Welcome to the first edition of the Just Women’s Sports LPGA power rankings. Every month this season, we’ll weigh factors such as wins, top-10 finishes and all-around performances while compiling the list of the top golfers on tour.

This will not be an exact replica of the Rolex World Rankings, though there will likely be some correlation. For example, you’ll notice that World No. 2 Nelly Korda does not appear on the list, as she’s out indefinitely with a blood clot.

As the LPGA gets set to tee off its first major of the year at the Chevron Championship, we run down the top 10 golfers playing right now.

1. Jin Young Ko

Six wins in her last eleven starts. Next.

In all seriousness, since Ko skipped the AIG Women’s Open last August to put in more work with her coach, Si Woo Lee, she has added even more records to her already historic ledger. Ko hit 63 consecutive greens in regulation to close out the 2021 CME Group Tour Championship, winning her second Rolex Player of the Year award. The streak ended at 66 during the first round of the HSBC Women’s World Championship.

The World No. 1 has recorded an immaculate 16 straight rounds in the 60s, a feat never seen before on the LPGA Tour. She’s also posted 34 consecutive rounds under par and nine consecutive top 10 finishes. Her per-round scoring average this season is 68.2.

Ko makes her third start of the year at the Chevron Championship while playing her best golf. Her last two finishes at the Dinah Shore Course were a victory in 2019 and a T7 finish in 2021. Should Ko secure her third major title, she’ll be in the driver’s seat to catch 27-time winner Lorena Ochoa for the most weeks atop the Rolex Rankings. Ko, at 122, currently sits 32 weeks behind Ochoa at 154.

Starts: 2
Wins: 1
Top 10s: 2
Best Finish: Win at HSBC Women’s Championship

2. Danielle Kang

If not for Ko’s laundry list of accomplishments, Kang would be worthy of the top spot. Since overhauling her team this offseason — bringing in a new physio, nutritionist and trainer — she has been tearing it up.

The American finished first and second in the two opening events of the season. Overseas, Kang posted back-to-back top 10s before a T42 finish in Carlsbad, Calif.

“I don’t know if this would be a good thing to say, but I’m using this week as practice a little bit for next week,” Kang said after the opening round of the JTBC Classic, the tournament directly ahead of the Chevron Championship. “There are still some parts of my game that I want to tune up, and I want to go in next week really confident.”

That’s some earned confidence displayed from the six-time tour winner, who’s finished in the top 15 in her last three starts at the Chevron Championship.

Starts: 5
Wins: 1
Top 10s: 4
Best Finish: Win at Hilton Resorts Tournament of Champions

3. Lydia Ko

The 2021 Vare Trophy winner (awarded to the player with the lowest scoring average in a season) is back to playing consistent golf six years removed from her time atop the rankings in 2015 and ‘16. Since last October, Ko has finished in the top 10 in five of her previous seven starts, with a T12 result last week narrowly missing the mark.

That streak culminated with her 17th-career LPGA victory at the Gainbridge LPGA, the second tournament of the tournament at Boca Rio.

Next month, Ko will look to defend her Lotte Championship title from 2021, when she finished 28-under par for her first victory in three seasons.

Starts: 4
Wins: 1
Top 10s: 2
Best Finish: Win at Gainbridge LPGA at Boca Rio

4. Atthaya Thitikul

Say hello to the newest LPGA star. It won’t be surprising to see her continue to ascend the JWS power rankings, just like she has in the Rolex World Rankings. In 20th place to start the season, Thitikul vaulted into fifth after shooting a final-round 64 and winning the JTBC Classic in a playoff. She’s the clear frontrunner for Rolex Rookie of the Year, currently sitting with 329 points and holding a 215-point advantage over Hye-Jin Choi in second place.

Thitikul has even contended in LPGA majors, finishing in fifth place at the Evian Championship last July. One of the only blips on her resume is a T11 finish at the LPGA Drive On Championship in her second start of the season, causing her to narrowly miss the bar for an 80 percent top-10 rate.

Starts: 5
Wins: 1
Top 10s: 3
Best Finish: Win at JTBC Classic

5. Brooke Henderson

The winningest Canadian in golf history finished as the runner-up at the Hilton Tournament of Champions to start the season and hasn’t slowed down since. She’d be five-for-five in top 10s if not for a T11 finish – like Thitikul – at the LPGA Drive On Championship.

“To come out this year so strong, I’m definitely happy and proud of that,” Henderson said after the final round of the Honda LPGA Thailand. “I feel like I’m inching my way closer every week to getting a little bit more comfortable and just enjoying those final groups as much as I have been.”

Henderson tends to win in bunches, having won two tournaments a season from 2016-19. She appears to be on the precipice of one of those runs with her consistent play of late. In late April, she’ll defend her title at Wilshire Country Club in Los Angeles at the DIO Implant L.A. Open.

