Why are some LPGA pros walking away early? It’s complex (and not)

It was in a busy elementary school cafeteria, of all places, when it hit Brittany Lincicome. The eight-time LPGA Tour winner was volunteering at her daughter’s school, floating around the room, opening bags of chips, extracting cheese sticks from those pesky wrappers and helping students toss their trash. And then she had a thought: this is so much more enjoyable than hitting golf balls.

That would not be an issue, were golf not her chosen profession.

“That’s the moment I had been looking for, and I was like, Okay, I’m retiring. I’m done,” Lincicome says. “All of a sudden it was like, You know what? No. There’s more to life. I don’t need to be out there grinding. I don’t have anything to prove.”

Lincicome, 39, was one of many LPGA pros who announced their complete or partial retirement from golf in the past year. Professional golfers walking away from the game isn’t necessarily news, but the number of women who decided to exit in the past 12 months was shockingly high, especially since so many of them are in their 30s.

“It’s been crazy,” Lincicome says. “I can’t even rattle off all the names.”

She can’t, but we can: Lexi Thompson, Amy Olson, Ally Ewing, Gerina Mendoza, Mariajo Uribe, So Yeon Ryu, Marina Alex, In Kyung Kim, Emma Talley. And that’s not all of them. Thirteen players retired from full-time play in 2024—and six were 34 or younger.

So, what gives?

The answer is simple yet complicated: Life. For some, retirement means becoming a parent, for others, it means the opportunity to find themselves. And while the LPGA has enticed players to stick around the game with steadily increasing purses over the years — up to $131 million total in 2025, from $73 million in 2021 — the money has also made it easier for top players to cash out early.

“For myself and my generation, somebody playing for 20 years is a thing of the past,” says Lincicome, who, as a mother of two, was a regular at the LPGA’s mobile Child Development Center, where players and staff have access to childcare on the road. “I don’t think girls play that long anymore. After 10 years, it’s like, Okay, we’re done.”

Ewing, 32, had one of the best seasons of her career in 2024. She missed just one cut in 19 starts and recorded six top 10s, three of them in majors. But she had other things she wanted to accomplish. Ewing and her husband, Charlie, adopted a dog, a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever named Rusty. In February, Rusty posed next to an ultrasound photo and a onesie. Ewing was pregnant.

Olson, at age 31, officially announced her retirement in April 2024, seven months after she gave birth to her daughter, Carly. Retirement was always the plan, and Olson and her husband, Grant, first talked about how it would look when they were dating.

“That made it easier sacrificing for the number of years we did, when I was traveling all the time,” Olson says. “Knowing it was temporary and knowing we were trying to set ourselves up to be able to have this phase we are moving into now was always in the back of our minds.”

Parenthood factors into the lives of PGA Tour players, too, but Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler and Scottie Scheffler — to name just a few of the Tour’s newest dads — have not wrestled with hanging up their soft spikes. In fact, for many of the top men in the pro ranks, fatherhood is seen as something of a competitive advantage. Many men only begin to reach their peak around the age when most LPGA players are in the back half of their careers. The average age of golf’s top 10 male players is 30.9; it’s 25.6 for the top 10 women, and none are north of 30 years old.

The men have another reason to stick around: a lucrative late-career tour. The PGA Tour Champions, for players over 50, schedules nearly 30 events each year, most with purses over $2 million. The female equivalent, the Legends of the LPGA, mounts events one-third as often and rarely has purses exceeding $400,000. The age requirement for the Legends tour is 45, although there’s been talk of lowering it to 40. Lincicome, who’d love another opportunity to play competitively down the road, would be all for it.

TO BE CLEAR, there’s more to early retirement in women’s golf. One-time teen phenom Michelle Wie West retired in 2023, at age 33, after five LPGA wins, a history of nagging injuries and seemingly a lifetime of scrutiny. She was somewhat shocked by the wave of 2024 retirees, but these things, she says, come in phases.

“Female athletes, in general — I think we just live a different trajectory than male athletes,” Wie West said. “We have a biological clock, and there are things we need to consider. Speaking for myself, it was not sustainable for me to play into my 50s and 60s, and that was a personal decision I made.”

Similarly, Lexi Thompson, 30, had already been in the public eye for nearly two decades when, in May 2024, she announced her decision to step away from a full-time schedule. She started playing tournaments when she was seven and competed in her first U.S. Women’s Open at 12. For her, it wasn’t just the golf that became too much, it was all the other stuff: the practice, the travel, the sponsor obligations, the loneliness, the stress. For all the highs, there were too many lows. Her decision, years in the making, brought relief.

“It’s time to be able to go to bed at night and not worry about the next day and how I’m going to perform and how I’m going to feel — or how people are going to see me — because of it,” Thompson told GOLF last summer. “Just giving my mind that mental shutdown and feeling okay with myself; not having to perform and be this perfect person — that’s what I’m probably looking forward to the most.”

AT 10 A.M. ON A FRIDAY IN LATE FEBRUARY, Lorena Ochoa looked back upon a busy morning. From a desk in the office of her home about 90 minutes outside of Mexico City, she was caught off guard by the realization that her three kids were off from school for the day.

“I thought it was going to be a quiet morning,” she joked.

Before this latest batch of LPGA retirees made headlines, Ochoa was the LPGA’s most famous early-departure. She was the top-ranked player in the world when she suddenly announced her retirement, at age 28, back in 2010.

In just six years on the LPGA Tour, Ochoa won 27 times, including two majors. In her 183 LPGA starts, she finished first, second or third a remarkable 34 percent of the time. By the time she retired, she was a lock for the Hall of Fame. But still, why quit?

“I was ready to move on,” she said. “I was ready to do all the other activities. I know I was young, only 28. Physically I was strong, mentally it was probably my best time. But you start getting these mixed feelings in your head, when you don’t get that spark anymore or get that excitement and motivation. And then your priorities start changing.”

Fifteen years later, Ochoa has no regrets. She’s deeply involved in her Lorena Ochoa Foundation, which, among other things, funds a school of 360 underprivileged children in Guadalajara. She’s active with her sponsors and has learned to enjoy “playing bad golf.” She builds golf courses and enjoys biking, running and hiking. The same energy, drive and commitment she used to put into golf now goes toward these new passions. Her three kids keep her busy too: they play golf, soccer and tennis.

“I’m glad to say I made the right decision, and sometimes you have to take a leap of faith,” Ochoa says. “You don’t know what is going to happen, but you are going to be surprised, because there are so many great and beautiful things outside of golf. I guess I’m proof of that, because I’m happy with myself. And I feel peace.”