Nelly Korda said the five weeks she took off from the LPGA Tour was a preventative measure and she was in good physical shape as she tried to break a nearly year-long winless drought at The Annika by Gainbridge this week.
Korda withdrew from last month’s International Crown team event and said she didn’t play golf for about three weeks while she focused on strengthening her neck, which started bothering her again over the summer. The constant travel and 17 events so far in 2025 have taken a toll on the 27-year-old’s body.
Korda said she learned from her past injuries that it was better to “sacrifice” a tournament rather than endure the pain and potentially be out for an extended period of time. She missed two events last fall with a neck injury and had a blood clot in her right arm in 2022.
“I learned a lot about myself and my injuries from my blood clot because I experienced the symptoms for about three weeks before going to see the doctor,” she said Wednesday. “I went to the emergency room. If I had listened to my body at that time, it would have been three weeks, I saved time.
“Instead, I was like, maybe it’s just something weird. Maybe I slept weird. Right now, I think I’m just a little more in tune with my body.”
Korda’s last victory came at this event last year, and she has won three of the last four iterations at Pelican Golf Club in Belleair, Florida. The course is only about an hour from her home in Bradenton, and Korda said being with her friends and family makes for a fun week.
At the same time, she hopes to end a somewhat frustrating year on a good note. Korda has seven top-10 finishes, including a T4 in his most recent event at the Lotte Championship. But she has yet to win, even though Jeeno Thitikul puts a significant distance between them at the top of the world rankings.
“I can control what I can control. I can’t control what other competitors do,” Korda said. “The only thing I can control is how much effort I put in every day, how I try to execute my shots.
“At the end of the day, that’s all I can do. Obviously I’m very, very competitive and what I want to do on Sunday is lift the trophy. Everybody in this business wants to do that.
“It’s definitely been a weird year, but I can’t compare this year to last year because…I had years where I didn’t win and I played good golf, and then the next year I won a few.
“So, it’s just sport. It’s golf. You can’t expect to win. You can expect to put 100 percent into it: 100 percent into your body, 100 percent into your routine, 100 percent into your practice, with no distractions.
“That’s what I can control and that’s what I will control. But everything else is kind of out of my control.”
–Field level media
