Colorado Golf Expo adds more World Long Drive flavor as Lakewood-based former world champions Monica Lieving and Andrew Eigner will conduct demonstrations and seminars at show
By Gary Baines – 2/13/2025
With Colorado hosting not one but two World Long Drive competitions in 2025 — including the biggest of them all, the World Championships — it seems only appropriate that the state’s season-opening golf gathering should help whet the appetite for the big hitters.
This week — after previously noting that the Colorado Golf Expo will be a qualifying site for the 2025 World Championships that will be held in LaSalle, Colo. — Expo officials announced that two former world champions from Lakewood will be on hand to put on demonstrations and seminars at next month’s Expo.
Monica Lieving, the 2023 women’s world champion, and Andrew Eigner, the 2023 amateur world champion who has since turned pro, will take center stage at the Expo, which is set for March 7-9 at Hall D of the Colorado Convention Center in Denver. Lieving will be on the main stage from noon-1 p.m. Friday, Saturday and Sunday, while Eigner will be there with her on Friday and Saturday. There are tentative plans for an autograph session after 1 p.m., but details are still being formulated.
In August and September, the world’s top long drivers will be in LaSalle, southeast of Greeley, for both the Rocky Mountain Rumble (Aug. 15-17) and the World Championships (Sept. 24-28). Both competitions will be held at Bigfoot Turf Farm.
Lieving, a realtor and a Colorado resident since 2020, holds the No. 1 spot in the women’s WLD rankings, having won four events over the past two years combined. A former NCAA Division I golfer at Arkansas State who grew up in Illinois, Lieving has hit her driver as far as 378 yards in a Colorado-based competition.
Coincidentally, it was a 2021 interaction with Eigner during a company scramble at Arrowhead Golf Club that set Lieving on the path to World Long Drive success.
“I accidentally hit into him (on a par-4),” she said in an interview with KAIT in Jonesboro, Ark., last year. “I apologized. He said ‘Hey, don’t say sorry. I’m really curious. I’d love to see some of your numbers, how fast (your club and ball speed) are — things like that.’ So we met up a couple of months later. I was nervous. (I thought) ‘There’s no way I’m going to be very impressive. He was really impressed with my numbers — my ball speed, my clubhead speed — and he said to me, ‘I think you could be (among the) top 10 women in the world without even practicing.’ I said, ‘You’re crazy. That’s a ridiculous thing to say.’ I tried it. My first full year was last year (2023) and I won two tour events as well as the World Championship.”
Lieving’s WLD victories have come in Mesquite, Nev., in March 2023, in Hobe Sound, Fla., in April 2023, the WLD Championship in October 2023 and in Canada in June 2024.
Interestingly, Lieving notes that not long after first interacting with Eigner, she served as his realtor when he purchased a duplex in Colorado.
Andrew Eigner. (Photo on X)
Eigner is a very big hitter in his own right — both left-handed and right-handed. He won the WLD amateur world title in 2023 and is now ranked No. 44 in the world in the open division.
The indoor qualifier for the World Championship at the Expo will be possible thanks to two large custom simulators from Clarity.Golf along with Trackman launch monitors — in an area located at the center of the exhibit hall.
The top performers in the open division will advance to a regional qualifying event scheduled for Aug. 15 in LaSalle. There, the top finishers will land berths in the World Championships. Beyond that, there will be long-drive competitions for various age and gender groups at the Expo.
All told, two of the nine World Long Drive competitions of 2025 will be conducted at Bigfoot Turf Farm in Colorado. For the entire WLD schedule, CLICK HERE.
For more information about the Colorado Golf Expo, CLICK HERE.
About the Writer: Gary Baines has covered golf in Colorado continuously since 1983. He was a sports writer at the Daily Camera newspaper in Boulder, then the sports editor there, and has written regularly for ColoradoGolf.org since 2009. The University of Colorado Evans Scholar alum was inducted into the Colorado Golf Hall of Fame in 2022. He owns and operates ColoradoGolfJournal.com