Women’s Open videos give Ashleigh Buhai good swing feeling at Chevron

Through 36 holes of the Chevron Championship, Ashleigh Buhai was admittedly frustrated. She was hitting her irons “very poorly” and missing too many greens. If not for her putter, she likely would’ve missed the cut.

Instead, she squeezed into the weekend by a couple shots with a 71-73 start, and then on Friday night, she opened the photo album on her phone and began watching swing videos from when she won the AIG Women’s Open last summer at Muirfield.

Buhai sent a few of the videos to her coach, Doug Wood, who is back in South Africa.

“We picked something up, and had a quick FaceTime lesson this morning,” Buhai said, “and obviously it paid off.”

Buhai responded with a 6-under 66 in Saturday’s third round at Carlton Woods, missing just four greens in regulation and carding seven birdies. That performance came after a warm-up in which she needed about 20 balls to rediscover some consistency with her ball-striking.

Full-field scores from The Chevron Championship

With one round to play, Buhai is outside the top 10, but she’s also only four shots off the lead – and now gaming a swing that she’s more pleased with.

“It was more just trying to recreate a feeling that I had, kind of was losing the club face, so I was just trying to keep the face throughout my swing by keeping my wrist in a certain angle, and then that was just able to free me up,” Buhai explained. “I always find I play well when I just have one swing thought and that’s all I tried doing was repeat. That varies from time to time. It was a different thing a few weeks ago and just needed to find that one swing thought this week, and today it clicked.

“… I can’t say it was the same feelings at Muirfield, but we tried to get my swing in the same position to get that, so it was a completely different feeling to what happened at Muirfield, but what I tried to do to square the club face up, and it got me the results I needed to get.”