Annika Sörenstam

Annika Sörenstam is a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on October 9, 1970 at Bro, outside Stockholm in Sweden. As a child she showed a talent for tennis, football and skiing as well, and she took up golf at about twelve, sharing one set of clubs with her sister Charlotta. As an amateur she played for Sweden and won the individual title at the 1992 Women’s World Amateur Team Championship (the Espirito Santo Trophy). She turned professional in 1992 and joined the LPGA Tour from 1994. She won 72 times on the LPGA Tour, ten of them majors, including three U.S. Women’s Opens. In 2003 she completed the career grand slam of all four majors, and in the same year she played in a men’s PGA Tour event, the Bank of America Colonial — the first woman to appear on the PGA Tour since 1945. She was named LPGA Player of the Year eight times, and in 2001 she became the first woman to shoot 59 in official competition. She was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2003 and stepped back from the front line after the 2008 season. Later, past the age of fifty, she won the 2021 U.S. Senior Women’s Open.

She has been at work on course design since 2003. Her first was the Annika Course at Mission Hills in Shenzhen, China, completed that year. Mission Hills is a large golf resort known for having each of its courses laid out by a different figure from the game, and on the same property are courses by Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, Ernie Els and Vijay Singh. Her second was Euphoria Golf Estate & Hydro in South Africa, announced in 2006 and opened in 2008. Since retiring from competition she has carried on designing under the name ANNIKA Course Design, one of her own brand businesses alongside her golf schools and her apparel.

Her ties with Asia run deep, and she won seven times on the JLPGA Tour in Japan. In Southeast Asia, a Malaysian business paper reported in 2009 that Sörenstam had been invited to design the first eighteen holes of Mines Golf City, a project planned at Bukit Beruntung outside Kuala Lumpur. The Mines Resort & Golf Club at Seri Kembangan, which GoGolf does list, is a different course altogether. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Sörenstam.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: Keith Allison / CC BY-SA 2.0