Minjee Lee ran away with the 2022 U.S. Women’s Open at Pine Needles, becoming the first Australian to win the major championship since her mentor and LPGA Hall of Famer, Karrie Webb, did so 21 years ago at the same course.

Led by Lee’s historic feat, here are five takeaways from the second major tournament of the LPGA season.

1. Minjee Lee’s major run

Last Monday, Minjee Lee joked with her caddie that there would be plenty of room to practice with the various stations on the Pine Needles’ driving range. On Sunday, she was one of the last players off the range ahead of the final tee time of the 2022 U.S. Women’s Open.

Lee protected her three-shot lead to win by four strokes, shooting an even-par 71 on a course that gave up only two under-par rounds Sunday. Outlasting second-place finisher Mina Harigae, Lee set the 72-hole scoring record while accomplishing a lifelong goal.

“It’s been my dream since I was a little girl,” Lee said. “This is the one I always wanted to win.”

Whatever nerves she was feeling subsided on the first holes, as Lee started birdie-birdie to extend her lead to five strokes. She all but solidified her victory on the 12th hole when she landed her approach shot 6 feet from the hole and made the putt for birdie. She joins Australian legends Jan Stephenson (1986) and Webb (2000, 2001) as U.S. Women’s Open champions from the country.

“I think this will be huge for all the little girls, and even the boys and the children watching,” Lee said. “I know there’s been a really big boom in [Western Australia]. The girls have been a lot more interested in playing, so hopefully they watch me on TV and I can be a good role model to them and they’ll start getting more involved.”

The winning putt. 🏆

Your 2022 #USWomensOpen Champion, @minjeegolf! pic.twitter.com/LX3OYPksbS

— LPGA (@LPGA) June 5, 2022

Lee has now won two of the last four LPGA majors (2021 Amundi Evian Championship, 2022 U.S. Women’s Open), a feat last achieved by World No. 1 Jin Young Ko at the ANA Inspiration (now the Chevron Championship) and Evian Championship in 2019.

2. Lydia Ko builds toward third major championship

When a player relinquishes the No. 1 spot in the Rolex World Rankings, they can end up in a battle for survival. Yani Tseng, for example, dropped off in 2012 and never recovered.

The last world No. 1 before Nelly Korda and Jin Young Ko, Sung Hyun Park, displayed her talent over the first 36-holes at Pine Needles this week, sitting at four-under par and T-9 after two rounds. The 2016 U.S. Women’s Open champion then faltered down the stretch, ending up at five-over par for the week and T-28, and still in search of her first top-10 finish since the 2019 AIG Women’s Open.

Lydia Ko last held the World No. 1 ranking in 2017 and has recorded only one victory from 2017-20, at the 2018 Mediheal Championship in San Francisco.

The 17-time LPGA winner fell as far as 55th in the world rankings in 2020. Now, the World No. 4 as of Monday, Ko has displayed remarkable consistency in her last 13 events, finishing inside the top 25 of every tournament since last September. Ko won twice at the 2021 LOTTE Championship and 2022 Gainbridge LPGA at Boca Rio. Her caddie, Derek Kistler, credits her recent success to her ability around the greens.

“She’s got the best short game in golf, pretty much when you talk about chipping and putting,” Kistler said. “She still can get loose with her driver a little bit, but it’s improving. I don’t think it’s anything crazy. She’s just consistent.”

Lydia Ko is quietly creeping her way up the leaderboard.

This birdie putt moves her inside the top ten at -5. #USWomensOpen

📺 : @USA_Network pic.twitter.com/u3wonmV4ac

— Golf Channel (@GolfChannel) June 4, 2022

Even when Kistler felt Ko didn’t have her best driver game at the Founder’s Cup in May, she still posted 24 birdies for a T-12 finish. This week, Ko posted her third top-10 finish in her last seven major starts. The Kiwi finished runner-up at the 2021 ANA Inspiration, T-6 at the 2021 Amundi Evian Championship and in fifth place at the U.S. Open on Sunday.

Firmly back in the hunt, the 25-year-old is aiming for her third major title and first one in six years.

“I think we all try and peak at the majors,” Ko said. “You’re just trying to play the best golf you can and, at the same time, not think of it any more differently than any other event. But to play solid, I think it just shows what point my game is at, and I know there are things to improve, but there’s still a lot of good from there.”

