Lottie Woad: Golf's emerging superstar who used to practice in the snow

New York Times

5 days ago

Farnham Golf Club is a 6,613-yard course in the English countryside — yet they are running out of room.
Last year, during a refurbishment of the clubhouse of the 18-hole venue founded in 1896, they created a place for meetings and called it the 'Champions Room'. Along with an Honours Board, there are two walls dedicated to Lottie Woad, a club member since 2012 and someone who, in the past month, has become the talk of golf.
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'We're going to need a bigger room with more walls,' Ben Beagley, Farnham's general manager, tells The Athletic. 'We're already wondering if we should rename the room after Lottie in honour of her growing number of wins.'
At the weekend, 21-year-old Woad won the Scottish Open at Dundonald Links by three shots — in what was her professional debut on the LPGA Tour. It was the first time since 2018 a women's golfer had won their inaugural LPGA event after turning pro and only the third time it has happened.
'If you don't know who Lottie is, you don't follow golf,' Amy Bond, who coached Woad on the golf team at Florida State University in the U.S. after she enrolled in 2022, tells The Athletic.
Woad's win in Scotland followed an Irish Open victory at the start of this month and a third-place finish a week later at the Evian Championship, one of the women's game's five majors. Across the two events, she had to forego winnings of around half a million pounds ($660,000) as she was still an amateur. Those finishes did however help her qualify for an LPGA tour card — which everyone back in her hometown of Farnham, a short drive southwest of London, always knew was coming.
'Anyone who has known Lottie in recent years has known she is destined to do great things,' Beagley adds. 'The only thing that may have surprised people is the speed at which she has gone about it.'
This week, at the Women's Open in Royal Porthcawl, Wales, the former amateur world No 1 will try to replicate her golden form of recent weeks as she tees off alongside stars such as reigning champion Lydia Ko and 2023 winner Lilia Vu.
It will be Woad's first major since turning pro. Winning would mean taking home $1,425,000 (just over a million pounds) and becoming the 42nd golfer to win the championship in its 49-year history.
A 'majestic' approach shot on the 17th by Lottie Woad 🙌 pic.twitter.com/iKMv64Iv62
— Sky Sports Golf (@SkySportsGolf) July 27, 2025
One of the people who knows what it takes to win is Woad's compatriot Karen Stupples, who won The Open in 2004.
'Every time Lottie tees up, she wants to win,' says Stupples, who also attended Florida State. 'She's not going out there thinking that she's not going to win. And sure, there's a lot of money on offer, but she's never a player to think about that. She sets goals for herself and she's very matter-of-fact about how she wants to achieve them.'
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Stupples was an assistant captain of Great Britain and Ireland's Curtis Cup-winning team last year as Woad starred in their first defeat of the United States in that biannual Ryder Cup-style team event for eight years.
The biggest takeaway from that weekend for Stupples, who met Woad there for the first time and has stayed in touch since, was how 'incredibly unselfish' she is. 'She was the amateur world No 1 but she didn't act like it,' Stupples says. 'There was a shyness to her and her abilities, but she was fully aware of what being a world No 1 entailed and the responsibility she had within the team.'
Asked by the Florida State sports media department to name the most famous person whose number she had saved in her phone, Woad answered that it's Stupples, who is one of her mentors.
'My name will be very quickly supplanted,' Stupples laughs. 'She's insanely well-rounded. She knows exactly what she has to do. She has a plan for everything. There's no real advice that I could possibly give her that would help. I mean, she knows that I support her 100 per cent and I'm always going to be there if she needs somebody. But she's got a great team around her of people that have supported her throughout her career.'
A big part of that team is Luke Bone, who began as Woad's swing coach at Farnham's junior academy when she was seven. He will be with her again this weekend, just as he was when she became the first European to win the Augusta National Women's Amateur title in 2024. There was no green jacket like the male pros receive when they win The Masters at that U.S. course but the world was made aware of her talent.
A year ago, as an amateur, she finished tied for 10th in The Open at St Andrews in Scotland. But it might have been different had Woad, who has the same management team as her golfing idol, fellow Brit Justin Rose, not walked away from football as a teenager. A Leeds United fan, she was at Southampton's centre of excellence but shifted her focus to golf.
By winning in Scotland, she collected a prize of $300,000 on the same day England's women beat Spain to retain the European Championship.
Woad listened to Sunday evening's match on the radio as she made the seven-hour road journey from Dundonald, near Glasgow, to south Wales with parents Rachel and Nick, keen to get a Royal Porthcawl practice round in on the Monday morning. Once she passes her driving test, Woad intends to buy herself a car using golf winnings which after this week will surely grow.
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She plans to borrow coach Bond's car to take her test when she is back in Florida in a couple of weeks, where she will remain for the next year, combining tournaments with her sports management degree studies.
It is not just the car Woad will return for.
'I made the mistake of saying, 'The ice cream is on me if you win',' Bond laughs, with Woad now having triumphed at two tournaments in less than a month.
She was recruited to Florida State during the pandemic, so the first time Bond watched her play live was at the British Girls Amateur Championship in 2022 — a week before Woad moved to the campus in the city of Tallahassee.
'The first hole I watched her play, she made birdie, and I thought to myself: 'Wow, this is gonna be a very good relationship'. And then she won that week,' Bond says. 'What sticks out most to me with Lottie is her work ethic and love of the game. She loves the process and to practice. That to me is something you don't see very often these days, somebody that truly loves every bit of the process of playing golf.'
Beagley recalls a time when the course at Farnham was closed because of snow but Woad turned up anyway to hit balls on the driving range and record every shot in a notebook, as she has done since her early teens. It is not uncommon for Farnham members to see her spend eight or more hours there, fine-tuning her game.
'She's always been dedicated and has this ability to practice for hours,' Beagley says. 'She's extremely committed and has been for a long time.'
Bond recalls Woad looking 'eerily comfortable' when battling it out at the Evian, where she missed out on a play-off for the title by one shot. Woad's unfazed calmness stems not just from her golfing ability but also the meticulous nature Stupples mentions.
'She always has a plan,' Bond says. 'She would call or text me every Sunday night and ask about the plan for the week, so she could set her schedule around our schedule and what we were doing. As much as we want all of our players to do that and come up with their own practice plan, she's the only one that's ever truly followed through with it by having a plan of what she wanted to accomplish every single week.'
Woad, who was given her first set of clubs aged three, is described by those who know her as shy and humble but almost everyone will tell you she has a great sense of humour once you get to know her.
'She's still a little embarrassed by how well she's playing and that people appreciate her,' Bond says. 'I've sat at dinners with her where little girls have come up and recognised her and asked for a photo. Her first instinct is to put her head down and for her face to turn red, but then she gets up and does it. I love that she's still humble enough to be embarrassed by people recognising her.'
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Bond's advice when she turned pro was to 'stay Lottie Woad'.
'She's pretty special and pretty phenomenal,' adds Bond, who will be watching every shot at The Open on television from her home in Florida. 'If you don't follow her, you need to, because she's going to do some special things.'
By all accounts, she already has.
(Design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic; Florida State Athletics, Getty Images)