At the LPGA Tour’s stop last year in Thailand, Maja Stark asked Lauren Coughlin if she wanted to play a practice round together. Coughlin agreed. Stark then told her she’d see her in 10 minutes, and Coughlin had to laugh. That wasn’t going to work. It was a perfect example of one of the differences between the 25-year-old Stark and 32-year-old Coughlin.
“I was like, Maja, I need like 30 minutes to get this body moving. It takes me a little bit,” Coughlin said. “I'm not 25 anymore. I can't just hit 10 golf balls and go to the tee like I used to.”
From the outside, one wouldn’t figure these two would be a natural pairing. Stark is a rising star from Sweden who won the U.S. Women's Open this year and is in the infancy of her professional career. Coughlin is a Minnesota native with two LPGA wins since joining the tour in 2018. In her rookie year, she married John Pond, a former University of Virginia football player who has served as her caddie.
“I do think about that sometimes,” Coughlin said of their differences. “You know, I'll be 33 in a couple of weeks and, gosh, Maja is only 25 years old and she's one of my closest friends out there. … She’s really easy to talk to. We can both vent and talk about whatever is going on on the golf course or off the golf course. She’s really fun. We’re both really competitive.”
After being in the same pairings in regular season events and playing against each other in the Solheim Cup in 2024, Pond and Stark’s caddie, Hadley Trenfield, became friends, and then the golfers got tight, too.
“In this sport, it seems you get very good at talking to all kinds of people,” Stark said. “Lauren and I think very similarly. We like to think things through and not react when we have problems. We talk a lot about golf in general and I think that we go about things very similarly. It’s funny, her husband has said we’re like the same person.”
At nearly eight years older, Coughlin has provided invaluable information from her experiences that she hopes can help Stark. And Stark providers her own listening and support.
Lauren Coughlin (front) and Maja Stark included sailing on the Baltic Sea among a trip with family and friends. (Photo courtesy of Lauren Coughlin)
“We just hit it off pretty well. We both like coffee and we started to get coffee during tournaments and basically just kept hanging out and we’ve stayed together a couple of times in Airbnb,” Coughlin said. “I would say it happened organically.”
All that led to a European vacation in July, when Coughlin and her husband joined Stark and her family and some friends for a trip together in Sweden during an off week on the European swing.
Stark grew up in the tiny coastal village of Abbekas, with a population fewer than 1,000. Still, it has a nice bakery with good coffee. She extended the invitation to a few friends. “It’s my little hometown where there’s not much to do,” Stark said. “Let’s bring some people there. I didn’t think they were going to do it.”
They had pastries (Coughlin can’t wait to go back for more of those sweet treats) and coffees. They rode bikes to a family friend’s house for a dinner party where there they ate, drank and chatted. They went to Copenhagen one afternoon, too.
Stark’s parents recently got a sailboat, and they all sailed around the Baltic Sea.
They did get some golf in, with Stark and her brother, Albin, beating Coughlin and her husband in a scramble and friendly match.
“There were thunder delays,” Stark recalled. “They were getting absolutely soaked. I don’t know if it was a great memory for her, but it was pretty funny. This was something else. I never experienced it raining that hard. The sky just opened. Singapore-type rain. They didn’t have an umbrella. Me and my brother had one that we shared. It’s competition. I think I had a sweep in Sweden.”
It still sticks with Coughlin, who has done quite well in match play and lost to Madelene Sagstrom in the final of the T-Mobile Match Play Championship this year. In the Americans’ win the Solheim Cup last year, Coughlin was 2-0-1 against Stark, winning a pair of team matches before they halved in singles.
“We did a nine-hole match, and she beat me,” Coughlin recalled of the play in Sweden. “We played a two-man scramble, and we were beating them pretty good for 10, 11 holes. They ended up beating us unfortunately. Those are a couple where she got me back.”
While there may be differences, there’s also many similarities. Their choice of careers is an obvious one, and, fittingly, Stark and Coughlin rank 14th and 15th in the world, respectively, heading into this week’s LPGA Walmart NW Arkansas Championship.
Though they both enjoy coffee, Coughlin is the far bigger fanatic. “I'm very into it. It's like my favorite thing to do,” she said. “It's kind of my thing on the road to decompress. I usually find a local place and try a couple different ones, or if I find one, I like and go there almost every day during the week.”
Coughlin lives in Charlottesville, Va., and Stark is based out of Nashville. They have the same agent, Jeff Chilcoat, of Sterling Sports Management, but that’s a coincidence. Stark was with Chilcoat first, and Coughlin didn’t have an agent until she won two LPGA events in the span of three weeks last summer. Coughlin had plenty of friends on tour who used Chilcoat, and she signed with him as well.
Lauren Coughlin went 2-0-1 against Maja Stark in the 2024 Ryder Cup.
Gregory Shamus
When Stark won the U.S. Women’s Open at Erin Hills Golf Course in June, Coughlin missed the cut, so she went home to Virginia and wasn’t able to celebrate with Stark in Wisconsin. Coughlin can recall all of Stark’s big shots and putts on the back nine.
“I was on pins and needles,” Coughlin said. “In hindsight, it would’ve been cool to have stayed and been there.”
A few days later, ShopRite LPGA Classic organizers decorated Stark’s hotel room and had a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Coughlin played in that event, and they drank the bottle and chatted. And friends always keep it real.
“I’d been struggling a lot earlier in the year. Lauren made fun of me that I was worried about losing my tour card,” Stark said. “When she saw how relieved I was, it was so great. We sat for like an hour and had champagne and just talked about everything that happened and what was different. She was interested to hear. I’ve listened to her talk about when she was winning the [ISPS Handa Women’s Scottish Open] and [CPKC Women’s Open]. It’s cool to have someone who is your friend, but then also is eager to learn about your experience. Hopefully, we can help each other that way.”
There are sure to be many more helpful chats this season. Friends from different backgrounds who are two of the best golfers in the world and their bond over coffee.