TOLEDO, Ohio – Lydia Ko has been known to shake up her team a time or two. That was the case again over the LPGA’s extended coronavirus break when about a month ago she started working with swing instructor Sean Foley.
Ko said Foley “hasn’t ripped anything apart.”
“He asked me the question, ‘Hey, if somebody asks you what are you working on, what are you going to say?’ ” said Ko. “I was like … we’re just getting into a position at the start of the swing to make sure that I can hit it freely and not, like, manipulate it.”
Ko’s list of former instructors is nearly as long as her caddie list. She was with Jorge Parada prior to Foley. She told Golfweek back in May of 2019 that she’d asked Chris Mayson and Foley to take a look at her swing. She ultimately went with David Whelan. Prior to that she’d been with Ted Oh, Gary Gilchrist and David Leadbetter. As an amateur, she worked with New Zealand’s Guy Wilson.
It’s a dizzying list for a 24-year-old who once made everything look so effortless.
Lydia said she played a lot of golf with Lindy Duncan & @Annevandam at Lake Nona. Loser had to drop and do push-ups after each hole. Outdrove Anne once during the break. Took a picture of it. pic.twitter.com/yyFbVMv2O5
— Beth Ann Nichols (@GolfweekNichols) July 31, 2020
Karen Stupples, an LPGA major winner who has followed Ko’s entire career both as a player and broadcaster for Golf Channel, weighed in on Ko’s swing coach carousel before the start of the LPGA Drive On Championship.
“We talked so much about how great she is around the green,” said Stupples, “how she visualizes how she’s feeling shots that not everybody has. She’s just magnificent with a wedge in her hand.
“My fear, and I think we’ve seen it over the last few years, she’s lost a little bit of that skill that she has because she’s so concerned with technique… If you make changes in your swing, it’s hard to not have those thoughts go through your head even on the shorter swings and the shorter shots because it just takes a while to work everything through the whole bag.”
Stupples will be pleased then to learn that Ko has recently taken a trip down memory lane.
“I’ve been looking at lots of my videos or swing videos,” she said. “Kind of weird to Google or YouTube yourself, but I’ve been doing that to just see my swing as an amateur.
‘He’s I think gotten me not to think too much about the lines of everything. I’ve tried to change my mindset of not trying to take a video of my swing every single time I’m on the driving range.”
And then this kicker: “It doesn’t need to look like a perfect swing for me to just play golf.”
It’s been more than two years since Ko, a 15-time winner on the LPGA, hoisted a trophy. She’s a two-time champion of next week’s Marathon Classic. At the opening round of the LPGA Drive On Championship, Ko carded a 3-under 69 at Inverness Club to sit three shots back of leader Danielle Kang.
Ko, who like Foley is based in Orlando, Florida, played quite a bit of golf over the LPGA’s extended break at Lake Nona with fellow tour players Lindy Duncan and Anne van Dam. Instead of playing for money, they’d make each other do push-ups after a lost hole.
“We used to play for 10 push-ups,” she said, “but now we play for five because we were like, ‘Man, we can’t do like 40.’ ”
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