How Lauren Coughlin, the Solheim Cup’s oldest rookie, learned to believe in her golf game

Lauren Coughlin is the hottest player on the LPGA Tour. This week the 31-year-old will play for the U.S. team for the first time, wearing the red, white and blue as the oldest member of the Solheim Cup team.

She is the embodiment of late-career success: a grinder who never gave up and always found a way.

And it all means that much more because of where she started — years of being wracked by self-doubt and the looming concern that she’d run out of cash before she could realize her potential.

In the middle of the summer of 2018, Coughlin’s inaugural LPGA season, she approached her husband, John Pond, with a pressing matter: She was $1,000 short on her next credit card bill. “She told me she needed some money,” Pond recalled. “And I just looked at her and said, ‘Me too, I’d love some money!’”

Pond, an Associate Director of Development at the University of Virginia at the time, had $1,500 to his name.

A few checks were coming in — Coughlin’s small-scale equipment sponsorship would hit soon and give them a few thousand dollars to work with. But rent was due, and Coughlin’s LPGA schedule wasn’t cheap. In 14 starts that calendar year, Coughlin made three cuts. Her best finish was a tie for 50th, which sent her home with a whopping $4,186, barely enough to cover her expenses for the week. The international travel required to play a full tour schedule didn’t compare to the cross-country driving and extensive saving that Coughlin had been accustomed to on the Epson Tour (the developmental circuit that feeds into the LPGA). Even if Coughlin paid her credit card bill on time, the next one would be just as much of a struggle.

Unless, of course, she started playing better.

The following month, Coughlin swallowed her pride and did what every professional golfer dreads: She went back to the minor leagues for one event. She didn’t have a choice, really. Coughlin wasn’t making the weekends on the LPGA, which meant she wasn’t cashing checks, much less moving up in the tour’s points standings. No points, no tournament starts. She’d settle for one Epson event — the PHC Classic in Milwaukee — but getting herself to the first tee was a challenge.

Pond sat on the phone with Coughlin for two hours the morning of the first round, convincing her not to withdraw from the tournament. “It was pretty bleak,” Pond said. “She was in breakdown mode. I think she got off the phone 20 minutes before she teed off. Didn’t warm up or anything like that.”

Coughlin was exhausted, discouraged by the backward move, and she simply didn’t see the point: Why keep going now? Pond told his wife that if this tournament was her last as a professional golfer, she might as well enjoy it, and go out on her terms.

Five hours later, Coughlin answered her own question. She shot a 6-under 66 to take the first-round lead. Three more rounds and Coughlin had won her first event as a professional golfer amidst perhaps her lowest mental state. Coughlin took home a $15,000 check.

“It was the first glimmer of success in two years of professional golf,” Pond said. “Something that you can hang your hat on and say, ‘I can do this.’”

It took a while, but Milwaukee wouldn’t be Coughlin’s last professional victory. It also wasn’t the only time she sniffed the perimeter of rock bottom on her way to playing for Team USA.

Coughlin and Pond met at the University of Virginia, where Pond played football, and Coughlin walked on the women’s golf team. Raised in Chesapeake, Va., Coughlin wasn’t exactly a hot-shot recruit out of high school. She was on the radar for small Division I schools, where she could have taken a scholarship. But she had a vision for what she wanted her college experience to look like.

“I was never really thinking about trying to play professional golf,” Coughlin said. “My goal was to play golf at a big school. I could have gone to a smaller school on a scholarship, but I really loved sports. I wanted to go to all the football and basketball games.”

Welcome home, @LCisHOOSgolfin 🏠 pic.twitter.com/QXuQhfwIhP

— Solheim Cup U.S. Team 🇺🇸 (@SolheimCupUSA) August 20, 2024

She redshirted her freshman year and played in two tournaments her sophomore year, but kept hammering away under the leadership of UVA head coach Kim Lewellyn. By her redshirt senior season, Coughlin had the lowest scoring average on the team and was breaking school records. The walk-on turned into one of the best ball strikers in the conference, her effortless consistency with her irons leading to lower and lower scores. In the spring of 2016, Coughlin was named an All-American and won the 2016 ACC Individual Championship — her first college title. Pond proposed on the 18th green during the trophy ceremony.

Professional golf was never part of the dream — it didn’t seem possible — but at this point, it would be dumb not to try. Pond and Lewellyn convinced Coughlin to keep playing.

“I was worried about the financial stress, the ‘eat what you kill’ mentality,” Coughlin said. “Very rarely do you come out guns blazing and start making money. Especially someone like me who didn’t have any sponsors. I didn’t know if I wanted to put that burden on my family.”

The next few years told an all too familiar story in pro golf. Coughlin would post low scores here and there, but couldn’t seem to string together four rounds. Her putting held her back in a major way. She earned conditional LPGA status, but only got into a handful of events, and didn’t quite take advantage of them. Another round of Q-School. Back to the Epson Tour again. A third year of Q-School. Conditional LPGA status again. Then the pandemic hit.

But if you ask Coughlin now, she’ll say that although the results were few and far between, her game improved incrementally each season. Her peers say the same thing about her: Coughlin’s steady improvement is noticeable because it’s rare. Some pros will reinvent their golf swing or hire a new swing coach when things are going south. Coughlin never tinkered. She never experimented. She knew what worked for her. From the moment she turned professional, she trusted that. But did she trust that what worked for her was good enough?

