Team USA defends its Solheim Cup title this week in the Netherlands, having won in Virginia two years ago. Back then, pairings were the story of the week. Then-captain Stacy Lewis had built a full analytics operation to find the sharpest partnerships. This year, heading into Bernardus, the obvious question is whether the U.S. team still uses a data-first approach to build its pairs.
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Asked about the methodologies for this year at Tuesday’s press conference, U.S. captain Angela Stanford laid out exactly where the numbers end, and the instincts take over.
“I’m probably 50/50. I think we’ve used the numbers to get us to this point and to get us into practice rounds. And then this week is more about what you see with your eyes because there are more emotions, there’s a lot of other things going on in play that—week-in and week-out they’re individuals playing golf, and this week it’s a team sport.”
“So there are a lot of other different elements that play into that. But, again, I just think we’re in a really good spot. A lot of it is how we play the golf course. I am very, very big on course management and playing golf courses, so we’ve kind of used both the data and then which holes—which players play better maybe on certain holes.”
“So I’m real big on course management. But it’s been kind of a mixture of data and course management, and then this week is gut and eyeballs.”
This question, for context, gets asked every Solheim Cup for a simple reason: pairings decide most of the points. Of the 28 available, 16 come from foursomes and four-ball, the two-player formats played on Friday and Saturday. Only the Sunday singles are one-on-one. The captain’s pairings over the first two days therefore shape the entire outcome before any individual matches are played. Naturally, it’s exactly why the questions keep arising.
Notably, these pairings are not revealed to the public in advance. Friday’s matches are revealed at Thursday’s opening ceremony, while Saturday’s are revealed the evening before. But the groundwork starts far earlier. Stanford said that she and her staff have been tracking players’ results and who they’ve partnered with all year, going back to March. With that, they also consider players’ choices regarding who they would like to be paired with. These back-of-house calculations fall under the “data” bracket of pairing procedures.
The 2026 pairings aren’t out yet.
Naturally, one may ask, what is the data bit? Well, the U.S. team uses the LPGA Performance Insight platform run by KPMG. It tracks shot-by-shot statistics for every player, including strokes gained, approach shots, short game and putting, proximity to the hole, and how players have scored on specific holes in the past.
Fed into simulations, the data points to two players’ strengths complementing each other. For example, pairing a long, accurate driver with a player who excels at approach shots and putting would make a good team.
The other half of the equation, Stanford said, gets the team into the practice round. The other half is “gut and the eyeballs” that only kick in once everyone is together on site. Stanford and her assistants have been mixing practice-round groupings daily at Bernardus, watching for chemistry the numbers can’t capture. For example, who calms a partner down, who feeds off crowds’ energy, and who reads the greens well, together under pressure.
But there is a tension between data and instinct. Notably, that clash isn’t new. The first attempt to formalize the pairings came in 2015, when Julie Inkster used personality tests. Lewis took it much further in 2023 and 2024, bringing a dedicated stat team to run full-time simulators ahead of every session. Europe has stayed closer to feel. The then-captain Suzann Pettersen said in 2024 she’d lock her opening pairings two months out on her instincts alone.
One of the clearest proofs that the approach worked came in the 2024 edition. Lewis paired Rose Zhang and Lauren Coughlin for the opening Friday foursomes purely because of the numbers. And it worked. The duo won 3&2 over Europe’s Albane Valenzuela and Céline Boutier. Zhang went on to play every session that week and never lost a match, finishing 4-0-0, a Solheim Cup record for going undefeated without a single match reaching the 17th hole.
As for this year, Stanford’s pairing will bring the best of both worlds: data and gut feelings.