Maja Stark had a hole-in-one on her way to finishing in a share of fourth place at Dundonald Links last year.
The Swede produced rounds of 69-65-72-71 to finish four strokes behind eventual winner Celine Boutier.
Stark comes into this week after producing a T10 result at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games and is happy to return to a place where she has good memories.
“I remember the last round being pretty frustrated until I got that hole-in-one,” she said. “Then I was happy again. I did thin the hole-in-one like it wasn’t a good shot it just managed to bounce well.
“I just love coming back here every year. It’s nice to have had a good finish last year and come in here with some good memories.
“The Olympics was really really cool. I feel like I had so much more motivation and energy from it, by doing all those other things [opening and closing ceremony].
“I felt like I was more excited to go hang out and watch other sports [handball] than to actually play my own sport. So that was pretty fun.”
The six-time LET winner believes she is in a good place with her game ahead of these next two weeks in Scotland.
Stark got a new coach recently and has been working on different aspects of her game whether that be changing her swing slightly and working on putting.
“I felt the long game has been very good,” she explained. “I practiced it a lot just the past month and a half because I got a new coach and we really felt like we needed to change some things so I’m really happy with where that’s at.
“I have been concentrating on my putting because I think that’s where I lost a lot of shots last week. It wasn’t that bad it was just nothing was going in, my speed and stuff was pretty good, I just didn’t read it well enough.
“I have only used the national team coaches lately over the past few years. Actually, after the LPGA Tour final last year my national team coach that I’ve had since I was like sixteen he said ‘Maja please get another coach cause I don’t want to feel like I’m holding you back.’
“It’s great to have people like that around me and I still practice with him I still use him to bounce ideas off of and I think he’s great he doesn’t watch me play enough.
“There are just little things that I’ve always been bad at. I feel like everyone has told me that it’s fine and it’s really hard to get rid of that, so then I’ve been like okay we’ll I guess we’ll work at it then.
“Now I’ve actually started to really say okay but now I have to start working on it. My new coach said we have to fix this before we fix anything else. It’s a thing at the start and when that’s been off that’s just messed the rest of the swing up. It’s good that we’re fixing that now.”
Stark will begin her title challenge at 7.43 am (local time) alongside American Lilia Vu and South Africa’s Ashleigh Buhai.
Follow all the action throughout the tournament on our socials – @LETgolf on Instagram, TikTok and X, and Ladies European Tour on YouTube and Facebook – #RaiseOurGame #WSO24.
