Early on a Monday morning in late March, several days before the LPGA Tour’s Ford Championship outside Phoenix, Lauren Coughlin accompanied her husband to his club fitting at Ping headquarters. Once there, she began sampling putters; she was on a years-long quest to elevate that part of her game, mostly to no avail.
By Gene Wang
But one flat stick caught her attention with how crisp and unencumbered her stroke felt. Soon, Coughlin’s swing coach took notice of her accuracy on the facility’s practice green. Also observing was Tony Serrano, the longtime principal design engineer for Ping who mentioned to Coughlin how effortless her stroke appeared with the new equipment.
That Ping PLD Oslo milled putter has been in Coughlin’s bag ever since, sparking the 2016 ACC individual champion at Virginia to by far her most prosperous season since joining the LPGA Tour in 2018. Coughlin enters this week’s Solheim Cup at Gainesville’s Robert Trent Jones Golf Club, some 90 minutes from her home in Charlottesville, on an upswing that includes two victories in a summer span of three events and five top-10s in her past six starts.
She had not won on the LPGA Tour until this season, and her ascent has transformed Coughlin from a Solheim Cup afterthought to someone captain Stacy Lewis and U.S. teammates Nelly Korda and Lilia Vu envision as an anchor. The United States is bidding to win the sport’s most prestigious international team event for the first time in four cycles; this is the event’s first appearance in the D.C. area.
“It feels pretty amazing and surreal, I think, just that I’m going to be an hour or so up the road from my house,” said Coughlin, whose husband, John Pond, played football for the Cavaliers and caddied for her briefly earlier this year. “It was my biggest goal to represent not only the United States but also my home state as well.”
There was considerable doubt at the start of this season as to whether Coughlin, ranked 14th in the world, would be in line to make the U.S. team. She had plummeted to 109th in the rankings, well out of the picture for Solheim Cup qualification. (The top seven in the points standings and the next two highest-ranked players in the world who otherwise did not qualify earn automatic berths.)
Several years ago, Coughlin, 31, entertained thoughts of quitting professional golf, with her form — not to mention her confidence — reaching a nadir. But a conversation with her husband redirected her focus, and she began to work on her swing with more vigor than at almost any other time in her career.
Then came the chance encounter at Ping.
“Ball-striking has always been my strength, but putting and chipping have kind of worn me down at times,” said Coughlin, who has Terry McNamara, former caddie for Annika Sorenstam, on her bag these days. “I started to get more and more confident, especially with my putter and just myself in general, just being me and not being too stressed about it.”
Coughlin finished tied for eighth at the Ford Championship, four shots behind Korda, who won the inaugural tournament. It was only the third top-10 of Coughlin’s career. Three weeks later at the Chevron Championship, the first major of the year, Coughlin surged to a tie for third place and her largest paycheck to that point.
Those performances offered promise for Coughlin and validated the countless hours she had spent fine-tuning her putting. They also put Solheim Cup qualification in more realistic focus.
“It took me a little while,” she said. “But every year I was kind of starting to get better and starting to realize what worked and what I needed to kind of keep figuring out to get better at stuff. A lot of stuff all kind of started to come together this year and all at the right time. Pretty special.”
The run of excellence that followed left no doubt Coughlin would be part of the U.S. team. After a fourth-place finish at July’s Evian Championship, the fourth of five women’s majors, Coughlin collected her breakthrough Tour victory at the CPKC Women’s Open in Canada. She tied for ninth at the Portland Classic one week later before adding another title at the Women’s Scottish Open.
Early in the week in Oregon, a teary-eyed Coughlin allowed herself to take a personal accounting of how far she had come since the pandemic year of 2020, when she played in five events and earned just $11,213. This year, Coughlin has banked $1.9 million, making 16 cuts in 21 starts.
Her putting was especially brilliant at the Scottish Open, where windy conditions frequently made judging speed and trajectory on the greens onerous. Coughlin one-putted the final seven holes to win by four strokes over Germany’s Esther Henseleit, a Team Europe representative also making her Solheim Cup debut.
“That never-give-up attitude, just pushing through, I was in awe,” U.S. teammate and close friend Megan Khang said of Coughlin, one of four players (along with Korda, Hannah Green and Lydia Ko) to win multiple times on tour this season. “I think after nine holes at the Scottish, I was like — I looked at my caddie, and I was like: ‘She’s going to win. She’s walking in like 30-footers for par.’ ...
“To kind of see her rise to the occasion, I couldn’t be happier for Lauren. ... Great golfer, even better person.”
