The Solheim Cup has visited a lot of golf courses that were never really built for match play crowds, and this week it corrects that by landing somewhere that was designed with exactly this kind of week in mind. Bernardus Golf in Cromvoirt hosts the matches from September 11 to 13, the first time the competition has been staged in the Netherlands, and by the time the closing singles session tees off on Sunday, either Angela Stanford’s American side will have completed back-to-back wins for the first time since 2015 and 2017, or Anna Nordqvist will have led Europe to the trophy in front of the kind of home crowd this event has rarely had on the continent.
A rookie captain who never really left the team room
Nordqvist announced her retirement from playing at the FM Championship two weeks ago, closing an 18-year career that ran through three majors and nine Solheim Cup appearances of her own, and there is something fitting about her handing over the clubs the same fortnight she takes charge of a European team for the first time. She rounded out her twelve with four picks, headlined by Leona Maguire, whose 8-3-1 career record in this event made her selection close to automatic despite a quieter 2026 by her own standards. Maguire’s job this week has as much to do with the locker room as the leaderboard. Four of Nordqvist’s players, Julia López Ramirez, Nastasia Nadaud, Mimi Rhodes and Nanna Koerstz Madsen, will experience Solheim Cup atmosphere for the first time on Friday morning, and it typically falls to the players who have been there before to make sure that atmosphere doesn’t swallow a debut whole.
Charley Hull and Lottie Woad lead the automatic qualifiers, with Celine Boutier, Carlota Ciganda and Maja Stark giving Nordqvist a spine of players who have already won LPGA titles this year. It is a European team built less around one dominant name than around depth across every pairing combination, which suits a format that asks a captain to find eight players for foursomes and eight for four-balls out of a squad of twelve, twice.
Korda chasing the rematch
The American headline is obvious enough. Nelly Korda arrives as world number one after winning both the Chevron Championship and the US Women’s Open this year, and she does so still carrying the memory of her singles loss to Hull at Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in 2024, a defeat that went a long way toward deciding that edition. Stanford’s team qualified nine players automatically, a group that includes Angel Yin, Jennifer Kupcho, Yealimi Noh, Auston Kim, Lauren Coughlin, Allisen Corpuz, Andrea Lee and Alison Lee, before adding Rose Zhang, Megan Khang and Lindy Duncan as her three picks. Khang will make her fifth consecutive Solheim Cup appearance, Zhang her third, and Duncan, at 35, will be the oldest debutant on either side.
The bigger question for Stanford is less about who made the team than how she uses them. Rookies on a strong American side are usually sheltered into the afternoon four-balls before facing the full weight of Friday foursomes, and how she sequences Kim, Duncan and her other first-timers through the opening two days will shape whether the US builds an early lead or has to chase one.
What the format actually asks
The three days follow the now-familiar match play rhythm: foursomes and four-balls on Friday and Saturday, four matches of each per day, then all twelve players from each side going out in Sunday singles. That is 24 points across the team sessions and 12 more on Sunday, with 14.5 needed to win the Cup outright. Bernardus, a Kyle Phillips design that opened in 2018, was built with wide fairways and generous run-off areas around the greens, terrain that tends to reward aggressive four-ball golf more than it punishes a bad tee shot outright, which could make the Saturday afternoon session the one that decides where the momentum sits heading into Sunday.
Why the venue matters as much as the golf
A Solheim Cup on a course built specifically for spectators, in a country hosting the event for the first time, is not a small thing for a competition that has spent most of its history rotating through the same handful of American and British venues. The crowds at Bernardus this week will be finding their footing as much as some of the players are, and how a first-time host country responds to genuine match play tension, rather than the polite applause of a regular tour stop, will say something about where this event goes next as it looks for new ground to grow into. Whatever the scoreline says by Sunday evening, Europe getting to defend the Cup on home soil for the first time in the Netherlands is the story that will outlast this particular week.