Leona Maguire surged into contention by the halfway point in the Fir Hills Seri Pak Championship with a sparkling six-under 65 second round, leaving her just two shots behind leader Malia Nam, an American newcomer in just her second LPGA Tour start.
Maguire is now in a three-way tie for fourth with Americans Rose Zhang and Alison Lee, with Sweden's Madelene Sagstrom and China's Ruoning Yin, the defending champion, tied for second at seven under.
Maguire shot a level par 71 in the opening round but gained more momentum on Friday, remaining par on her first six holes with one birdie and one bogey, and then carding six more birdies on her final 12 holes. She needed just 25 putts for her lowest round yet on the LPGA this year.
The Cavan golfer was positive about her performance, especially as she gears up for a summer including the Olympics and the majors.
"I was a little bit all over the place yesterday," said Maguire. "Drove it well but missed a lot of greens. So yesterday was a really good day. Sort of hanging in and scrambling and a lot of good up-and-downs to keep me in it."
"And then today I gave myself a lot of chances. Putter was working nice, which was good. Nice to sort of get a birdie on our second hole, on 11, to get the round going."
"I made a few changes over the off-season...Drove the ball really nicely the first two days, which has been good to see, then, yeah, putted really nice as well. Kind of found a couple of things I had been doing a few years ago, kind of gone back to them, which is nice to see that sort of paying off sort of these first two rounds as well."
"Just need to get my irons dialed in a little bit more and hopefully we can have a good weekend," she said.
"It's going to be a really big summer, so I think everyone is sort of gearing up towards a big summer. The offseason being so short, some of those first few events were a little bit of a trial run for that."
"So working through those changes whilst still playing tournaments rather than having an extended time off, making sure everything is in a really good place come the summer for all the majors, for the Olympics, for Solheim."
