SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) -- The field at this week's State Farm LPGA Classic may be most notable for who it's missing.

When play starts Thursday, there will be no Lorena Ochoa, Annika Sorenstam or Paula Creamer. In fact, only two of the Tour's top 10 money winners will be in Springfield.

That could open the field for one of the golfers behind the big-money winners -- eight of the top 25 money winners will play this week, including No. 6 Yani Tseng -- or, perhaps, for Michelle Wie.

The 18-year-old long-hitter, for year's considered one of the next great players in women's golf, has never won a tournament, and is playing a handful this summer between sessions at Stanford University.

Wie, though, says she doesn't pay any attention to who's at a tournament and who isn't.

"All I look at is my game and the golf course," Wie said during a pre-tournament news conference. "All in all, you can't control the players, you can't control the conditions. All you can control is yourself and how you play."

Wie is coming off a 46th-place finish last week at the Jamie Farr Owens Corning Classic in Ohio, shooting 1 over par for the tournament. Last week, Wie left her driver and her long game in her bag for half of the tournament, saying the course and conditions swayed her to play shorter.

"The golf course is very different this week," she said. "Last week, you really couldn't hit it past 250 (yards), anywhere really."

"It seems like a pretty fun golf course," she said after looking over the layout at Springfield's Panther Creek Country Club. "I can hit drivers here."

The State Farm Classic will be only Wie's sixth tournament this year. Her best finish so far is 24th, in June at the Wegmans LPGA in Pittsford, N.Y.

The last time she played in Illinois, two years ago as the lone female golfer at the PGA Tour's John Deere Classic, Wie withdrew from the tournament with what she said was heat exhaustion. She left the course on a stretcher.

"Illinois in the summer time can be kind of mean," she quipped to reporters.

But she said she learned a lot from that experience -- water alone, she says she knows now, isn't enough in extreme temperatures -- and hopes to again play tee off with the men, though she isn't sure when or where that might happen.

"It's why I started playing golf," Wie said. "It's what drives me. It's definitely in my mind right now."

While Wie hopes to build on last week's 46th-place finish, Angela Stanford hopes to generate a little momentum on a solid ninth-place at the Jamie Farr.

That 8-under performance, Stanford said, followed a rough couple of months, a period in which she said she was pressing too much rather than just playing golf.

"Last week was my first good week in a while," she said. "I feel like my head's in the right spot."

Stanford said she hasn't paid much attention to the field -- she didn't get to Illinois until Wednesday after attending baseball's All Star Game Tuesday night in New York. But she'd prefer that all the top players be there.

"If I'm going to win," she said, "I want to beat the best players."

A number of the game's bigger names, she guessed, chose to skip Springfield because it's the last stop before three straight tournaments outside the country -- the Evian Masters in France, the Ricoh Women's British Open in England and the CN Canadian Women's Open in Ottawa.

"Everybody wants to see the top players," Stanford said, "but we're really deep."

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