The top five players in the women’s golf world rankings have something in common. All five have won at least one tournament since the 2026 season began, whether on the LPGA Tour or elsewhere.
Actually, that quintet of Jeeno Thitikul, Nelly Korda, Hyo-joo Kim, Charley Hull and Hannah Green shares another attribute: They’ve collected zero of the sport’s last nine major championships.
As major season kicks off at the Chevron Championship on Thursday in Houston, the world of women’s golf waits to see if one of its star players can reassert her dominance under the brightest lights the sport has to offer.
Four of the five major winners in 2025 were first-time champions, including Mao Saigo of Japan, who birdied the first hole of an unprecedented five-way playoff (featuring Kim, among others) to win the Chevron.
That was the event’s final year at the widely-panned Club at Carlton Woods in the Houston suburbs. Formerly played in the Coachella Valley and known as the Dinah Shore, Kraft Nabisco Championship and other titles, the Chevron will make a new home at Memorial Park Golf Course.
The municipal course near downtown Houston is the current home of the PGA Tour’s Houston Open, renovated less than 10 years ago with consulting from Brooks Koepka. It will play as a par-72, 6,811-yard course for the ladies this week.
“It’s definitely a second-shot golf course,” Korda said. “Greens are pretty tricked out. Just depends on how it’s going to play with all the rain that they got. It can play really long where (drives are) not going to go run out or play really soft.”
Korda is the most recent major winner of the world’s top five, having taken the Chevron crown in 2024. But in nine major starts since, she has mixed two T2s with two missed cuts and an array of also-ran finishes.
She began 2026 with a win at the season-opening Tournament of Champions, weather-shortened from 72 to 54 holes. World No. 1Thitikul won the next event in her native Thailand.
Though only 23, Thitikul has been gunning for her first major for close to five years, collecting nine top-10s without a victory.
“I think it’s a good thing,” Thitikul said. “If you in contention, if you without a win as well but you in contention for like maybe four, five week in a row, which mean your game is there. …
“If you were in contention every week, you saw your name on the top in every week, which mean your game is there and then just matter of time.”
England’s Hull has yet to capture a major, while Kim, a South Korean veteran who won back-to-back tournaments in March, hasn’t added to her major mantle since the 2014 Evian.
Green will be a popular pick this week as the Australian rides white-hot form into Houston. She’s won four tournaments since March 1, including a two-week sweep of the Women’s Australian Open and Australian WPGA Championship. On Sunday outside Los Angeles, Green putted her way into a playoff and then won her third LA Championship.
She said Tuesday that she plans to “ride this wave for as long as possible.”
“My putter has been very kind to me, so it’s nice to feel like all aspects of my game have actually been able to turn on at the same time, as to where last year I felt like one thing would go well and something would be really off,” Green said.
“That’s probably been the biggest difference, but obviously the inner belief has definitely been different, too.”
Green’s lone major title came when she won the 2019 Women’s PGA Championship.
–Field Level Media
