GAINESVILLE, Va. — ­­Lauren Coughlin, U.S. Solheim Cup rookie, is a dream she had aspired to make come true for more than a year. It was at the 2023 Kroger Queen City Championship, two weeks after she posted a then-best-career finish of T-6 in Canada, where it hit the Virginia resident that the 2024 Solheim Cup would be only an hour from her home in Charlottesville.

Yet how would a player never ranked better than 104th in the world, who struggled just to keep her card, achieve that lofty goal? After her first professional season in 2017, Coughlin nearly quit the game. She didn’t get decent status on the LPGA again until 2021, where it wasn’t until her final start that she knew she had status for 2022. She started 2024 ranked 109th in the Rolex Women’s Rankings.

Even Coughlin acknowledged the long-shot nature of her bid: “I think if you would have told that to me probably even like the beginning of last year, or three or four years ago when I was really struggling to make cuts and stuff. I don’t know if I would believe you.”

Yet in the last 13 months, the 31-year-old has seen her game go through a transformation that began with a T-9 at the ShopRite Classic in June, the first of six top-10 finishes in her next nine starts. During that run, the University of Virginia alum earned her first career victory in the CPKC Women’s Open a month later, following up with her bulldozing second title, a four-shot win just two weeks later in the ISPS Handa Women’s Scottish Open.

So it is that Coughlin heads to Robert Trent Jones Golf Club the first American to play a Solheim in her home state since Tammie Green in 1988 at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio.

What gives? How did she manage to pull off a career-redefining stretch of golf?

How about by trying less hard.

More From Golf Digest Solheim Cup All 24 players competing in the 2024 Solheim Cup, ranked Solheim Cup What’s on the line at the Solheim Cup? Analyzing what feels like a ‘must’ win for the Americans Solheim Cup How a popular social-media stats guru has become a critical part of the U.S. Solheim Cup team

Indeed, Coughlin’s hot stretch began after a seemingly innocuous conversation with her caddie, Terry McNamara, after the pro-am outing at the ShopRite LPGA Classic in June. McNamara, a veteran looper who worked for Annika Sorenstam in her early 2000s heyday and was starting up with Coughlin explained to her how impressed he was that day with the relaxed, fun nature she showed on the course. In turn, she didn’t miss many shots, performing at a talent level that many believed she was always capable of but had inconsistently displayed. Long story short, there wasn’t some magic gear that Coughlin needed to find for tournament play that she hadn’t shown in the pro-am.

Truth be told, it wasn’t that much different from the messages her team had tried to convey for a while. Coughlin’s husband, John Pond, coach David Llewellyn, LPGA Tour psychologist Dr. Julie Amato, and sports psychologist Bob Rotella all affirmed to Coughlin that she just needed to be herself. Wanting LPGA success so much was leading the journeywoman to lose her way under pressure. Coughlin’s most clutch performances since her 2018 rookie season were acts of LPGA survival, not contention.

Now was a time for that to change.

“Terry [McNamara] saying it to me just finally pushed me over the edge into believing it,” Coughlin said. “Just given his experience and who he’s been around, caddieing wise, for his career, it meant a lot to me for him to say that and kind of just kept saying it over and over again.”

• • •

Interestingly, it wasn’t just Coughlin who began thinking about her making the 2024 U.S. team late last year. So too was Stacy Lewis, the U.S. Solheim Cup captain. Lewis had known Coughlin since her LPGA debut, when Coughlin Monday qualified for the 2017 Volunteers of America Classic as a then-Symetra Tour member. During Coughlin’s first practice round ahead of her LPGA debut, Lewis joined Coughlin for her back nine. Pond later told the captain that Coughlin barely held it together playing in front of the former World No. 1.

When they got paired together a few times towards the end of the 2023 season, Lewis left with questions. “When I played with her, I was like, ‘man, she’s such a good ball-striker,’ ” Lewis explained. “Hits it straight, hits tons of fairways, tons of greens. Why hasn’t she played better?”

Coughlin knew that if she had any chance at making the U.S. Solheim Cup team she had to become a more consistent—and improved—putter.

Raj Mehta

Lewis told her assistant captain Angela Stanford that they needed to follow Coughlin more closely as they entered 2024. Without knowing Lewis’s assessment of her game, Coughlin came up with her own answer to the captain’s questions in the offseason. To make the 2024 Solheim Cup team, she needed to improve her short game, particularly putting: Coughlin finished 134th and 118th in putts per GIR over the last two years.

Coughlin started the year 15th on the Solheim Cup points list, but a dispiriting performance at the Aramco Saudi Ladies Open in February revealed she needed to make more putting changes than she thought. That’s when she incorporated a speed-putting drill from her former collegiate assistant coach turned short-game specialist Brian Bailie. Twice a day, she hit putts from 10, 20, and 30 feet from the cup, helping her develop a baseline feel to lean on during her rounds.

