By Kent Paisley
For those successful on the LPGA Tour, the offseason comes like a brief reprieve. The CME Group Tour Championship finishes near Thanksgiving, and a mere six weeks later, the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions kicks things off once more. The constant grind causes Lydia Ko to only take a month off each offseason.

In turn, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 presented a silver lining for the Kiwi star, forcing the 16-time LPGA winner to go on the most extended break of her career. She got away from competitive golf for six months, honing her technique and mental game with coach Sean Foley.

The work paid off in 2021 with 11 top-10 finishes in 20 starts and a victory at the LOTTE Championship in April that ended a three-year winless streak. The consistent play brought her another reward on Sunday when the 24-year-old was officially awarded the LPGA’s Vare Trophy for the season’s low scoring average for the first time in her storied eight-year LPGA career, thanks to her 69.3 average.

“Every season is a new chapter in a book,” Ko said, “and I think the break was a whole new chapter itself for me.”

Those short off-seasons had hindered Ko’s opportunity to rebuild herself after her World No. 1 run through 2016. Stuck in the seemingly endless schedule churn, Ko felt discouraged until her seven-stroke victory at the LOTTE Championship.

“When you do all those things and it doesn’t work,” Ko explained, “even though you try to be patient, sometimes it’s hard to be patient when things just don’t go your way. But to have kind of have that momentum shifted, I think it just helped a lot with the confidence.”

The Vare Trophy was the only major annual award that Ko didn’t already have in her trophy case, although not for a lack of trying. Twice she had narrowly missed winning it. In 2015, Ko lost to Inbee Park by .03. In 2016, she fell to In Gee Chun by .01.

Ko holds the Vare Trophy on Sunday after finishing up the 2021 LPGA season with the official low season scoring average of 69.3. Michael Reaves

This year, she beat Lexi Thompson by .3 to win after finishing T-19 at the CME Group Tour Championship on Sunday with a 15-under 273 total. But it came with a caveat; neither Nelly Korda and Jin Young Ko, who both had lower marks, were eligible to win because they had not played the minimum 70 rounds.

Until a few months ago, Ko also appeared as if she’s miss out, only adding an extra event to her schedule (Pelican Women’s Championship) to nudge her over the 70 mark.

While new LPGA Commissioner Mollie Marcoux Samaan recognized the potential need to change the minimum rule, Ko’s winning score tied for the fifth-lowest average in Vare history alongside Annika Sorenstam in 2005. In addition, it gave Ko a 20th LPGA Hall of Fame point with 27 needed to enter the hallowed territory.

“It’s really special because obviously it sums up the whole season,” Ko said. “All the other things do, too, but at the end of the day golf is about how consistently well you can play and what kind of low score you can shoot.”

The post Lydia Ko’s comeback season helps her claim the one LPGA award she was still missing appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Ryan Herrington
Nelly and Jessica Korda rank first and sixth, respectively, in scoring average this season on the LPGA Tour. With just two tournaments left on the 2021 schedule, Jessica’s 69.927 is too far back to catch her sister (69.074), or Jin Young Ko, who ranks No. 2 with a 69.186 average. Yet neither she, or Nelly, or Ko for that matter can go down officially as the winner of the scoring title, anyway, due to a caveat in how the honour is handed out.

To be eligible to win the LPGA’s Vare Trophy (and earn a point toward induction into the LPGA Hall of Fame), a player must have played in a minimum of 70 rounds or 70 percent of the round she is eligible to play in a given season. Add four rounds at this week’s Pelican Women’s Championship, and four more at next week’s CME Group Tour Championship, and Nelly still only will have played 66 on the season, while Jessica will have played 67. Ko also falls shy of the 70-round minimum (67) as does Inbee Park, who currently ranks No. 3 in scoring average at 69.534 but is not playing this week.

You have to go to No. 4 in the current ranking, Lydia Ko, to find the first player eligible to win the award—presuming she makes the cut this week at the Pelican and plays all four rounds next week in Naples.

Suffice it to say, the fine print associated with the award’s eligibility is something neither Nelly or Jessica knew much about or sounded all that fond of it.

“I was like, ‘Oh, OK. Cool. That sucks.’ That’s pretty much what I said in our group chat,” Nelly said ahead of the Pelican about learning that she wouldn’t have enough rounds to qualify.

“Yeah, I was like, ‘great rule,’ ” said Jessica sarcastically. “It’s just such a weird rule when your No. 1 and 2 player in the world [can’t win].”

Nelly noted that she pulled out of the LPGA stop in Portland two weeks after the Solheim Cup in September because she wasn’t feeling well. She also took off the Arkansas stop a week later. “I don’t think I could have played more events because my body was just so tired,” she said when asked about not reaching the minimum. “I typically play all the events at the start of the year, and if I play well then I’ll take some time off, because the travelling in the summer was just so crazy.”

Compounding things in 2021 was a crazy summer schedule that included Korda going to Japan and playing in the Olympics, where she won the gold medal.

This is the second straight year that the top players in scoring average aren’t eligible for the Vare Trophy because of failing to reach the minimum-round threshold, although the pandemic in 2020 understandable impacted how many events players could reasonably compete in. Still, it’s a trend that the Kordas hope causes the tour to consider changing the rule.

“There is a board of players and people higher up than us that are going to need to come up maybe with a different plan,” Jessica said.

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