Lydia Ko and Lexi Thompson are excited to get underway for this week’s Aramco Team Series presented by PIF – Florida.
The duo are no strangers to the innovative format having both competed in previous editions with Ko teeing it up in Singapore in March while Thompson won the event staged in New York last October.
The Aramco Team Series – Florida will see 108 professionals compete in two competitions simultaneously with a 36-hole Team competition alongside a 54-hole stroke play competition, where there will be a cut to the top-60 professionals and ties at the end of round two.
World number three Ko produced a final round of 66 (-6) in Singapore to finish in third place on the Individual leaderboard.
And after experiencing the unique format for the first time, the New Zealander is ready to play again this week at Trump International Golf Club West Palm Beach.
“I really enjoyed playing in the ATS – Singapore,” said Ko. “There’s not that many opportunities where you play in a team format, even though we are counting our individual scores.
“It was nice to be in that kind of a team atmosphere, something different having an amateur as well for the first couple of days. I really enjoyed it. That golf course was very new to me at Laguna National, and this is a new golf course, so I’m just trying to get a good gauge of how the course is playing.
“I don’t have that many experiences playing in this part of Florida, but it’s super beautiful out here and the weather has been really hot and humid the last couple of days.
“The golf course is nice. It’s tricky. There are some longer holes, there are some shorter holes. It’s a really good golf course. The greens are quite small, so I think when you’re on the green, you’ve got a pretty good chance of having birdie opportunities. But it’s also just as easy to not be on it. Ball striking is probably going to be a big key.”
Defending champion Thompson is going to try and put her home advantage to use this week after she triumphed in New York last year.
The venue is her home course and she’s relishing the experience of being at home while playing in a tournament.
Thompson explained: “It’s amazing to be able to play in Florida! Any Florida events that we get, I obviously look forward to them. This one is only about 25 minutes from my home, and I practice out of here.
“These events are such great events to begin with, but it’s definitely a bonus to be here in Florida and it would mean the world to me to win to defend the title. I’m just going to go out there, I have a lot of family friends coming up to support me, so overall it’ll just be a blast of week.
“It’s just a very difficult golf course and they have it set up difficult as well, yardage wise. It is a ball striker’s golf course. It’s very scenic, there is a lot of water and a lot of trees, but you just have to really commit to your lines out there and sometimes play more aggressively because you want shorter clubs coming into some of the greens because some of them are elevated and a lot of them have a lot of slope in them as well.
“I would say it’s a little bit of an advantage being my home course, but you still have to go out there and hit the golf shots.”
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