Madelene Sagström

When it comes to golf, Madelene Sagström is a citizen of the world.

Growing up in her native Sweden, the 32-year-old Sagström represented her homeland in an assortment of international amateur matches before going on to play college golf in the United States at LSU, where she was named the 2015 SEC Player of the Year and was a finalist for the ANNIKA Award, presented each year to the top player in women’s college golf.

She turned professional in 2015 and today competes on both the LPGA and Ladies European Tours. She’s won two LPGA tournaments, most recently the T-Mobile Match Play in April, and has been part of four European Solheim Cup teams. She also represented Sweden at the 2020 Summer Olympic in Tokyo.

Appearing on the Wonderful Women of Golf podcast with host Rick Woelfel, Sagström recalls experiencing a variety of golf courses when she was starting in the game.

“Learning how to travel was the big thing growing up,” she says. “Going to different places, going to different climates, learning new golf courses. That’s what I do now on a weekly basis. I go all across the world and travel and try to figure out how to play good, week in and week out.”

Moving to the southeastern U.S. for college forced Sagström to adapt to different types of grasses than she was accustomed to. That process remains ongoing.

“I’m still fighting with Bermuda,” she says. “It took me a good two or three years to actually figure out that, ‘This is insane.’ But it was a great experience and now I have Bermuda in Florida” — where she resides when in the United States. “It definitely feels like that is to my advantage when we go to [courses with Bermuda greens] throughout the season, but everything takes adjustment. So, wherever you live, you’re probably going to like it more or less and then you have to learn to adapt and change when you travel.”

Sagström notes that being a professional golfer requires being able to adjust to varying conditions.

“You have to learn how to adapt,” she says. “Before the week, throughout the week. The pace of the greens can change from day to day. The better you are at adapting, I think the more success you’re going to have.”

In the LPGA Tour’s early days, there were occasions when host superintendents would set the golf course to be as difficult or as long as possible to give the long-hitting Babe Didrikson Zaharias an advantage (often at her insistence) or to minimize the chance of the LPGA players shooting lower scores than the club’s members.

The mindset is vastly different today as the LPGA marks its 75th anniversary. Sagström says she sees a variety of course conditions and green speeds over the course of a season.

“Superintendents try their best at doing everything they can to prepare courses as well as they can for us,” she says. “I do think that over the years there used to be more of a standard of ‘We want this speed of the greens to try and keep it consistent.’ I see a change in that, which I like, and I think it’s the right direction of the course saying, ‘This is the pace we can get on our greens, and this is what we desired,’ rather than having the stereotypical 10½ Stimp.

“You can go one week playing 13 on the greens and then the next week we’re playing 10½. It’s fun, but it’s hard. You have to figure out how to get around the golf course each week, but we play the best conditions the course can play, and our major championships are really outstanding, the level of golf we play and the courses we play.”