tour and after her first $180,000 winner’s check, she likely cleared her debt.

But going back to what helped build the foundation of Francella’s current success is to look at the drive of an overachiever. What she lacked in the silver spoon she made up for in determination to reach her goals. She worked hard -- moving from junior golf to college golf to the Duramed FUTURES Tour to the LPGA Tour, never doubting that she would make it.

For the two and a half seasons she spent on the Duramed FUTURES Tour, Francella displayed the desire and sometimes a little too much fire, but she learned some valuable lessons. She learned that she couldn’t play mad. She learned that she couldn’t swing a golf club when she was so tense that her shoulders nearly bumped her ears. She learned to let the errant shots go, to recover and to not celebrate for too long when the good shots came. She learned that it takes three good rounds to win a tournament. She learned patience. And she learned that it was wasted time to sit in the parking lot nervously counting spots and shots on Sunday afternoon of the season-ending tournament to see if she was among the top 15 who either earned an LPGA Tour card or an automatic pass to LPGA Final Qualifying. Last year after the final round of the final tournament in Albany, N.Y., she was an anxious bundle of nerves waiting see if she finished in the top five.

But just as it was at the LPGA Final Qualifying Tournament in the fall of 2005, where she earned the last conditional card as a non-exempt 2006 LPGA Tour member, in the fall of 2006, she earned the last of the five automatic LPGA Tour cards awarded to the top-five members of the Duramed FUTURES Tour. Maybe she just squeaked in, but she finally kicked down the door as a 2007 member of the LPGA Tour. And she’s still out there kicking. Chances are good she’ll be doing that for the rest of her career.

Meaghan Francella earned that fifth LPGA Tour card last fall the hard way. There were no short cuts and she never thought there would be. And while she won once on this Tour, compared to multiple wins by other card winners, it is the overachieving, hungry-to-win Francella who is setting the pace for the Duramed FUTURES Tour’s graduating Class of 2006.

Who will be the next player to step up in 2007? Who will be the top five players by season’s end who will reach the first-phase goals of their long-term objectives to earn LPGA Tour cards? With most of the season still stretched ahead, there’s a lot of golf to play, a lot of dreams to be chased and a few doors to be kicked down along the way.