“I shouldn’t have been missing the cut [in Saudi],” Coughlin said. “And it was just kind of a theme of, finally, you can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting it just to fix itself because clearly what you’re doing is not working.”

Returning to the LPGA for the Asian swing, Coughlin incorporated another change while getting her husband a fitting at Ping headquarters, based in Phoenix, during Ford Championship week in nearby Gilbert, Ariz. Coughlin came along and was messing with a Ping PLD putter when Ping’s Senior Design Engineer, Tony Serrano, stopped by and noticed how well it fit in her hand. She made the switch and has kept it ever since, starting with an electric run of seven birdies over her last 10 holes to make the cut on the number in the Ford. The momentum continued on the weekend for a T-8, her first top-10 of the season.

Veteran caddie Terry McNamara has helped Coughlin relax on the course during her break-through summer.

Paul Devlin

While gaining ground on the Solheim Cup points list, Coughlin never took Lewis up on her open-door policy approach to having potential players ask the captain where they stood and what they needed to do to make the team. Coughlin preferred staying in her own bubble and honing her routines, getting her first practice round at Robert Trent Jones in March.

Coughlin’s T-3 finish in the next month’s Chevron Championship foreshadowed her short game coming together. With her husband, a former football player at UVa, on the bag for his third event, Coughlin’s new career-best finish helped leap her to ninth on the points list. After McNamara started working for her during the Mizuho Americas Open in April, and Pond started working for Gina Kim, Coughlin kept churning out consistent performances with three top-25s in her next four starts.

“I think the encouraging part with Lauren is they’re not huge jumps,” Stanford explained. “I know some people will be, well, don’t you want that? I think consistently getting better over time shows that it wasn’t just a flash in the pan.”

Coughlin continued working towards trying to earn her way onto the team, playing more practice rounds at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club before and after the Amundi Evian Championship in July. She contended throughout the French major before finishing fourth, moving then to sixth place on the points list, inside the bubble for one of the seven automatic qualifying positions.

“I think that’s kind of right when I was like, ‘OK, now I need to kind of start shifting from just trying to make the [Solheim] team,’ ” Coughlin explained. “To what can I do to make sure that I’m prepared enough to play well, get points, and help the team get the win?”

Two weeks after the Evian, Coughlin she knew how to handle the pressure of contending. Tied for the lead Sunday in the CPKC Women’s Open on the par-3 17th, Coughlin hit her tee shot to 10 feet. In the past, she would have tensed up in that moment, her putter going cold. Instead, she everything flowed.

“I finally, I think, just let go enough on the green,” Coughlin said. “Before I hit that putt to where I was able to just stroke it really, really well, and it went in when I needed it to.”

The putt turned into a two-shot swing, with Coughlin two-putting the 18th for her first victory. Three weeks later, in the same situation of contending for a title, Coughlin fell back on her new confidence and tromped her way through Scotland to a four-shot win to formally lock her spot on the Solheim Cup team.

As husband John Pond poured the bubbly, Coughlin soaked up the moment of her first LPGA win at the CPKC Women’s Open in July

Vaughn Ridley

Over Coughlin’s year-long emergence, she rose from that 109th spot at the start of 2024 to World No. 14 coming into the Solheim. Her refined putting has her 22nd in putts per GIR, fueling an impressive fourth place in birdie percentage on tour.

“I think I’m a much, much better player than I was a year ago,” said Coughlin, who’ll have McNamara on the bag this week in Virginia. “I think I’m a much better player 1726074199 than I was at Chevron even. I think I showed flashes at Chevron, but I think I’m a more steady player now.”

Coughlin is accustomed to being a late bloomer. She wasn’t even 5-foot tall starting high school, eventually growing to 5-foot-7 when she added another an inch while redshirting at Virginia. She used that time to physically grow, eventually competing and winning the ACC Championship her senior year in 2016. Sometimes, it just takes a little while for her to learn. Figuring out the LPGA was another lengthy learning curve to adapt to.

“I think it’s just a bunch of little things that I’ve just learned, fine-tuned over years of work is what I think really is like the biggest thing,” Coughlin said. “It’s not just something that has happened this year.

“I feel like I’ve just been learning for many years.”

More From Golf Digest A Cup Outside U.S. Solheim Cup team unanimously puts viral putting debate to rest Course Strategy Solheim Cup 2024: 3 holes that could decide the matches at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club TOUR TECHNIQUE Rose Zhang shows how you can swing smooth and still rip it

This article was originally published on golfdigest.com