Starts: 5
Wins: 0
Top 10s: 4
Best Finish: 2nd at Hilton Resorts Tournament of Champions

6. Nanna Koerstz Madsen

It’s incredible how just one stroke can swing your fate in golf. On the 72nd hole at the JTBC Classic, Koerstz Madsen stared down a 5-footer for the win. After becoming the first Danish woman ever to win on the LPGA Tour in Thailand, the 27-year-old nearly went back-to-back and earned the No. 2 spot in these rankings.

Instead, she missed the putt and lost to Thitikul in a playoff. It was her second top-two finish this year and a dramatic reversal from missing the cut in her first start of the season.

Starts: 4
Wins: 1
Top 10s: 2
Best Finish: Win at Honda LPGA Thailand

7. Leona Maguire

Leona Maguire checked off what felt like an inevitable box for the former No. 1 amateur in the world at Crown Colony Golf & Country Club in early February. The day before her mom’s birthday, Maguire shot 18-under par at the Drive On Championship for her first victory and the first by an Irishwoman on the LPGA Tour.

“The support from home has been incredible,” Maguire said. “They’ve been rallying behind me, and that’s something that I’m truly grateful for. It’s always an honor to represent Ireland, no matter where you go.”

Maguire stayed steady in southeast Asia, with a T13 finish in Singapore and a T12 in Thailand.

Starts: 4
Wins: 1
Top 10s: 1
Best Finish: Win at LPGA Drive On Championship Crown Colony

8. Celine Boutier

The Frenchwoman has been on a tear since last June, when she shot a tournemant-record 64 at the Mediheal Championship. She’s finished in the top 10 in nine of her 19 starts since then, and she has three top-five finishes this season. And in 15 rounds on tour this year, the two-time winner has yet to shoot over par.

“I feel pretty good about my weekends, to be honest,” Boutier explained at the Drive On Championship. “It was something I was struggling a bit with last year. I feel like I had a lot of tournaments where I played well the first two days, and then it’s not always easy to be either in the lead or in contention, especially the last two rounds … And I feel like the past two weeks have kind of proved that I got better at that. I feel like I handled it better.”

After passing on the JTBC Classic, she returns at the Chevron Championship, where she finished T50 last year.

Starts: 5
Wins: 0
Top 10s: 3
Best Finish: 3rd at Honda LPGA Thailand

9. Hannah Green

The 2019 KPMG Women’s PGA Championship winner did something no other woman in golf ever has before rejoining the LPGA in Singapore this year: Green won a mixed-gender event on the PGA Tour Australasia’s TPC Murray River. Before that, she’d won the Women’s Vic Open, a former LPGA event.

“I want to be in the top 10 in the world,” Green said after her TPC Murray River victory. “I think I can achieve it. If I keep playing the golf that I am now, hopefully I can get there.”

The Australian kept the momentum going in her opening tour start in Singapore, with a T6 finish.

Starts: 3
Wins: 0
Top 10s: 1
Best Finish: T-6 HSBC Women’s Championship

10. Lexi Thompson

The Florida resident opened the LPGA calendar with two starts in her home state, finishing T6 at the Gainbridge LPGA Boca Rio and second at the LPGA Drive On Championship at Crow Colony. Thompson, who recorded victories in seven consecutive seasons from 2013-19, is looking to return to the winner’s circle. The last time she hoisted a trophy, she dropped a cross-green bomb for eagle for her 11th career victory at the 2019 Shoprite LPGA Classic.

“Just going to continue to work hard and stay in the moment and put myself in contention and hopefully a win will come,” Thompson said after the Drive On Championship.

The first major of the year gives Thompson an opportunity to surge in the power rankings. The Dinah Shore course, home of the Chevron Championship, is one where Thompson has historically excelled. In 12 career starts at Dinah Shore, she’s posted six top-10 finishes, including a victory in 2014.

Starts: 3
Wins: 0
Top 10s: 2
Best Finish: 2nd at LPGA Drive On Championship at Crown Colony

Kent Paisley is a contributing writer at Just Women’s Sports covering golf and the LPGA. He also contributes to Golf Digest. Follow him on Twitter @KentPaisley.

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony this afternoon. 

The Team USA standout is the most decorated women’s swimmer in the sport’s history. In addition to her seven Olympic golds, she’s also won a total of 21 gold medals at the World Championships, the most of any swimmer regardless of gender. 

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The esteemed award recognizes those who have "made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors," according to a White House press briefing. 

Ledecky is one of 19 medal recipients chosen by the Biden administration this year. She joins a class that spans the worlds of politics, sports, film, human rights, religion, and science. Her fellow 2024 awardees include Everything Everywhere All at Once actress Michelle Yeoh, pioneering Hispanic astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, plus posthumous winners Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the US, and assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers. 

Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe were among 2022’s class of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients. Biles and Rapinoe were the fifth and sixth women athletes to be given the honor, making Ledecky the seventh.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

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In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

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In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.