Mollie Marcoux Samaan is a golf fanatic and a Juli Inkster super fan. She’s a wife and mother of three. She’s a two-sport varsity athlete at Princeton (soccer and ice hockey) who spent 19 years at Chelsea Piers Management before coming back to her alma mater to serve as athletic director.

And now, she’s the LPGA’s ninth commissioner, what she calls a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Marcoux Samaan couldn’t wait to tell her husband the day she first talked to Inkster on a call.

“I like to see myself as a values-based sports leader,” said the 51-year-old Marcoux Samaan, “and I truly believe that this is one of the very best jobs in all of sports.”

Marcoux Samaan replaces Mike Whan, the longest-tenured LPGA commissioner who rebuilt the tour and announced in January he would be stepping down from the role. In February, Whan was named the next Chief Executive Officer of the USGA.

Inkster, who served on the LPGA’s search committee for a second time, liked what she saw in Marcoux Samaan, calling her an authentic, down-to-earth person who will be a great “players’ commissioner.”

Mollie Marcoux Samaan (Princeton Athletics)

“I know this is probably not the greatest term,” said Inkster, “but she’s a jock and she loves sports and I love sports, and I think you have to be that way to really dive in. She’s been AD for a huge athletic department, and she’s been in a man’s world. She knows the golfing world and she knows how to play with them, be nice and collaborate and bring the LPGA forward. “

Marcoux Samaan has been a golfer since she was 11. Neither of her parents played but she first tagged along with an older brother who had taken up the sport. Her early golf story is one shared by many.

“I had seen these women playing golf on TV,” she said, “and I was going to be a professional golfer and I needed to join the local club, and literally to join the local club in Ithaca as a junior member was $45 for the summer, so my parents were like, that’s the best babysitter I could ever imagine, and they just dropped me off at the course at 8:00 in the morning and I played all day long with people from all different backgrounds.”

Following graduation from Princeton, Marcoux Samaan served as assistant athletic director, assistant dean of admissions, and coach of girls’ ice hockey and soccer at the Lawrenceville School (Lawrenceville, New Jersey). After that, she began a 19-year career with Chelsea Piers Management before transitioning back to Princeton in 2014 as the Director of Athletics.

“I believe passionately that sports have the power to change the world,” she said.

“And in this moment in time – with the positive energy around women’s sports, women’s leadership and society’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion – I believe the LPGA has an incredible opportunity to use our platform for positive change,”

LPGA veteran Alena Sharp served on the search committee alongside Inkster and said she appreciated Marcoux Samaan’s transparency. If Marcoux Samaan didn’t know the answer to a question, she didn’t try to fake it, saying she’d find the answer one way or another.

“She’s very down to earth and humble,” said Sharp, “and that’s what we need. We don’t need someone promising us the moon, and then we don’t get it.”

Search committee members didn’t have their sights set on finding a woman, Sharp explained. They simply wanted the best person for the job. In Marcoux Samaan, they feel they have found a gritty, hard worker who has a great presence when entering a room. Sharp also liked that Marcoux Samaan found the disparity between No. 125 on the money list on the men’s and women’s tours ($877,761 vs $64,410 in 2019) ridiculous and a top priority. The LPGA had 14 millionaires in 2019; the men had 112 players who crossed the $1 million mark.

Kris Tamulis, an LPGA board member, finds Marcoux Samaan’s work-family balance impressive. She met Marcoux Samaan for the first time last night on a board Zoom call after the vote. Marcoux Samaan’s three kids Maddie (17), Catie (15) and Drew (12) are excited about mom’s new role and can’t wait to join her on adventures around the world.

“They said ‘Mom, you’ve got to go for this,” said Marcoux Samaan. “This is like a dream job for you.’”

Her husband, Andrew, will be working with a partner on a private venture fund in Florida.

Marcoux Samaan describes herself as a servant leader. Her job, she said, is to solve problems and help others.

“I also like to have fun,” she said. “I like people who like to have fun and love what they do and are engaged with what they do and see positivity and optimism and gratitude. Those are three things we talk about all the time here.”

It’s not surprising that Marcoux Samaan talks a lot about teamwork and wins. There’s been a focus in the Princeton athletic department on branding, broadcast and technology, three priority areas for the LPGA.

Mollie Marcoux Samaan (Princeton Athletics)

In 2019, Princeton opened the H.G. Levine Broadcast Center, which gives the athletic department the ability to produce live events for streaming and television and create on-demand video. Marcoux Samaan said it was an unusual investment for the size of the program.

“As we had that platform to be able to stream our games and stream our content, I thought it was really important that we had quality content,” said Marcoux Samaan, who worked with the Ivy League to secure a relationship with ESPN+.

“Because our student-athletes are truly remarkable, similar to the LPGA tour, and often their stories aren’t told. If we could have a studio that looked authentic and new and innovate and high-tech, I think that made the athletes feel even more supported.”

LPGA board chair Diane Gulyas said she felt one of the most impressive things about Marcoux Samaan is her ability to build strong relationships with a variety of different stakeholders at Princeton, whether it was the university officials, donors, alumni, coaches and athletes. Whan was a whiz at relationships.

“I think the first most important thing is to learn and to just listen to absolutely everybody,” said Marcoux Samaan, echoing a strategy that was similar to Whan’s more than a decade ago.

“It’s a very complex organization, and to sort of understand the landscape and then try to simplify that into the core values and the core strategy, I think that’s what I love doing, just outside of being super passionate about sports, it’s about setting a strategy for an organization, and again, like I said, taking really complex ideas and condensing them into a clearer strategy.

“So writing our strategic vision will be sort of priority number one and thinking about how we expand on the global scale and how we work with our partners around the world to grow the game of golf and to provide even more opportunities for both our pros and to women around the world. I can’t wait to dive into that.”