Ruoning Yin had gone thirty-four tournaments without winning one, a run long enough that she had started calling her frequent runner-up finishes, only half joking, being the first loser. That ended on Sunday at TPC Boston, where a two-under 70 in a stiffening wind saw off Hyo Joo Kim by two shots and delivered Yin her sixth LPGA Tour title, her first since the 2024 Maybank Championship.
A coach’s deadline, met almost to the shot
Yin’s week did not look like the winning kind at the start. She opened with a workmanlike one-under 71, good for only a tie for 24th and a long way back from the leaders. Her coach, unimpressed, told her before round two that he intended to be on a Saturday morning flight home unless she answered with a seven-under round. Yin shot exactly seven-under, a 65 that carried her into a share of fourth, and the coach stayed put. A four-under 68 on Saturday kept her in touch with the lead, and by the time Sunday’s wind rolled in over TPC Boston’s Gil Hanse-remodelled fairways, it was Yin and Kim, paired together in the final group, setting the pace for everyone else.
Sharing the lead, then taking it alone
A 25-foot birdie putt at the par-five 12th pulled Yin level with Kim, and the two matched each other hole for hole through a stretch of pars in conditions considerably tougher than the calm week that preceded them. The tournament turned at the 18th, a reachable par five where Yin found the green in two and left herself an eighteen-foot look at eagle. She did not make it, but the two-putt birdie was enough. Kim, playing right alongside her, could not answer with one of her own and finished two shots back at twelve-under, the closest anyone came to catching Yin all week.
Relief more than celebration
Yin dropped to her knees on the 18th green before the tears came, the release of two years spent finishing agonisingly short of a trophy she had once collected with some regularity. “It’s just been so long since my last win,” she said afterwards. “It felt like all my hard work paid off.” Her mother had made the trip to Massachusetts to watch, and once the presentation ended, Yin’s first instinct was to send her a message in Chinese. She said a friend had once told her that finishing second so often was not failure so much as evidence she was close: that it meant she was capable of winning and due a breakthrough. Sunday made good on that.
A crowded leaderboard, and one eye on the Netherlands
Behind the two leaders, Allisen Corpuz put together the best final round of anyone near the top, a four-under 68 that carried her from a share of sixth after the third round into outright third at eleven-under. Sei Young Kim finished tied for fourth despite a one-over final round, and Megan Khang, playing an hour from where she grew up in Rockland, Massachusetts, closed with a double bogey at the last for a share of 27th. Nelly Korda, the world number one, had a quiet week by her own standard and finished one-over for the tournament, tied for 50th.
Khang, Korda and Corpuz will all see plenty more of one another before the month is out. All three are part of the twelve-woman American side that leaves for Bernardus Golf in the Netherlands next week, where the Solheim Cup begins on September 11. For Yin, who plays for China rather than either side in that contest, Boston was simply the win she had been chasing since the leaves turned in 2024, delivered in exactly the wind and nerve that had denied her for most of this season. “I think wins seven, eight, nine, ten are coming,” she said. On Sunday’s evidence, nobody at TPC Boston felt much like arguing.