Cristie Kerr (born October 12, 1977 in Miami, Florida) is an American professional golfer who plays on the LPGA Tour.

Amateur:

Kerr started playing golf at the age of eight. She had a very successful amateur career, won the 1994 Junior Orange Bowl International Golf Championship[1] and was the 1995 American Junior Golf Association Junior Player of the Year. In 1996 she played in the Curtis Cup and was the low amateur at the U.S. Women’s Open. She graduated from Miami Sunset High School in West Kendall, Florida.

Professional:

Kerr turned professional in 1996, playing on both the Futures Tour and Players West Tour. Her first professional victory came at the Ironwood FUTURES Classic in 1996. Late in 1996 she tied for sixth at the LPGA Final Qualifying Tournament to gain exempt status for 1997. Her LPGA career started fairly slowly. It took her three years to make the top fifty on the money list, but in 2002 she won for the first time on the LPGA at the Longs Drugs Challenge. By 2004 she was one of the leading players on the tour, with three tournament victories, and a fifth place finish on the money list. She won two tournaments in 2005 and moved up to third on the money list. She tied for second at the 2000 U.S. Women’s Open matched by her performance in the 2006 Women’s British Open. Her first win of 2006 came at the Franklin American Mortgage Championship where she posted a tournament-record score of 19 under par. To date, Kerr has ten wins on the LPGA Tour. In 2006, she was the only American to win more than one event on the LPGA Tour, winning three times (Americans won only seven of that year’s 33 events). In 2007, she won the United States Women’s Open Championship, her first major championship.

She was also a member of the United States Solheim Cup team in 2002, 2003 and 2005.

The hallmarks of Kerr’s game are putting; she finished in the top 5 on the LPGA Tour in putts/greens hit in 2005 and 2006 and iron play. She was 5th in greens-in-regulation in 2005. She is also among the longest hitters on the tour, though the other players have caught up to her in recent years. In 2003, Kerr switched to newer Callaway Golf equipment after playing with the same clubs for the previous seven years, and the move coincided with a sharp increase in wins and earnings on tour. In 2005, Kerr finished in the top 10 in half of the tournaments she entered, and ranked second in the LPGA in scoring average, trailing only Annika Sörenstam.