Golf
Viktor Hovland Gives Brutally Honest Self Assessment After Winning Valspar Championship With New Coach
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Viktor Hovland has given an honest self-assessment after his Valspar Championship victory and heaped huge praise on his new coach, Grant Waite.
Viktor Hovland Praises Coach After Valspar Championship Win
After a successful 2023 campaign, many tipped Viktor Hovland to go on and achieve great things in the 2024 season – but things did not go to plan.
The Norwegian made obvious adjustments to his game, tinkering with his swing and implementing new features which did not gain the results he would have been expecting.
This poor run of form appears to be coming to an end, as Hovland picked up a victory at the 2025 Valspar Championship recently – being an underdog to win the tournament on UK betting sites.
After this triumph, Hovland now has seven PGA Tour titles and despite this run of success, the 27-year-old is still struggling with certain aspects and offered out advice to other players to help similar problems.
He said: “I’d say, at the end of the day, when you’re struggling with something it’s just problems, and problems are usually a lack of information.
“So, I would encourage people to go out and seek more information and try it out for yourself, see if it improves, if it helps your problems.
“And if it doesn’t, then you got to seek for more answers, and you keep going and keep going, and hopefully you got it figured out until the end.”
As previously mentioned, Hovland struggled during the 2024 campaign, only finishing in the top 10 at two PGA Tour events – placing third at the PGA Championship and second at the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
Although his performance at the Valspar Championship was far from perfect, Hovland is clearly on the right path and put this down to the work he has put in with new coach, Grant Waite.
Hovland said: “Grant is really smart. He’s looked at a lot of golf swings, he’s very knowledgeable, and he’s obviously played at the highest level himself. So I think that’s really cool to be working with a person like that,
“I really trust Grant because he can, he sees it and knows what kind of matchups need to be there for it to work. So, yeah, it was obviously a good first week together, so hopefully just build on that.”