Piller leads excited, curious LPGA friends into motherhood

Gerina Piller’s new “bump” got a lot of attention from a group of major champions who huddled around her Monday during the Morgan & Friends Fight Cancer event in Boca Raton, Fla.

Morgan Pressel, Brittany Lincicome and Paula Creamer were more than excited for Piller, who is 23 weeks pregnant. They were also curious.

“I told Gerina, `Write down everything I’ll need to know,’” Pressel said. “I told her to take notes.”

Pressel wasn’t kidding. She yearns to be a mom someday soon.

“It’s definitely something my husband and I are talking about a lot,” Pressel said. “It’s something we will pursue, hopefully soon.”

It seems like yesterday Piller and Pressel’s generation of American women were hitting the tour in force. Piller is 32 now, and Pressel will be 30 this spring. Creamer is 31 and Lincicome 32.

They became friends as juniors and while growing up on tour. They’re all married now, and they’re reaching that age together when thoughts of starting a family are becoming more important to them.

“I think once one of us gets it started, there’s going to be a ripple effect, with many kids coming at the same time,” Lincicome said when they all got together at Pressel’s charity event last year. “We’ve gone through junior golf together, professional golf together, weddings together, and one day I can see our kids together.”

There was a time not so long ago when the LPGA was filled with working moms, when the tour’s Smuckers-sponsored traveling daycare center bustled with children. It has shrunk considerably, so much so that Karine Icher’s two children are sometimes the only ones there during a tournament week.

The tour is so much younger now than it’s ever been. When Creamer turned 30 in 2016, the average age of an LPGA winner was just 22.3 years old. It helps explain why the traveling daycare center isn’t bustling anymore, but that might be changing in the not so distant future, if Piller really has started something.

“I feel like there’s going to be an influx,” Pressel said. “I know a quite a few ladies on tour would like to start families in the next few years, and hopefully we’ll all have children in daycare together. That would be fun.”

Piller will get to show off her “bump” Friday at the Diamond Resorts Invitational at Four Seasons Resort Orlando. It will be the first and only tournament start this year. She and husband Martin Piller, a PGA Tour pro, are expecting a boy on May 3.

While Piller plans to take the rest of the year off, her fans shouldn’t worry. She is determined to return to the LPGA next year with her status intact, thanks to the tour’s maternity policy.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to be a mom,” Piller said. “But with Martin’s schedule and our lifestyle, it’s been hard to plan, but we’re blessed and excited for this time now in our lives.”

Piller, Pressel, Creamer and Lincicome don’t have to look far though to see evidence that there’s life on tour after motherhood. Juli Inkster won 18 times, four of them major championships, after giving birth to the first of her two daughters. Catriona Matthew won the Ricoh Women’s British Open when she was 39, 11 weeks after giving birth to her second daughter. Cristie Kerr, who became a mother 4 years ago with the help of a surrogate after she was diagnosed with endometrial deficiency, won after turning 40 last year.

Piller is especially close to Inkster.

“Juli is a huge role model for me, not just on the golf course, but off the course,” Piller said. “She has always stressed to me how family comes first, and how golf is always going to be there. She loves her girls and wouldn’t trade being a mom for the world. That’s very encouraging.”

Amanda Blumenherst, the 2008 U.S. Women’s Amateur champ, actually got this baby deal going among her generation of American LPGA pros. She left the tour four years ago and now has a 3-year-old son and 1-year-old daughter.

While Blumenherst entertained thoughts of returning to golf, she says her work as a Golf Channel analyst has satisfied her desire to remain involved in the game.

“I did think I was just hitting a pause button, as opposed to a retirement button,” Blumenherst said. “I thought we would start a family and then re-evaluate after having a few kiddos, but it really was a difficult decision to try to come back.

“I would have loved an LPGA win, or a hand full of them, or to make the Solheim Cup team. So that was a challenge, having goals I hadn’t met yet, but at the same time I knew having a family was very important to me.”

Blumenherst said she has gained a special admiration for women who continued to compete as moms.

“I had so much respect for Juli Inkster, Nancy Lopez and Danah Bordner before I had children, and now I have hero worship for them,” Blumenherst said. “I don’t know how they did it.

“Being a parent is a full-time job, and to see them balance both so well, it’s a super human feat. I don’t know if I could do it . . . It’s hard to be away from your children, to leave them for long chunks in a day or even to fly away to Asia and Europe and not take them with you. I admire the moms who do it.”

These are the challenges awaiting Piller, who knows she has a special group of friends who will want to see her notes when they follow her into motherhood someday soon.

“I look at what Catriona and Juli did, and I have hope I can come back just as good or even better,” Piller said. “If that’s not the case, I’ll have a pretty good reason why it wasn’t. Martin and I feel blessed and excited about what’s ahead.”

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