[PHOTO: Andy Lyons] The Chevron Championship’s defending champion didn’t even get to the first tee for round one. Lilia Vu withdrew from the Chevron ahead of her 1:10pm tee-time. The LPGA did not provide a reason. Vu’s manager did not respond to a request for comment. Lilia Vu has withdrawn from The Chevron Championship before the first round. @LPGA — LPGA Media (@LPGAMedia) April 18, 2024 Today marks the third withdrawal of Vu’s injury-marred 2024 campaign. The 26-year-old suffered from back spasms while in South-East Asia, exiting the HSBC Women’s World Championship after the third round ..read more

[PHOTO: Christian Petersen] The LPGA’s first major of the year began overnight amid an unprecedented run of women’s sports growth. Superstar guard Caitlin Clark spearheaded the moment, leading Iowa to the championship game of the NCAA Women’s Final Four in March, with an astounding 18.7 million people tuning in to watch the sharpshooter, beating the ratings for the men’s title game for the first time. Soon after, Clark being drafted No.1 to the Women’s National Basketball Association by Indiana drew 2.5 million viewers on a Tuesday night, shattering the previous record from 2004 by five times ..read more

Australia will have its strongest representation in tournament history with nine Aussies to tee it up at the Chevron Championship in Texas starting tonight (Australian time). Led by major champions Minjee Lee and Hannah Green, the nine Aussies in the field betters the previous mark by two, achieved in 2003, 2004 and 2019. Six Aussies played at the Country Club of Carlton Woods 12 months ago, those numbers bolstered by Gabi Ruffels and Hira Naveed graduating to the LPGA Tour in 2024 and Queenslander Robyn Choi returning after a single season in 2019. A two-time major winner, Lee has been paire ..read more

[PHOTO: Stacy Revere] Nelly Korda was practising on the green at The Concession Golf Club just longer than five years ago when World Golf Hall of Famer Hollis Stacy walked up to her. Korda shared her frustration that she hadn’t won yet on the LPGA Tour, and Stacy responded with, “When the time is right.” Korda wrote that phrase in her yardage book and won the next week at the 2018 Swinging Skirts event. That conversation has helped ground Korda in the present moment ever since. The 12-time winner now finds herself having won four tournaments in a row on the LPGA circuit, facing the historic p ..read more

[PHOTO: Katelyn Mulcahy] The trend for rising LPGA Tour major championship purses continued overnight, Australian time, when the circuit announced that it was raising the prizemoney for this week’s Chevron Championship to $US7.9 million. That’s up from the $US5.2 million it gave out last year, when the first major of the season was played for the first time outside Houston. The LPGA and Chevron also announced that the company has extended its title sponsorship deal until 2029. In the three years since Chevron became the sponsor, purses for the tournament, previously held in California’s Palm ..read more

[PHOTO: Julio Aguilar] Rose Zhang finally got a break. The 20-year-old had her first break of the year last week, after starting 2024 with a quarter of study at Stanford University, playing in the LPGA’s Tournament of Champions in January, The Match in February, then finishing her finals before playing at the Se Ri Pak Fir Hills Championship in March, the first of three straight weeks competing on tour. After the Californian finished that gauntlet with a quarter-finals loss at the T-Mobile LPGA Match Play two weeks ago, she enjoyed a dinner with Michelle Wie West and Marina Alex before comple ..read more

[PHOTO: Getty Images] Despite stringing together some impressive results over the past month, including three top-15 finishes, rising star Gabi Ruffels will enter the season’s first major championship with something so much more valuable than form itself. Just five events into her first full season proper, Australia’s newest LPGA Tour sensation admits she has discovered the secret sauce to any fledging pro career: self-belief. The timely shot-in-the-arm comes fresh off a T3-performance at the Fir Hills Seri Pak Championship, where Ruffels fell agonisingly short of making a playoff against Ame ..read more

[PHOTO: David Tease/Golf NSW] Wales’ Lydia Hall has been crowned the first Women’s World Sand Greens champion after an all-world up-and-down on the final hole at Walcha Golf Club in New South Wales. Five strokes from the lead entering the final round of the Women’s World Sand Greens Championship powered by Origin Energy, Hall dropped shots at the first and fourth holes before roaring up the leaderboard with four straight birdies from the fifth hole. Given that all four players in the lead group made bogey on their opening hole, the leaderboard soon tightened up. At one point, 13 players were ..read more

[PHOTO: Tristan Jones/LET] Australian Jess Whitting is an unofficial Ladies European Tour winner after the final round of the Australian Women’s Classic was abandoned at Bonville Golf Resort. A wild storm that lashed the Coffs Coast on Saturday night dumped a further 80 millimetres of rain on the Bonville course, taking the total tally of rainfall to more than 200mm in the past 72 hours. Rivers of water washed across fairways on Sunday morning, access paths underwater making the course not only unplayable, but inaccessible in numerous areas. After an inspection of the course and lengthy delib ..read more

[PHOTO: Maddy Meyer] She’s a stoic soul, Lottie Woad, someone who takes pride in staying cool no matter the temperature, but she could not conceal her frustration walking off the 13th hole. Her four-shot lead had turned into a two-shot deficit, and the game that looked so easy to her through the first two days of this tournament was suddenly turning foe. Woad was discovering what many who have competed on this course have learned: Augusta National’s beauty disguises its penchant for turning things ugly. But instead of fighting herself Woad fought back, and delivered the type of charge this pr ..read more