3. LPGA’s parity era continues

From 2002-16, a player won multiple times on the LPGA Tour by the 10th tournament of the year. In four of the last six seasons, it’s taken more than 10 tournaments for the first multi-time champion to emerge, showcasing the increasing depth of the field.

Minjee Lee’s wins in 2022 came in the 11th and 13th events on the tournament calendar. In 2017, it took until the 17th event for So Yeon Ryu to become the first player to win multiple tournaments. In 2018, Ariya Jutaugarn did it in the 14th event, and in 2021, Nelly Korda got there by the 14th event, too.

This weekend at the U.S. Open, runner-up Mina Harigae finished four strokes off the mark in her first top-10 in 46 career major starts over her 11-year career.

“I’m not going to lie, my stomach hurt the last couple holes coming down,” Harigae said. “I was really stressed out, but I was really just focusing on one shot at a time, making solid contact and just hitting good putts.”

4. Michelle Wie West and Annika Sorenstam exit the stage

There are few sports where a 51-year-old could return to the major stage for the first time in 14 years and still be expected to perform. Annika Sorenstam, 72-time LPGA winner and three-time U.S. Women’s Open Champion, faced just that in her return to Pine Needles, where she won the championship in 1996.

“The curiosity for me isn’t how she’s going to make the cut this week, because she is going to make the cut,” former Golf Channel commentator Jerry Foltz said leading up to the tournament. “She doesn’t know how not to. Unlike my playing career, Annika doesn’t make plane reservations on Saturday morning in advance.”

Paired with 2011 U.S. Women’s Open winner So Yeon Ryu and amateur Ingrid Lindblad (who won low Am honors this week), Sorenstam felt she had to score under par Friday after an opening-round 74 to advance to the weekend. Instead, Sorenstam posted a 10-over par 81, including a seven-over 43 on the back nine, to finish outside the cut — her 12th missed cut in 310 career starts.

“It was a disappointing final round, actually final nine,” she said. “But it’s been great to be here. You know what Pine Needles means to me and my family and everybody. We made a lot of different memories in different ways.”

Michelle Wie West, meanwhile, exited Pine Needles with a smile after almost making a long bomb from the front fringe on her 36th hole to get to three-over par and a possible spot in the weekend’s competition.

The 32-year-old ended up finishing at five-over par through two rounds, missing the cut and officially moving on to her next adventures around golf. The 2014 U.S. Women’s Open champion didn’t disclose those plans specifically, but she did share earlier in the week that LA Golf — a golf equipment company for which she leads the women’s partnership initiative — is providing full healthcare for sponsored athletes, featuring mental health days and paid maternity leave.

“This is just the beginning,” Wie West wrote in an Instagram post. “We are excited to create a dialogue.”

The Stanford graduate plans to let her clubs gather some dust before preparing for her final start on the LPGA Tour, the 2023 U.S. Women’s Open at Pebble Beach.

5. The gold standard

Harigae’s agent, Alex Guerrero, may have put it best Saturday afternoon on how much this week has done for his client, a 13-year LPGA veteran.

The $10 million purse and first-place check of $1.8 million, introduced this year at the U.S. Open, are new records in the women’s game. Harigae earned the first runner-up check worth over a million dollars in women’s golf history (her biggest payday previously was $268,657 for a T-3 finish at the 2021 CME Group Tour Championship). NBC also featured seven hours of live coverage of the tournaments on its national network, a marked increase from past years.

“My player is in the final group back-to-back days,” Guerrero said of Harigae. “That’s more national TV exposure than she’s gotten over her whole career.”

The USGA aims to expand the purse to $12 million over the next five years and continue to hold the major championship at some of the sport’s most iconic venues. Pebble Beach, one of the most historic courses in the country, will host the 2023 U.S. Women’s Open.

Behind Heather Daly-Donofrio, the LPGA’s former Chief Operations Officer (and former LPGA player) hired in April as the USGA’s Managing Director of the Athlete Development Program, will lead a $50 million initiative to grow the talent pool and lower barriers to access in women’s golf.

