The Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman Award for December: Lauren Walsh (Golf).
With a degree in mathematical business, Lauren Walsh is handy enough with numbers. Her 2025?
“I visited 22 different countries, I did 62 flights which, if you add up the hours, was 14 days on a plane. So yeah, lots of travel. It was crazy,” she laughs.
But such is the lot of a professional golfer. And she’s savouring every minute of it. “It’s part of the reason I love the job – we get to go to some really, really cool places. Yeah, there’s the jet lag to deal with, but you get in to a routine and figure it all out, what you like to do when you travel. Some Netflix, some reading, anything to keep me busy. And a little bit of sleep too.”
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She’ll be racking up the air miles soon again. She’s off to Saudi Arabia next month for her first tournament of the year, the European Tour’s Saudi International, and a couple of weeks later she’ll be China-bound.
That will be a momentous experience for the 25-year-old from Kildare – the Blue Bay LPGA tournament in southern China’s Hainan Island will be her first since she won a full LPGA Tour card for 2026, making her just the third woman, after Leona Maguire and Stephanie Meadow, to achieve the feat.
Walsh had earned her place at the LPGA Q-Series Final in Alabama in December by finishing 10th in the European Tour order of merit, but needing a top 20 finish to secure that card, she was 34th going in to the final round. At which point she carded a bogey-free, five-under-par 67 to leap up to 17th and fulfil a lifetime’s ambition – this year, she will be lining up alongside golf’s elite on the LPGA Tour.
“I still don’t know if it’s really sunk in, even after all the processing time over Christmas. It was just a dream come true.”
“Q School is like a job interview that lasts six days. Your entire following season depends on how you play in that one week. So it’s a very, very high amount of pressure and stress, there is so much riding on it.”
“But I played really well all week, I was feeling really good. My coach [Shane O’Grady] called me the night before and told me ‘you’ve got this’ – and that’s kind of the attitude I had all day. I fully believed with every inch of myself that it was going to happen. I just had to allow it happen. Ultimately, that mindset is what allowed me play my best golf.”
“I tried to reframe it in my mind. Like, how cool is it to have a chance, with nine holes to go, to be able to do this? I just looked on it as a privilege to have an opportunity to be able to do something that I’ve dreamt of my whole life.”
That kind of attitude has, she says, been something she has had to work on. To relish pressure-laden challenges, rather than be suffocated by them.
“It’s hard when your hobby, that you really enjoy, turns in to your job. That can test your love for it. But I really do love this game and I love competing, so I want to continue to enjoy it. That’s been a conscious choice over the last two years, to realise just how lucky I am to have this as my job. So I try to play with a smile on my face, that allows your better golf to come out.”
Mind you, before she was 11, golf wasn’t even on her radar until she started playing at her local Castlewarden club with her sister Clodagh. “Gaelic football and camogie were definitely more my sports,” she says. “But then I fell in to golf and got better at it very quickly, so that’s when I began dreaming of playing on the LPGA.”
She took inspiration from Leona Maguire, also coached by O’Grady, who made her LPGA debut when Walsh was 17 and after making rapid progress in the game, making two Curtis Cup appearances and representing Ireland at the 2018 Youth Olympics, she took up a golf scholarship at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.
“Wake Forest really did open my eyes, going over and training in these amazing practice facilities, being surrounded by some of the best amateurs in the world. Including myself, we had four in the world’s top 50, so I was practising with these girls week in, week out, and getting brilliant coaching. That not only pushed me on and progressed my game hugely, it also gave me a confidence that, yeah, I could do this for a career.”
Incidentally, if 2025 proved to be a memorable one for Walsh, it was the same for another Irish Wake Forest graduate.
“I was sitting beside this girl in the gym one day. She turns to me and she goes, ‘you’re from Ireland?!’ We made a connection,” she laughs.
It was Emily Murphy, the Irish football international who began her professional career with Newcastle United this year, scored her first goal for Ireland and is part of the squad that won promotion to the top division in the Nations League. Walsh and Murphy are text buddies now, the pair probably worn out from congratulating each other.
Full steam ahead, then, in to 2026. “Getting comfortable out there will be a big goal of mine. I’m just hoping I can bring the momentum in to this year, enjoy the LPGA experience as much as I can. Some of the golf I played in 2025 is definitely of the standard needed for 2026. It’s about trusting my own game and sticking to everything that I’ve done the last couple years to get me to where I am today. And then see where that takes me.”
