By Chris Lang
WILLIAMSBURG — Elsa Diaz could barely contain her smile.
She sat on the dais in a plush leather chair in a conference room at the Kingsmill Resort on Tuesday afternoon, and as she looked down at a television monitor, Natalie Gulbis stared back up at her on a FaceTime call from California.
“You and Paula Creamer, you were the ones I watched growing up,” Diaz told Gulbis.
And now, she’ll play the same course with them.
Diaz, who will graduate from the University of Richmond next month and is a VSGA member at Independence Golf Club, received one of two sponsor’s exemptions to the Kingsmill Championship presented by Geico, set for May 17-20 at the resort’s River Course.
It marks the second time in three years that a past winner of the VSGA Women’s Stroke Play Championship will play in the LPGA event on a sponsor’s exemption. Three-time champion Lauren Greenlief played Kingsmill in 2016. Diaz won the 2015 championship and was the runner-up last year.
Gulbis, who this week is playing for the first time since undergoing back surgery in October, played in her first official LPGA event 16 years ago, and she said she remembers every detail of it. (She also appeared in the 2001 U.S. Women’s Open.) Her advice to Diaz was simple.
“Have fun,” Gulbis said. “Playing in a professional event, you’re going to get to do something that everybody in the audience, everybody outside the ropes, would love to do. Just to have an opportunity, to have a chance to tee it up with professionals, when it’s your first event, you’re going to remember all of it. You just have to enjoy it. It’s so fun. It’s so incredible to be able to play as a professional athlete, to play alongside the best in the world.
“I just hope for you that you have fun with everything.”
That won’t likely be a problem for the bubbly Diaz, who plans on turning professional immediately after the upcoming NCAA championships. Diaz said she hopes to play well enough at Kingsmill to earn another sponsor’s exemption somewhere down the road. She has limited status for the Symetra Tour, the LPGA’s development circuit, and she can also attempt to go through the LPGA’s Q School later in the fall.
“The fact that I get to do this, straight off my college graduation, it’s very nerve wracking,” Diaz said. “But it’s very, very exciting. I’m trying to envision what kind of pressure I’ll feel, with the crowds … I don’t think there are any words to describe how I’m going to feel.”