LEONA Maguire hopes to add more distance off the tee for next season and Rathfriland-based strength-and-conditioning coach Timmy Graham will play a leading role in helping the Cavan golfer get the extra yardage and accuracy she wants.
During an “up and down year” Maguire (30) became the first Irish woman to win on the Ladies’ European Tour and reached the final of the T-Mobile Matchplay in Las Vegas but slipped to 51st in the world rankings and was surprisingly used just once before the singles in the Solheim Cup.
Now the Breffni county native intends to use the off-season to work on her game and Graham, whose clients range from the Burren Gaelic Footballers to the Northern Ireland weightlifting team can continue to coach her no matter where she is in the world.
“I’ve been working for Timmy for quite a while now and he’s a great guy,” explained the Solheim Cup star who insists there is no bad blood between herself and European captain Suzann Pettersen.
“He’s helping me with that pursuit of more distance and he really knows his stuff. He’s always trying to evolve and he works closely with my physio and my whole team, trying to always find new ways, whether it’s to prevent injury or pick up a bit of speed or things like that.
“So he’s a very valuable member of the team and it’s nice to have him on board because he’s such a positive guy as well.
“He’s always the first one on the phone when something goes well, or even when it doesn’t, always with a positive attitude and a positive outlook which is very important.
“He programmes everything through an app and sends on videos of all the different exercises and then when I’m home, I’ll pop up to either see him in Rathfriland or he’ll come down and see me in Cavan.
“When I’m on the road we’ll do Facetime or whatever. He has an app and I get a notification every day for what session I have to do, or whether it’s a warm-up or a gym session, or whatever it is.
“I get a ‘ping’ on my phone every morning when I wake up and what I have to do so I have to adapt to it with modern technology. He’s been a great, great addition to the team.”
Maguire’s father Declan is also a rock of support. She returned home at the weekend and he immediately invited her to join him on a trip to Omagh to watch Cavan’s Arva play in the Ulster Intermediate Championship final against Ballinderry.
“Dad’s a massive sporting fan - football fan and any time I’m away I always get the run-down of Cavan GAA and what’s going on in the county and further afield,” said Leona.
“I get lots of sporting analogies. I’ve got a lot of sporting analogies over the last year, sort of on the ups and downs of sports and mentality and stuff like that. He’s taken to Kobe Bryant videos at the minute - that’s been his go-to recently and I’ve done those lately.
“He’s always there and he’s good for advice and support when it comes to sport.”
Maguire had many memorable moments last season but when mistakes came along they tended to derail some of the good work that had gone before them and that proved costly.
She has fallen from top 10 in the world to outside the top 50 over the past 18 months but is confident that she will recover the lost ground.
“It was a bit of an up-and-down year,” she said.
“I suppose that’s sport and golf as well. At the same time, I felt like I played some really good golf in spots this year, obviously getting the win in London, getting my first LET win (with an eagle at the final hole).
“I suppose that was probably the highlight of the year. That was nice and that was a goal at the start of the year, to try and get that one ticked off.
“Even though it maybe wasn’t as good a year as I had in the past, it was still full of a lot of great golf and I still made my way to the Tour Championship at the end of the year. And the standard on the LPGA is just getting higher and higher every year as well.
“There was a lot of sort of close calls this year, of a shot here and a shot there. It was a learning year.”
She intends to use her downtime during the off-season to “fine-tune a few things” in her swing and iron out issues in her game which prevented her from performing consistently at the highest level last season.
“I think last year I sort of leaned more towards a draw to get a little bit more distance off the tee,” she explained.
“And as the year went on, we kind of scaled back a little bit, tried to get a bit more neutral again and tried to get back to a bit more of my left-right flight. In the process of that I got a little bit caught between the two and ended up with a few bigger misses with my driver which caused a little bit of bother.
“So I just need a little bit of time to sort of dial that in and get that back to where it needs to be. If I can drive the ball a little bit better, I’ll be in good shape next year and hole a few more putts.”
As for the Solheim Cup, Irish golf fans shared her frustration as she sat on the bench watching Europe’s struggles against the USA in September.
Europe lost 15.5 to 12.5 in Virginia and Maguire - Europe’s best player in 2021 and 2023 – was picked just once before the singles in which she hammered Ally Ewing (currently ranked 19 in the world) 4&3.
She insists there are no hard feelings between her and European captain Pettersen.
“I have an incredible amount of respect for her and we actually get on very well,” she said.
“We were faced with very tough opposition and she had certain stats and people she employed this year that felt that other people were better choices and that’s ultimately the choice they made.
“We’ve had discussions since, some things we agree on, some things we don’t agree on but there’s absolutely no animosity. The way we left it was she said to me that 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.”
