After first LPGA win, this former college star fell into driver slump

Ingrid Lindblad was on the plane in Singapore, headed home to Sweden, when she fired off an Instagram post that bared her soul. The panic she’d felt over every tee shot that week left her so exhausted and empty that she didn’t want to show up to the course the next day.

The comments on her post poured in at such a rate – with many offering to help her find a new swing coach – that she turned them off.

“I was like, no. That's not what I asked for,” said 26-year-old Lindblad, who has had the same coach for 20 years.

Ingrid Lindblad of Sweden reacts after her shot from the eighth tee during the first round of the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions 2026 at Lake Nona Golf & Country Club on January 29, 2026 in Orlando, Florida.

At this week’s JM Eagle LA Championship, Lindblad returns as defending champion. But her pre-tournament press conference on Tuesday was less about the winning and more about the present state of her game and mind.

The kind-hearted Swede, one of the most decorated collegiate players of all-time, answered every question with great thought and detail.

Her driver woes began last June at the KPMG Women’s PGA in Frisco, Texas, when she lost trust playing in brutal wind and heat. As the months wore on, she could stand on a tee and not know if the miss was going 50 yards right or 50 yards left. Lindberg saw trouble off the tee that wasn’t in the zip code of the fairway.

“I said to someone when we played Pelican, hole No. 10 at Pelican – obviously you're left of the driving range, but I said to someone when we played Pelican, I said, I pushed it because I was scared of hitting it in the water on left.

“Someone was like, where is there water left on 10 at Pelican? I was like, it's 50 meters left of the fairway. Why are you looking over there? I was like, well, that's where my misses have been.”

At home in Sweden this spring, Lindberg thought she’d found something while working on her game indoors. Went to far as to believe she might win at the Founders Cup in San Francisco. But then she got to Sharon Heights and thought, “Whoa, this is scary. Trees everywhere.”

This week at El Caballero in Los Angeles, Lindberg plans to hit driver everywhere, as she did last year. She’s worked a lot on her breathing. It’s OK to feel scared on the tee, she said, but she can’t make a scared swing.

“It's better to make a good swing and you hit it offline versus like, oh, shoot I can't miss it left. Let me just steer it right,” she said. “I would rather just swing at it and if it misses, it's OK.”

Lindberg isn’t remotely close to being alone in this mess. The woman who came to the podium before her on Tuesday at El Cab, Alison Lee, has dealt with the driver yips several times in her career.

It was so bad in college, at one point, Lee was afraid UCLA might pull her scholarship.

As an LPGA rookie, Lee played her way onto the Solheim Cup team, but watched that early success quickly plummet when she lost her tee ball.

Michelle Wie West had the putting yips three times over the course of her career. Five-time major champion Yani Tseng got them so bad she’s now putting left-handed.

“Having the yips is like the wildest thing in sports,” Wie West once told Golfweek. “Something that is so simple, and you just all of a get clammy hands, start shaking, heart palpitations."

As Lindblad works to claw her way out of this slump, she’s heartened by the fact that she went a long time on a high.

“I had one bad college tournament in five years,” said Lindblad, who won 15 times at LSU, “and it was my last one … I haven't played bad in like 10 years, which is actually very crazy.”

Lindblad has made small changes recently, like jotting down all her stats while she’s still at the golf course so she doesn’t have to think about it back at the hotel. She’s let go of some of her superstitions too, like having to listen to the same four songs before she tees off.

She saw progress several weeks ago at the Ford Championship near Phoenix, even though she missed the cut, and received a lengthy message of support from Madelene Sagstrom. She also talked at length to another Swede, Linnea Strom, about what it’s like to return to a tournament as defending champion not feeling good about your game. Strom did that last year at the ShopRite after shooting 60 to win the year before.

It will be hard to recreate last year in L.A., Lindblad admitted during her press conference, but she can smile when she talks about her struggles now, even through tears.

“I definitely feel like I'm in a better spot,” she said, “just trying to know that people like me for me, and not my score.”

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Ingrid Lindblad is less about winning, more about state of her mind