Leona Maguire has retooled to find her flow before Solheim Cup test
Leona Maguire of Team Europe looks on during a practice round prior to the Solheim Cup 2026 at Bernardus Golf on September 09, 2026 in Cromvoirt, Netherlands. (Photo by Kate McShane/Getty Images)
Ignorance really can be bliss, simplicity a godsend. All sportspeople chase the flow state, that magical interlude where years of practise and all-round dedication to a craft meld into an almost dreamlike trance where everything feels easy.
Hungarian psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi was the man who coined the actual term ‘flow’ to explain this. That was in the 1970s and neuroscientists and academics still puzzle over the hows and whys, like 19th century explorers looking for the source of the Nile.
Athletes, musicians, artists, brain surgeons: anyone can slip into this ephemeral state, time slowing down around them and inside their brains: real-life Neos dodging slow-motion bullets in their own versions of The Matrix.
“I felt so relaxed. It just felt very easy, and that's why it surprised me that I had broken my world record,” said Katie Ledecky, the most decorated female American Olympian of all time, at the 2015 World Championships in Russia.
Yeah. And then we have golf.
Look, flow states are hardly an unknown phenomenon here either. Players routinely strike a seam of form that allows them to bludgeon a course, or a portion of it, into submission. Birdies pile up, confidence swells and the game bends to their will.
It’s a high that doesn’t last. Far more time is spent wrestling with the swing and all the myriad of mechanics that feed into the process. Many is the man and woman who has dispensed with the tinkering to sign up for a complete refit.
Tiger Woods, Padraig Harrington and Nick Faldo are up there with the most celebrated of players to have retooled. Viktor Hovland, Wyndham Clarke, Rickie Fowler and Will Zalatoris are among the more recent batch to have tried it, with varying degrees of success.
And now Leona Maguire, Ireland’s sole representative in a 2026 Solheim Cup date with Team USA that gets underway at Barnardus Golf in North Brabant in the Netherlands on Friday morning, can be added to that same list.
The reasoning is obvious.
Maguire stands - officially anyway - at 5’ 6” tall. She is thin as a whippet and the physical disparity with some of her more athletic colleagues was immediately apparent as her group stood on the first tee for the opening round of last month’s KPMG Irish Open at the K Club.
There were times throughout the four days in Kildare when the Cavan player was 50, 75 and even 100 yards behind her playing partners off the tee and reaching again for a hybrid or fairway wood to make up the shortfall with her approaches to the green.
She proved equal to the task time and again.
Most eye-catching was her approach to the difficult 9th hole on the Sunday as she chased South African leader Casandra Alexander, her fairway wood splicing the fairway from 205 yards and landing just two feet from the flag for a superb birdie.
Physics still campaigns against her though. The further you are away from the green the more difficult it is to nail those shots and Maguire is nearly always further away than most. Hence the new swing designed to add distance and height to her long game.
She is all in on this. Maguire has finished up with her long-time coach Shane O’Grady in favour of a new start with Sean Foley, who once tutored none other than Tiger Woods, and he is closer to her in the US and therefore more accessible too.
The danger in it is in robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Maguire’s average driving stat on last year’s LPGA Tour came in at 238.76 yards. She has added 8.51 yards to that so far in 2026, but her driving accuracy has dipped from 77.69% down to 70.52%, taking her out from 25th in the ranking to 38th.
Her strokes gained has improved by 0.30, even as her average scoring per round has slipped just the wrong side of 72, but all these numbers are malleable for now. This is a two-year project she has committed to and she is sure that signs of progress have been seen.
“You're never done,” the 31-year old said at the K Club last month. “You're always building, you're always growing, there's always stuff to be worked on. We're definitely closer now than we were a couple of months ago.
“It's tricky to make changes while you're still trying to compete. It'd be nice to be able to take six months off and just work on everything, but we don't have the luxury of that. You're trying to work on things and improve and compete as well at the same time.”
Maguire’s form has been up and down through the season. There has been the odd high finish and too many missed cuts, but she travelled to the Netherlands on the back of an encouraging Irish Open where she shot a superb 63 on the Saturday and finished tied for 4th.
Her last Solheim experience, when the then captain Suzanne Pettersen left her out of half the foursomes and fourballs having been a key cog in Team Europe prior to it, offers us a glimpse into the woman, the golfer and her reasons for her current course.
Her own theory immediately after that team loss in Virginia was that Pettersen felt she was a tad on the short side and didn’t make enough birdies. Her 4&3 singles win over Ally Ewing went some way to disproving that. As did her succinct take post-round.
“I think I proved today there's more than one way to skin a cat,” she said.
Doing it this week, with her swing and form in flux, would be more impressive again.
Match 1, 6.40am: Hull/Woad v Corpuz/Korda
Match 2, 6.52am: Koerstz Madsen/Boutier v Coughlin/Lee
Match 3, 7.04am: Henseleit/Maguire v Lee/Duncan
Match 4, 7.16am: Stark/Grant v Zhang/Kupcho
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