Nelly Korda Won 7 Times in 2024 — So Why Hasn’t She Lifted a Trophy in 2025?

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There is so much parity on the LPGA Tour this season that 22 different players have won the first 21 events, the most in tour history. Six of those wins have come from rookies. Yet perhaps the most unfathomable part is that Nelly Korda is not one of those players after she won seven times in her dominant 2024 season.

What makes it all the more baffling is that performance-wise, Korda isn’t having an off year at all. In fact, she’s playing just as well as she did last year, statistically speaking, with the margins by comparison almost microscopically small heading into her start this week in the CPKC Women’s Open in Ontario, Canada.

The 27-year-old Korda recently fell to No. 2 in the World Rankings but is still one of the best to tee it up.

Korda has five top-10 finishes this season and has made all 13 cuts in stroke-play events. She’s second in scoring average to Jenno Thitikul at 69.87. Last year, Korda had an ever-so-slightly better scoring average at 69.56, also second to Thitikul’s 69.33.

So, what gives?

“It’s always like just a little bit of a question, like, ‘How? How am I up there?’ But it also is in a sense motivating, too, knowing that I am putting in all the work and playing well,” Korda said on Wednesday.

“Everything just hasn’t clicked. For you to win out here or to win in general, it’s so hard. Everything has to click. Bounces have to go your way. Everything just has to click. Unfortunately, it just hasn’t. But never say never. We still have a bunch of events left in the season. Doesn’t matter how you start, it’s how you finish, so we’ll see.”

We could point to the competition from Thitikul, the Thai star who grabbed the World No. 1 title from Korda two weeks ago. But the 22-year-old has only one win this season, at the Mizuho Americas Open in May, though she has bested Korda with eight top-10s and owns the tour’s best scoring average of 69.51.

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Stacy Revere

Could it be that the top contenders are playing better? Not really. The LPGA doesn’t have an official tour-wide scoring average for this season, but it reports that the current average for the top 25 players is 70.48, just a bit lower than the 70.74 at this juncture last season.

In one example of the difference in Korda’s year, she won the 2024 Mizuho to cap a run of six wins in her first seven starts. The victory came with a 14-under total, five shots better than Thitikul. This year, Thitikul flipped things around by shooting 17 under, and while Korda opened with three 68s, then faded with a 73 on Sunday to finish six back.

Korda has been in contention on Sundays, but it’s not like she’s had a 54-hole lead and blown it. Nothing glaring like that. She’s been lurking, but never making the charge needed to win. A year ago at this time, she had 10 weekend rounds in the 60s; this year, it’s six.

“I think there’s just a little bit of confidence lacking this year,” said Tom Abbott, a broadcaster for the Golf Channel and NBC. “Then there was that stretch last year where she had the three missed cuts in a row. That changed things a little bit for her with the way that season played out. She bounced back, but it was it was just very strange, that midseason that happened. She got that win at The Annika [in November] and had an injury later during the season.

“This year, I felt like everything has been set up for her to succeed. I think she’s managed her schedule very well. She’s basically played the same amount of events to this point that she played last year. She’s tried to peak, obviously, at the right times in the major championships. She hasn’t done that yet. I think her performance in the majors would be the big difference to me.”

Last year, Korda won the first major of the year, the Chevron Championship, but then missed the next two cuts in the U.S. Women’s Open and Women’s PGA. She made a point to concentrate on majors this season and originally said she planned to play in weeks right before the big events. But her thoughts changed when she opened this year’s Chevron with a 77, had to grind to make it to the weekend and tied for 14th.

Korda made the cut in all five majors this season, and her best chance came in the U.S. Women’s Open at Erin Hills, where she tied for second for a best finish in 11 appearances. Her 67 in the second round put Korda into a tie at the top with eventual winner Maja Stark heading into the weekend. But Korda shot 73 on Saturday to Stark’s 70, and she managed to only earn one shot back on Sunday by shooting one-over on the back nine with a bogey on the 72nd hole.

Two starts later, in the first KPMG Women’s PGA Championship to be played at PGA Frisco, Korda didn’t shoot better than 72 and tied for 19th. She shot a third-round 75 at the Amundi Evian Championship in France and eventually tied for 43rd, and in the AIG Women’s British Open at Royal Porthcawl, she shot 74-75 on the weekend and finished T-36.

Asked to sum up her performances in majors this year, Korda said, “Good here and there. Obviously, the U.S. Women’s Open was close and then the rest of the majors were kind of OK.”

It’s hard to say what’s behind not raising a trophy with the way she’s playing, and Korda has often offered a simplistic “that’s golf.”

One area that has fallen off slightly for Korda is her scoring average in the third round. Sometimes, she hasn’t made the moves she needed on Saturdays to set herself up for a legitimate run on Sunday. She has a 70.25 scoring average in third rounds this season, which is 17th on tour. Last year, she was nearly a full stroke better at 69.39, which ranked seventh.

But it’s difficult to point to instances in which the Saturday scores truly cost her a win.

Korda’s other second-place finish was at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions, her first event of the year. There, it was an opening 71 that hurt her, because Korda shot 17 under the rest of the way and still lost by two shots to A Lim Kim, who led wire-to-wire. Korda said after there were a couple of putts she wanted back in that final round.

Korda wasn’t able to defend two titles from 2024 because the tournaments were no longer on the schedule in 2025. She started the LPGA Drive On Championship with a 65 and won despite a closing 73. Then Korda captured the Fir Hills SeRi Pak Championship in Palos Verdes, Calif., and that tournament was canceled this year due to underwriter problems.

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Cliff Hawkins

Her first defense of a title came in Arizona at the Ford Championship, where a third-round 73 led to a tie for 22nd. In the T-Mobile Match Play, which Korda won last year, she failed to qualify to get out of round-robin play with just one win.

Nearly all of Korda’s strokes-gained statistics this year are very close to last season, and she’s further gained in putting, going from 34th to 19th. That is balanced by losing a chunk in her short game, going from fourth around the green to 73rd. (That drop is by .25.)

“If you look at those stats, you’d be telling Nelly that you’re right there, your ability is going to shine through, and you’re going to win before the end of the season, maybe multiple times. Right?” Abbott said. “If you were a sports psychologist, if you were a coaching a player, you’d be looking at those numbers and saying, ‘Look, the work is paying off. You’re playing well. It’s going to happen for you. This isn’t the case of having to worry too much. Just go out there and play and trust your ability and trust your game and your skill and you’ll win.’

“The stats are pretty similar to what you had last year. She had some slip-ups last year. She had this amazing season where she won seven times, but then she had some really poor results in major championships. It wasn’t sort of Scottie Scheffler-ish. And so, when you look at this year, it’s pretty similar. It’s almost like she’s been a little more consistent.”

This week in Canada, one noticeable difference is that Korda’s caddie, Jason McDede, will no longer be wearing the green bib that is reserved for the looper of the world’s top player. Thitikul’s caddie, Banpot Bunpisansaree, has the green bib now. And with her first win of the year, Korda could be back in that top spot, a place that had been so familiar over the last 18 months.

“I never thought [about it like that], that I want to get back to World No. 1. I just want to play well,” Korda said. “I want to be in contention on Sunday. I’ve been putting in a lot of work on every part of my game. Statistically, I saw my stats, and seeing that I’m always in the top and some of my stats are maybe better than even last year, it’s just crazy.

“That’s just golf. By this time last year, I had six wins under my belt and my stats are better and I have zero wins under my belt this year. I think the most important thing is kind of sticking to your process, always trying to be in contention coming into the weekend, and kind of figuring out your groove, too.”

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