RANCHO MIRAGE — Carolyn Bivens doesn't profess to have a crystal ball to tell her how long the current economic downturn will last or what the long-term impact will be on the LPGA Tour.

“A lot of people who are much smarter than me are trying to figure it out, and they don't know,” said Bivens, the commissioner of the LPGA. “If they don't know, I'm not going to venture a guess.”

As the women's golf tour comes to its first major championship of the year at the Kraft Nabisco Championship, the staggering economy is as big an issue for the LPGA as it is for any other sport. What that means for sponsorship renewals and the 2010 schedule hasn't become clear yet, Bivens said.

“We feel good about the way the 2010 schedule is shaping up, but it is still too early to know exactly what is going to happen to the sponsors and to our fans,” Bivens said.

The LPGA's successes and disappointments of the last few months have been well-documented. There were two new television contracts signed, one with the Golf Channel and one with Korean media company J Golf. There was also the announcement of a new Los Angeles area tournament in 2010, with J Golf as sponsor and the move of the Samsung World Championship to Torrey Pines in San Diego this September, at least for one year.

But the tour also lost three tournaments from its 2008 schedule before this year began. Ginn Resorts then pulled out as sponsor of a 2009 tournament with little warning, leaving a hole in the tour's April schedule. And a tournament in Alabama announced it would not be played this year, opting for a spring date in 2010.

In her fourth full year as LPGA commissioner, Bivens said the current economic downturn is worse than the three big hits the U.S. economy has taken in the last 20 years, the saving and loan scandal of the early 1990s, the dot-com bubble burst of the late 1990s and stock market dip after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks.

“This is not just a cycle,” she said. ‘I think this is resetting the bar.”

Bivens didn't downplay the five lost tournaments or the potential for more lost tournaments as the tour looks to renegotiate about a dozen sponsorship agreements that conclude this year, including some long-time LPGA strongholds such as the Corning Classic or State Farm Classic.

And there is the potential for a stronger Southern California presence with the Samsung move to San Diego and the promise of a Los Angeles event, likely in the weeks leading up to the Kraft Nabisco event.

“The Southern California market offers us the opportunity to be in a big television market and a big population area,” said Bivens, who worked in media marketing in the Los Angeles area before taking the LPGA job in the fall of 2005.

But even the best news the LPGA has to offer is overshadowed by the uncertainty of how low or how long the downturn in business revenues and job losses for the country will be.

“I just don't think anyone knows where things are going to go from here,” Bivens said.