Jeeno Thitikul

Choosing golf in Ratchaburi

Atthaya “Jeeno” Thitikul was born in Ratchaburi on 20 February 2003. Unlike the Jutanugarn sisters, she did not enter a family already organised around golf. In an account published by the LPGA, Jeeno explained that a doctor encouraged her parents to choose an outdoor sport because she was frequently ill as a child. They offered golf or tennis; she chose golf, in part because tennis involved more running.

Her father operated a car wash and her mother worked as a hairdresser. They adjusted their schedules around practice and competition as Jeeno’s interest became a serious junior path. The family background matters because her later rise can look prearranged when reduced to age records. It was instead built through a new sport for the household, sustained travel and the discovery that a child from Ratchaburi could compete far beyond the local circuit.

The youngest winner in professional golf

In July 2017 Jeeno entered the Ladies European Thailand Championship as an amateur and won at fourteen years, four months and nineteen days. The victory made her the youngest known winner of a professional golf tournament. She could not collect the professional prize money, but the result carried greater long-term value: it established that her junior promise could survive a four-round event against paid competitors.

Her amateur record then widened internationally. She won the inaugural Women’s Amateur Asia-Pacific in 2018, a result that opened places in major professional events, and later that year joined Vanchai Luangnitikul to win mixed-team gold for Thailand at the Buenos Aires Youth Olympics. Jeeno also became low amateur at the Women’s British Open in 2018 and 2019. Those results joined stroke-play, team competition and major-championship settings rather than repeating one kind of success.

She won the Ladies European Thailand Championship again in 2019, this time by five strokes, and rose to No. 1 in the women’s amateur ranking before turning professional in January 2020. The pandemic restricted travel during her first professional season, so she competed largely at home and won five times on the Thai LPGA circuit. A disrupted calendar became a development year rather than a lost one.

A European season became a route to the LPGA

Jeeno finished second to Ariya Jutanugarn at the 2021 Honda LPGA Thailand, one stroke behind the player who had first taken Thai golf to world No. 1. As travel restrictions eased, she moved into a full Ladies European Tour campaign. She won four events, topped the Race to Costa del Sol and became the youngest winner of that season-long order of merit.

The LET named her Rookie of the Year, while fellow players voted her Player of the Year. Winning both awards showed how quickly she had moved beyond the usual expectation for a first full season. She finished the year eighteenth in the world ranking, then placed third at LPGA Q-Series to secure membership for 2022. Europe was therefore not a detour: it supplied the sustained international schedule that connected her Thai development to the LPGA Tour.

Two rookie victories and world No. 1

Jeeno won her first LPGA title at the JTBC Classic in March 2022 and added the Walmart NW Arkansas Championship in September. The second victory followed a second-round 61 and a playoff against Danielle Kang. Across the season she paired those wins with repeated top-ten finishes, making consistency—not only precociousness—the main evidence behind her advance.

On 31 October she became No. 1 in the Rolex Women’s World Golf Rankings at nineteen. She was the second Thai golfer to reach the position after Ariya and, behind Lydia Ko, the second-youngest golfer to lead a recognised world ranking. The LPGA also named her Louise Suggs Rookie of the Year. Her first season had linked an age record from Thailand five years earlier to the highest cumulative ranking in the women’s professional game.

Scoring, team golf and a season-ending breakthrough

Jeeno did not win an LPGA event in 2023, yet the season produced another measure of performance: the Vare Trophy for the tour’s lowest scoring average. She also represented Thailand in the Hanwha LIFEPLUS International Crown, where the national team won. Those achievements showed that a winless season could still document elite week-to-week play and contribution in a team format.

A wrist injury delayed the start of her 2024 season. After returning, she partnered Ruoning Yin to win the Dow Championship and qualified for the Paris Olympics, tying for eighteenth. At the CME Group Tour Championship she began the final round tied for the lead, made an eagle at the seventeenth and birdied the eighteenth to defeat Angel Yin by one stroke.

The CME victory brought the Race to the CME Globe title and a four-million-dollar winner’s prize. Jeeno finished the year with $6,059,309 in official earnings, then an LPGA single-season record, while also winning the Aon Risk Reward Challenge. Prize records reflect changes in purses as well as performance, but they marked how quickly the economic scale of her career had grown after only three LPGA seasons.

Player of the Year and a ten-win career

Jeeno returned to world No. 1 in August 2025 and produced her strongest LPGA season to that point. She won three tournaments, including a second consecutive CME Group Tour Championship, and became the tour’s Player of the Year. Her Vare Trophy came with a 68.681 scoring average, passing the previous LPGA season record attributed to Annika Sörenstam. The combination of wins and scoring separated a complete season from the short two-week spell she had first spent at No. 1 in 2022.

In February 2026 she won the Honda LPGA Thailand for the first time, finishing twenty-four under par and one stroke ahead of Chizzy Iwai. It was her eighth LPGA title and her first tour victory in her home country. She then successfully defended the Mizuho Americas Open and won the Portland Classic with a final-round 64, bringing her career total to ten as of 3 October 2026.

Jeeno’s record belongs to the wider expansion of Thai women’s golf that Ariya helped begin, but it has its own structure. She arrived through amateur championships and the LET, became world No. 1 during her LPGA rookie year, and later converted scoring consistency into season titles. Her career is still active, so totals will change; the durable significance lies in how quickly a teenage exception became a repeatable model of international performance.