“USGA can assist families who have children with the talent to continue,” Whan told The Pilot. “Mexico does it, Canada does it, other countries do it. We are going to do it.”

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.

Zimbabwean swimming legend Kirsty Coventry made history on Thursday, when she became both the first woman and first African ever elected president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

At 41-years-old, Coventry will also be the youngest president in the organization's 131-year history and the 10th individual to ever hold the office.

"As an nine-year-old girl, I never thought I would be standing up here one day getting to give back to this incredible movement of ours," the five-time Olympian said in her remarks.

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An extensive Olympic resume, in and out of the pool

The Auburn University grad and seven-time Olympic medal-winner — including back-to-back golds in the 200-meter backstroke at the 2004 Athens and 2008 Beijing Games — retired from competition after the 2016 Rio Olympics.

At that time, Coventry was already three years into her IOC membership, after initially joining as part of the governing body's Athletes' Commission. She joined the Executive Committee in 2023.

"I will make all of you very, very proud and hopefully extremely confident in the decision you have taken," Coventry said to her fellow members in her acceptance speech. "Now we have got some work together."

That work that awaits Coventry in her eight-year mandate will include navigating the 2028 LA Games and selecting a host for the 2036 Summer Games.

Her first Olympic Games at the helm, however, will be the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, giving her less than a year to prepare before the Opening Ceremony kicks off.

Coventry to continue IOC efforts to promote gender equity

Coventry will have a few months to adjust before assuming her new office on June 23rd, when she will succeed her mentor, 71-year-old Thomas Bach.

Bach will have served the IOC's maximum 12-year tenure in the role when he steps down, having led the governing body to stage the first-ever Olympic Games with equal numbers of women and men competing — a mark captured at the 2024 Summer Games in Paris.

With gender equity as a driving force in his leadership, Bach also increased the number women serving as both IOC members and in the organization's leadership roles, with women comprising seven of the body's 15-person executive board.

Coventry is one of those seven women, and Bach specifically hand-picked her as his successor.

The legacy she inherits isn't lost on Coventry, both in the efforts of Bach and in the women who paved the way — perhaps none more directly than IOC member Anita DeFrantz, a 1976 Olympic bronze medal-winning rower for Team USA and the only other woman to ever run for IOC president.

Recognizing the election's historic significance, 72-year-old DeFrantz overcame significant health issues to travel to Greece in order to vote for Coventry — with her ballot securing the exact number of votes Coventry needed to win.

"I was really proud that I could make her proud," an emotional Coventry said.

The NCAA is leveling the playing field, with Women’s March Madness teams in line to receive their first-ever prize payouts based on tournament performance — a mechanism the men’s tournament has enjoyed since 1991.

Sparked by 2021's landmark NCAA gender equity review, the NCAA will distribute a total of approximately $15 million to individual conferences based on how many games their teams play, with each March Madness performance "unit" worth about $113,000.

This year's inaugural $15 million purse represents 26% of the competition's $65 million media rights valuation — putting it proportionally on par with the percentage allocated to the men's fund.

That overall prize pool will jump to $20 million in 2026 and $25 million in 2027, before switching to a successive 2.9% increase per year.

"We are all playing in the same March Madness," said UNC Greensboro head coach Trina Patterson, whose No. 16-seed Spartans will face No. 1-seed USC in the first round on Saturday. "The treatment for the men and women should be equal. We get a unit!"

March Madness teams get additional NCAA tournament perks

While the performance payouts are new this year, women's March Madness teams also receive perks like charter flights throughout the tournament, which can make all the difference for smaller programs eyeing an upset.

"Everyone is so excited about the experience. Going from the bus directly to the plane, everyone was so happy," March Madness debutante William & Mary head coach Erin Dickerson Davis told ESPN ahead of her No. 16-seed team’s First Four victory on Thursday.

Columbia junior Perri Page, whose No. 11-seed Lions defeated Washington in their own First Four matchup on Thursday, echoed Davis' sentiment, saying, "It was cool going to the charter, and we've been taking it all in."

"We've been enjoying the whole season," the forward added, noting "It's great we can make money for the school now."

"It should have always been that way. Women's basketball has been fighting for equality for a very long time," said Davis. "I've been in this business for many, many years. I played college basketball. It's a long time coming."

