“I am excited for the opportunity and I’ve got the experience from leading in Ireland and other events that I’ve been in,” she said. “I’m just going to try and use that – I’m feeling good.”<\/p>\n
A fourth birdie in her first 10 holes briefly extended Woad’s advantage to three shots and, despite picking up further shots at the 14th and 17th, a bogey at the short 15th – only her second in 54 holes – left her 17 under.<\/p>\n
That was two better than Denmark’s Nanna Koerstz Madsen and South Korean Sei Young Kim, who shot an impressive 66.<\/p>\n
Seven-time LPGA winner Hyo Joo Kim matched that to sit one back, while world number one Nelly Korda is five shots adrift on 12 under after a bogey-free 70.<\/p>\n
The last time a player won on their professional Ladies European Tour debut was Singapore’s Shannon Tan at the 2024 Magical Kenya Ladies Open.<\/p>\n
“There was a lot of attention kind of leading up, so this feels a bit more free now that I’ve got my [LPGA] card,” Woad said.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think you can ever expect to be leading, but I knew my game was good and I was playing well the last month or so. I definitely hoped to be contending. I’m where I wanted to be.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“I am excited for the opportunity and I’ve got the experience from leading in Ireland and other events…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26231,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-26230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}