KPMG Women's PGA Championship
No Nelly victories? 15 different winners? Parity has been name of the game on LPGA this season
FRISCO, Texas — A Lim Kim won the opening LPGA Tour event at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions in January. Then Americans Yealimi Noh and Angel Yin won the next two events. Hall of Famer Lydia Ko raised the next trophy and so on and so on. It’s mid-June and the LPGA Tour has had 15 different winners heading into this week's KPMG Women's PGA Championship.
It’s the first time since 2017 that the tour has gone this long without a multiple winner. That year, the LPGA got to 15 champions before So Yeon Ryu won for the second time at the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship on June 25.
Last year, World No. 1 Nelly Korda won seven times on tour—six of those coming before June—but she has yet to win a tournament this season. There were six players who won multiple times last season—Korda, Lauren Coughlin, Ruoning Yin, Jeeno Thitikul, Lydia Ko and Hannah Green.
“It's golf. Every year is just so different,” Korda said. “Last year coming into this event, I had [six] wins. I think even Hannah Green had multiple wins under her belt, too, coming into this event. It's just golf. You kind of just have to ride the wave, and the competition is getting better and better every year. To win once, to win twice, it's really good.”
Perhaps there will be a repeat winner here at Fields Ranch East at PGA Frisco this week. Even with that possibility, there’s so much parity this season. So what gives? Why are so many players winning this season after a year in which Korda dominated?
Chisato Iwai, a 22-year-old LPGA rookie, won the Mexico Riviera Maya Open in late May.
Christian Petersen
“I think the game of golf has changed quite a bit in general, if you look at the equipment and the technology and the amount of investment in fitness and nutrition and the amount of people that players have on their teams, I think there's more availability of resources to make the average professional become a great professional,” said Tom Abbott, the anchor for NBC and Golf Channel LPGA coverage. “I think that is having an effect on both the men's and the women's side of things.”
The average age of the 15 winners on tour this season is 24.7 years. The game continues to get younger and better.
“Winning out here is hard, to be honest,” said Thitikul, 22, who has six top-10s this season and 47 in her three-plus years on the LPGA. “Week in and week out, we're trying to do the best that we can, but there’s a lot of talented players coming and new generations, new faces. I don't know, if you're going to win out here, definitely you're going to have talent. Depends on luck and time as well.”
Japan's Chisato Iwai and Rio Takeda, along with World No. 2 Thitikul, are the youngest winners on tour this season at 22 years old. Both Chisato and her identical twin sister Akie are ranked in the top 40 in the world (Akie is 23rd, Chisato is 38th), Chisato won in Week 12 event at the Mexico Riviera Maya Open, and the Iwais already knew how to win before they arrived on the LPGA, each capturing three times on the LPGA of Japan Tour before earning their LPGA cards through the Q-Series last winter.
This year’s 15 winners are from seven countries—U.S., Japan, Korea, Sweden, Spain, Thailand and New Zealand. Three Swedes have won this season—Maja Stark just captured the U.S. Women’s Open, and Madelene Sagstrom and rookie Ingrid Lindblad won as well. Mao Saigo, who is from Japan, won the Chevron Championship, which was her first win. Three Japanese golfers have won this season.
Nine of the season’s winners chose turning professional rather than go to college. There’s no pathway that’s the same. All three Swedish winners had successful collegiate careers in the U.S. and Stark and Linn Grant (who has yet to win this year) went to the same Swedish sports-specialized high school, Filbornaskolan, that Ludvig Aberg attended.
Among the 15 winners, only two are in theirs 30s. Sagstrom won the T-Mobile Match Play Championship at 32 and Carlota Ciganda won last week’s Meijer LPGA Classic at 35. It had been nearly nine years between Ciganda’s Sunday victory and her previous win.
“I’m very happy to be one of them,” Ciganda said. “I think I've been playing very solid. I'm very consistent this year. I'm happy and proud of that to be up there in contention more often. I think winning out here is getting tougher and tougher. Lots of really good players, especially lots of youngsters, also good Japanese and Koreans and Asians and Americans. It's not easy, so I'm happy I can still compete at this high level. I still love it, so it's a nice feeling.”
The PGA Tour also experienced a run of early parity this season, with 11 different players lifting a trophy. Then Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler put an end to that. McIlroy won his second title of the year at the Players Championship (and got a third at the Masters), and then Scheffler won three times in a one-month span. Sepp Straka and Ryan Fox have both won twice.
For comparison, the average age for a PGA Tour winner this season is far older—31—than on the LPGA.
Karl Vilips is the youngest winner at 23, and Fox and Brian Harman are the oldest, at 38. There are 12 winners in their 30s and eight in their 20s.
On the PGA Tour, with the likes of Tiger Woods, McIlroy and Scheffler, long streaks of players not repeating don’t happen very often. There was, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the strange extended season of 2020-21 that included the U.S. Open and Masters being played in the fall. That campaign began with 20 different winners. Before that, we have to go back five years to the start of the 2015-16 season, when there were 15 different winners before Adam Scott won the Honda Classic and WGC-Cadillac Championship in back-to-back weeks.
To start the 2018 and 2021 seasons, the LPGA had 13 winners, so parity has reared its head before. It’s just that prognosticators like Abbott didn’t draw it up this way this season.
“I felt we were going to have this big three—Nelly Korda, Jeeno Thitikul, and Lydia Ko—and they were going to dominate in 2025,” Abbott said. “I really felt that was going to happen. And it hasn't happened. Players are having more opportunities, players having these resources that make them better, and you've got these young players coming to the tour who are just ready to win right out of the gate.
“When you've got this factor of the top three players in the world not dominating like we thought they would … for Jeeno to have won once, Nelly not to have won, and Lydia to have won once, and we're almost halfway through the season, that's quite surprising when you compare that to the men’s side and Scottie Scheffler and Rory and the events they’ve won.
“That’s very different on the women’s side. That’s a tough thing for the fans. They want their stars to win. Maybe that will change over the course of the summer. We saw that electricity that it brought to the game when Nelly had those run of wins early and Lydia did what she did over the summer. When the stars play well, that really helps.”