“I’ve been playing the same shafts in my irons for like five years,” Coughlin said. “I don’t change things when I don’t have to. I’m good at reflecting, talking about what’s not working, and then going to work and trying to fix it.”

Like pins on a roadmap, there are a handful of pivotal breakthrough moments that propelled Coughlin to each additional leg of her journey. And funnily enough, they all follow the same pattern. Just as her career is starting to look like it might be fading — or just as she’s feeling like she wants to quit — she finds something. A tiny flicker of self-belief. And she uses it to turn things around.

Coughlin first connected with the hugely popular independent golf media company No Laying Up when she sent a cold direct message on Twitter to Todd Schuster, known by the fanbase as Tron Carter, pitching herself for a potential sponsorship opportunity.

NLU had started a program called “Young Hitters” to sponsor up-and-coming mini-tour pros. Coughlin was a fan of their podcast and wanted to be the first “Hittress,” as she wrote in the DM. The message sat unread for six months. But in 2020, Schuster responded. The NLU guys wanted to sign her up and make her a custom tour staff bag with the company logo.

“Seriously?!” Coughlin replied.

The NLU partnership bolstered Coughlin’s career in several ways. The group’s name recognition helped her secure a few more endorsements on tour; She gained a fanbase amongst the site’s community; The people in the NLU network became some of her and her husband’s closest friends.

She was at a low moment when she arrived at NLU’s season-ending golf event in the fall of 2021, knowing she’d need to not just Monday qualify into the next week’s LPGA event but then finish in the top 25 to keep her card for 2022.

The weather was terrible — “41 degrees, pissing sideways. It was tropical storm conditions,” Schuster said — but Coughlin and a few other pros decided to participate, playing from the same tees. She won.

“I remember her turning to John after the round and saying, ‘I’m playing, like, really good right now,’” Schuster said.

It was a seemingly insignificant golf tournament with no real stakes and no direct impact on her professional career. But playing in the middle of a Nor’easter brought out that secret ingredient that Coughlin always seemed to have trouble mustering up on her own: confidence.

Coughlin turned around to win the Monday qualifier, then finished 16th in the LPGA event.

Heading into 2024, Coughlin admits she had one fear: What if I don’t get better?

“I’ve had small steps in my career every year since my freshman year of college. I was like, man, what if I don’t get any better? What if I don’t keep improving?”

Thirty-one is old for the LPGA. Most of the game’s stars over the years have seen their careers peak in their early twenties. Lydia Ko is in the Hall of Fame at 27. Lexi Thompson is stepping away from a full schedule at 29. Lorena Ochoa retired at 28. While other players had their own timelines and reasons for such paths, the precedent was nevertheless a serious consideration for Coughlin and Pond. How much more time did she really have left to make this work?

Coughlin spent the offseason racking up hours with her swing coach, John Lewellyn — her college coach’s husband — and put a specific emphasis on her putting. A few months later, at the end of the LPGA’s winter Asia swing, a series of changes made the difference that she had been seeking for the better part of the last six years.

On March 1, Pond decided to quit his job and join Coughlin out on tour as her manager. But soon after, Coughlin split with her long-time caddie and put Pond on her bag for a six-week trial run until she found someone new. Within that period, Coughlin implemented a new Ping putter that immediately got hot, and launched herself into contention at the Chevron Championship. It was the first time she had a chance to win on Sunday at a major.

Coughlin made an 8-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole of the tournament to clinch a tie for third place, securing her best LPGA finish (and largest paycheck) to date.

“I’ve reflected on it, and I remember leaving and thinking that was the first time I needed to make some putts, and I actually made those putts,” Coughlin said.

Pond has been there for Coughlin every step of the way, including carrying her bag. (Paul Devlin / Getty Images)

The floodgates were officially open, and one more important change solidified that. Pond’s trial run was over and 66-year-old Terry McNamara, Annika Sorenstam’s legendary caddie, took over as Coughlin’s full-time looper.

This wasn’t your average caddie switch. McNamara, who has 85 total wins, 69 of them with Sorenstam, sought out Coughlin’s bag. He wanted to come out of caddie retirement for her, and only her.

“He was the best to ever do it, and he’s one of the best caddies on our tour,” Coughlin said. “So when Terry tells me, ‘You’re that good,’ it feels great coming from him. It means more coming from him.”

Even if it took a Hall of Fame caddie to remind her, the self-belief was finally seeping into her veins.

Coughlin started 2024 ranked outside the top 100 in the world, with a career-best finish of T6 on her competitive resume. She climbed to No. 55 with Pond on the bag, but with McNamara and all the confidence he extracted out of her, Coughlin soared.

Four months later Coughlin is the No. 14-ranked player on the planet. She won her first two LPGA events in three starts this summer, the CPKC Women’s Open in Canada and the ISPS Handa Women’s Scottish Open, to reach $1.9 million in earnings for 2024.

Coughlin is the second-oldest player in the top 20 on the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings. She’s also simultaneously a rookie and the oldest member of the U.S. Solheim Cup team, where she’ll compete against Team Europe at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club this week, 70 minutes from her house in Charlottesville.

After a year that still doesn’t feel real, Coughlin’s friends and family members will get to watch her play one of the most important events of her career. And it’ll be on home turf, in the stars and stripes, during the best golf season of her life.

“It’s just really cool,” Coughlin said. “And really special.”

Now, she believes.

(Top photo of Lauren Coughlin: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)