New Jersey native Marina Alex competes at home after Palos Verdes win | LPGA

CLIFTON, NEW JERSEY | After earning a long-awaited win at the Palos Verdes Championship presented by Bank of America, Marina Alex enters the week with a second career LPGA win under her belt. Alex, now No. 28 in the Rolex rankings, beat world No. 1 Jin Young Ko by a single stroke in California two Sundays ago.

“It’s probably one of the most consistent golf courses I’ve played in a long time, from Boca down to this stretch,” Alex said.

Marina said she worked through some issues in her game leading up to California, past Thailand and Singapore.

“I just changed the way I start my golf swing and my takeaways in the first third of my swing. It allows me to take the strain off my back a bit and get through the ball with a little less twist on my spine,” she said.

Alex has struggled with a nagging back injury for the past few years which has kept her out of competition and left her career in the air. In 2020, she said she was in the best shape of her life, but training hard during the pandemic triggered her.

“It didn’t give me an opportunity to improve anything. It’s really easy to go back full throttle and then that’s when things start to go haywire, that happened to me. I was trying to accelerate to get back to playing and I was absolutely not ready for that,” said Alex.

Earlier this year, Alex didn’t know how long she could keep playing golf due to injury, but she worked hard in the offseason on her swing after building up some stamina.

“It was a long process, but hopefully it allowed me to heal properly and rebuild my strength, and hopefully it’s not something I have to deal with in the immediate future,” she said.

Born and raised in Wayne, New Jersey, Marina is vaguely familiar with the tree-lined course, narrow fairways and sloping greens of Upper Montclair Country Club.

“I played the US Junior Qualifier when I was 12, and I’m pretty sure I shot 93. That’s my only memory.” Marina joked: “I hope to improve from 93, if I’m being honest.”

To prepare for this week’s potential curveballs, Alex worked closely with coach Claude Harmon III.

“I noticed on the nine that I played, which was our back nine that I played yesterday, you can hit a good shot, but then you might get slightly blocked by a tree and have to work away from the spit or from the middle of the green,” she says.

Marina said this hometown event will require tactical positioning off the tee and consistent ball trajectories to be successful.

“There are certain angles off the tee where you have to get to the right or left side of the fairways to get better approaches into the greens as they have some overhanging tree branches which is a pretty subtle but cool element of this course,” she said.