"You got to start somewhere, and I think we've been so far behind," added Columbia head coach Megan Griffith.

"This is more like the whipped cream. I think the cherry on top is going to keep coming — but it's really good so far."

Less than two months before the season tips off on May 16th, the WNBA dropped its full 2025 national broadcast slate on Thursday, rewarding last year’s most in-demand teams with a significant uptick in screen time.

Fueled by the fan fervor around 2024 Rookie of the Year Caitlin Clark, the Indiana Fever will see a league-record 41 of their 44 regular-season games aired nationally this season.

That tally includes all five Fever matchups against regional rival Chicago, after the pair's June 23rd game averaged 2.3 million viewers — becoming the most-watched game of the 2024 regular season.

Just behind Indiana in earning significant national broadcast coverage are two-time WNBA champs Las Vegas, who will see 33 of their games aired across the country. As for the reigning champions New York Liberty, they trail the Aces by just one game, with 32 of their 2025 season games garnering national attention.

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Record WNBA ratings spur big broadcast moves

Thanks to 2024’s monster ratings, big-name networks are increasingly recognizing the WNBA as a profitable summer product, with broadcasters expanding their coverage as the league prepares for its 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights contract to kick in next year.

With the 2025 WNBA season expanding from 40 to 44 games per team, ION is leading all broadcasters with 50 regular-season games, with ABC/ESPN, CBS Sports, NBA TV, and Amazon Prime all taking a piece of the pro women's basketball league's pie.

Broadcasters are also moving games off of their sports-specific networks and onto flagship cable channels, with a record 13 matchups — a full half of Disney Networks' 26 regular-season games — set to air on ABC, including the 2025 WNBA All-Star Game.

The league will also see its first-ever regular-season games earn primetime broadcast TV slots, with CBS Sports elevating two of its 20 games — the June 7th and August 9th battles between the Chicago Sky and the Indiana Fever — to its flagship network, CBS.

As the WNBA shoots for an even more impactful 2025 season, broadcasters are helping to boost the charge, offering increased access to the league’s brightest stars and biggest games.

The NCAA tournament tips off in earnest with the bracket's 64-team first round on Friday, as eager March Madness fans look beyond the chalk to eye the competition's underdogs after a rollercoaster 2024/25 basketball season.

Early upsets aren’t exactly the norm in the women’s tournament. Only one lower seed won their first-round matchup in 2024, and no team below a No. 3 seed has ever gone the distance, but in a season of increased parity, a few lower-rated squads are rounding into underdog form.

Breaking down potential March Madness bracket-busters

For potential March Madness upset instigators, late-season momentum late season momentum is the name of the game — a dangerous factor in any single-elimination tournament.

Even without superstar grad Caitlin Clark, No. 6-seed Iowa capped their regular season on a high before narrowly losing to No. 4-seed Ohio State in the Big Ten tournament's quarterfinals. Should they advance past No. 11-seed Murray State in their first-round Saturday matchup, the Hawkeyes are poised to give No. 3-seed Oklahoma a run for their money in the second round on Monday.

Entering as a No. 10-seed, Ivy League tournament champs Harvard will have their hands full against No. 7-seed Michigan State on Saturday, but Crimson senior Harmoni Turner and her season-average 22.5 points per game could tilt the scales in Harvard's favor.

After edging out first-round opponent No. 11-seed Iowa State, No. 6-seed Michigan is playing like an upset contender. Now a potential second-round matchup against No. 3-seed Notre Dame — fresh off a recent losing skid — awaits the young squad. 

With the brackets locked and the teams loaded, the prospects of twists and turns make the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament especially exciting — even if this year’s frontrunners appear destined for Tampa.

How to watch Women's March Madness games this weekend

The Big Dance officially begins at 11:30 AM ET on Friday, when No. 11 Iowa State tips off against No. 6 Michigan on ESPN2.

Saturday's slate will complete the 2024/25 NCAA tournament's first round, with No. 6 Iowa beginning their Madness run against No. 11 Murray State at 12 PM ET on ESPN.

No. 10 Harvard will start dancing a few hours later, with the Crimson facing No. 7 Michigan State at 4:30 PM ET on ESPNews.

All games in the 2025 March Madness tournament will have live coverage across ESPN networks.