'A learning year' - Leona Maguire reflects on up and down 2024
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“Overall, it was an OK year,” says Leona Maguire. “It wasn't a bad year. It was an OK year.”
Still, when you’ve achieved what she has, and are as ambitious as she is, OK isn’t quite enough. For the 30-year-old Cavan golfer, 2024 will go down as a year defined by difficulty, with a few flickers of light alleviating the frustration. Chief among them was a victory on the European Tour in July, Maguire the first Irishwoman ever to achieve that. Then there was her runner-up finish at the LPGA Match Play final in April, where she was beaten 4&3 by US star Nelly Korda.
But there were plenty of lows too: a scarcity of top-10 finishes on the LPGA Tour, which had previously been so common; a Solheim Cup where her talents went largely unused; a split with her caddie; putting issues that caused many chances to slip away; an Olympics where illness left her game in rag order.
“It was a bit of an up and down year, but that’s sport,” says Maguire, a KPMG ambassador. “Not everything goes in sort of a linear climb. At the same time, I felt like I played some really good golf in spots. The standard on the LPGA is just getting higher and higher and there were a lot of close calls this year of a shot here and a shot there. So yeah, a learning year.”
Maguire is “not going to go into much detail” around the reasons for her split with Dermot Byrne, her caddie for two and a half years. “I will say this time last year it would have been a very unexpected decision,” she adds. “We enjoyed a few great years together and I was obviously very grateful for all his help and guidance and certain situations arose that made it not possible to continue working together. I wish him all the very best.”
She has since linked up with Vernon Tess, who has two decades of experience on the LPGA Tour. “It's obviously a change, getting used to someone new. He's a very hard worker. He has a very positive outlook and I think that's something I needed in the second half of the summer.” At the Solheim Cup in September, Maguire – who’d played in all 10 sessions in her first two appearances – had to sit out many sessions but as Europe mounted an ultimately unsuccessful comeback in the Sunday singles, she scored an emphatic 4&3 victory before taking to social media to write: “Form is temporary, class is permanent.”
She insists she has no bad blood with European captain Suzann Petersen over the selection decisions. “She wanted to do what she thought was best to help the team win,” says Maguire. “We've had discussions since. Some things we agree on, some things we don't, but there's absolutely no animosity. The way we left it was she said she thought I was the one to carry the torch going forward for the European team and she'd be there on the sidelines, cheering us on.”
With a less condensed calendar in 2025, Maguire is busy fine-tuning aspects of her swing that misfired this year while also “tidying up” her putting. “People only see the results. They don't see the work that goes in behind the scenes, both for myself and my team. I feel like I worked harder this year than I have any other year and it just didn't quite show on the results. But I know it's close, I know it's in there. I'm very grateful to be getting to do what I do on the LPGA – another year with the best job in the world.”
