Constellation golf tournament leaving Baltimore for one year 

Posted: 6:50 pm Wed, November 4, 2009
By Danielle Ulman
Daily Record Business Writer

The Constellation Energy Senior Players Championship will leave Baltimore next year to play the first professional tournament at the newly renovated course at TPC Potomac at Avenel Farm next year.

The move, announced by the PGA Tour Wednesday, will just be for next October’s event. In 2011, the golf tournament will return to the Baltimore Country Club, where it has been played since 2007. The tournament is one of the five major championships on the PGA’s Champions Tour, which is for players age 50 and over.

Steve Schoenfeld, the tournament’s director, said a combination of factors played into moving the event. In particular, the PGA owns TBC Potomac and put a lot of money into its renovation.

“It kind of made sense for us to move down there to help showcase the renovation to the course,” he said.

The Constellation tournament will also help fill the void in Montgomery County left by the departure of the Tiger Woods’ AT&T National tournament. After three years in Bethesda at Congressional Country Club, Woods’ tournament will be played at Aronimink Golf Club in Newton Square, Pa., in 2010 and 2011.

Sponsorships in Baltimore, which included Johns Hopkins Medicine, McCormick & Co. Inc. and T. Rowe Price, did not factor into the decision to change venues.

“No matter where we stood with sponsorship dollars, the tour would have been moving,” Schoenfeld said. “Our goal is to bring those sponsors to the TBC Potomac and hopefully get some more corporate support in Washington.”

The PGA does not envision holding the Senior Players Championship in Potomac in 2012, he said, because the AT&T National is scheduled to return to Congressional from 2012 through 2014.

Many of the senior tour’s players golfed at TPC Potomac when the Kemper Open and Booz Allen Classic were played there, but the course was then plagued with flooding problems and complaints of a poor design.

The tournament was able to move because Baltimore Country Club agreed to extend its contract with the PGA and hold the fourth and final event there in 2011 instead of 2010. Michael Stott, general manager and chief operating officer of the club, said in a statement that he looks forward to the tour’s return to Baltimore.

“We are in full support of the Tour’s opportunity to take the event to TPC Potomac next year and know that the D.C. area will appreciate the event — and its commendable charitable impact on the local community — as much as we have since 2007 and will again in 2011,” he said.

Since Constellation Energy Group began sponsoring tournaments affiliated with the Champions Tour in 2003, $3 million has been raised for Maryland charities, according to the PGA.

This year’s tournament, which was won by Jay Haas last month, will benefit the same four charitable organizations as it did in 2008, Schoenfeld said. Contributions will go to The First Tee of Baltimore, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Union Memorial Hospital and the Baltimore Community Foundation/BGE Community Assistance Fund.

Although the charities have not been chosen for next year’s tournament, Schoenfeld said the tour could work with some Washington-based organizations.

“Every year I worry about it. I never take it for granted, ever,” said Lainy Lebow-Sachs, executive vice president of external relations at Kennedy Krieger.

Lebow-Sachs said that although the institution is in Baltimore, people from around the country — many of them in the Potomac region — are patients at Kennedy Krieger, a research and training institution dedicated to children’s brain development issues.

“We’ve been so fortunate to be a recipient every year,” she said. “I hope and pray that we’ll be a recipient next year.”