Korda aims for repeat at LPGA’s T-Mobile Match Play at Shadow Creek

Nelly Korda was on a heater when she arrived in Las Vegas for the T-Mobile Match Play last year.

Shadow Creek did nothing to slow her down. She made the tournament the fourth of five consecutive victories during her monster 2024 season.

Korda arrives at Shadow Creek this week playing well once again, but without a win in her three starts in 2025. That, she says, does nothing to impact her approach.

“You have to take the expectations, put them aside, and what you did last year, that’s great,” Korda said Tuesday. “I accomplished so much, but this is a fresh start. It’s a new year. I’m just going to have the same mindset as I did last year, and for me what I can control is how hard I work, the effort that I put in.”

Korda is the headliner of the 64-player field that gets into action Wednesday morning with three days of round-robin play. Golfers have been divided into 16 four-player pods, with the winner of each group moving on to the weekend knockout rounds.

That’s the format the LPGA used the first three years of the tournament before experimenting last year with a larger field and three days of stroke play to identify eight players for a match-play weekend. Korda likes the change, even if she wasn’t aware of it until Sunday night.

“At the end of the day it is a match-play tournament,” said Korda, who opens against Brittany Altomare on Wednesday. “Not many girls got to play any matches last year, so I think going back to all match play is what makes the tournament what it is.”

What it is is a grind, with the eventual champion having to navigate seven matches over five days. And it all begins Wednesday with plenty of intrigue right from the start.

Two-time major champion Brooke Henderson faces match-play titan and 2024 runner-up Leona Maguire.

Charley Hull and Alexa Pano, two of the most aggressive players on tour with personalities to match, face off.

Danielle Kang, the Las Vegan struggling to find her game, is thrown into the fire against Jeeno Thitikul, who has top-10 finishes in 11 of her last 12 LPGA starts.

Henderson welcomes the challenge and feels more confident in her game after four years of playing Shadow Creek.

“Having a little bit of course knowledge over the last four years is helpful,” Henderson said, but playing well in general is vital. “As much as you want to have a good strategy, you need to be able to hit quality shots and get up and down sometimes because you’re going to be in tough positions.”

Allisen Corpuz agrees that a mixture of course knowledge and having your game in good shape is more important than ever this week.

“The more you play it, the more you know just spots — I think there is a few spots on the course where it might look visually like it’s an OK spot to miss and you’ll miss there and it’s really, really tough,” said Corpuz, coming off a third-place finish Sunday in Arizona. “But it makes it a little easier when you’re playing good golf as well.”

Nobody knows more about playing good golf than Korda, but she also knows the game can be fickle.

“You kind of just have to appreciate when you are in that flow state, but you can’t get too comfortable,” Korda said. “If you get too comfortable, I mean, it’s golf. It’s going to humble you really fast.”

Greg Robertson covers golf for the Review-Journal. Reach him at grobertson@reviewjournal.com.