Steph Kyriacou is six years into life as a professional golfer, living out of a suitcase, chasing majors and quietly becoming one of the most compelling players of her generation. She jumped on a call with Australian Golf Digest Women from the US for a conversation about flow state, side bets and what keeps her hungry for more.
There is a version of Steph Kyriacou the golf world already knows. The teenager who arrived at the 2020 Australian Ladies Classic at Bonville as an amateur and won by eight shots like she had been doing it her whole life. The player who backed it up almost immediately on the Ladies European Tour. The major contender who stood on the brink of history at the 2024 Evian Championship. From there, she moved quickly from breakthrough to mainstay status. Now deep into her professional career, Kyriacou is one of Australia’s highest-ranked female golfers. But the version of her you get in conversation is even better.
She is warm. Funny. Sharp. Grounded. The kind of athlete who talks about competing in major championships with the same energy she talks about birdie bets with her mates. One minute she is unpacking the psychology of pressure in elite sport, the next she is laughing about making fellow Aussie Hannah Green buy dinner after losing a side bet. That is exactly why people connect with her.
Life on the road
From such a young age, Kyriacou has already lived a version of life most people only imagine. She has spent years travelling the globe as a professional golfer, based in the United States but rarely still for long. Weeks blur into airports, hotels, tournament practice rounds and Sunday pressure. Sometimes she spends seven months away from home at a time.
“I get to travel the world in my 20s,” she says. “There are hard parts to it, for sure, but I still really enjoy it.”
That balance between ambition and perspective feels central to who she is. Kyriacou is deeply competitive, but never consumed by ego. She wants to win badly, but she also understands how lucky she is to be living this life. And when she talks about the sacrifices required to make it work, there is no self-pity attached.
“People see the glamorous side, and there are definitely moments that are really cool,” she says. “But for Aussies especially, it can get lonely. You live out of a suitcase. You don’t have your family about. The first couple of years are rough.”
What makes it manageable is the community she has built about her. Every week on tour, there is a rotating crew of Australians nearby. Hannah Green. Grace Kim. Karis Davidson. Some weeks, there are three of them staying together. Other weeks, there are nine or more Aussies packed into one house, turning tournament weeks into something that feels a little more like home. “It was chaos,” Kyriacou laughs. “But fun chaos.”
There’s something special about that image. A new generation of Australian women competing at the highest level of global golf, genuinely enjoying the ride together. Championing each other, ruthlessly keeping each other humble (very on-brand for Aussies), travelling the world side by side and building careers in the process.
A sport changing in real time
For so long, our sporting heroes have overwhelmingly been men. Especially in traditionally men’s sports. Women’s sport often existed on the sidelines, underfunded and under-celebrated, despite producing athletes every bit as compelling. That is changing now.
Athletes like Kyriacou are a huge part of why. Not because she is trying to be a role model in a polished, media-trained way. In fact, it is probably the opposite. She feels real. She talks openly about nerves, pressure, loneliness and self-doubt without ever sounding defeated by them. She talks about golf not as some untouchable dream life, but as something messy, difficult and deeply rewarding all at once. That honesty matters.
It matters to the young girls now flooding into golf clinics and junior programs across Australia. It matters to the women discovering golf for the first time through driving ranges, social rounds and Instagram feeds full of fashion-forward golf brands and creators changing what the sport looks like culturally. Kyriacou has watched that transformation happen in real time.
“When I was growing up, there weren’t too many girl juniors,” she says. “Now I see so many more girls getting into it, which is amazing.”
Kyriacou believes part of the shift came during COVID, when golf became one of the few sports people could still safely play outdoors. But she also thinks the culture about the game has evolved dramatically.
“Golf feels more social now,” she says. “People wear cool outfits, go out with their mates, have a drink afterwards. It’s become a whole-day thing.”
Evian Championship 2024
Of course, the higher the profile, the higher the stakes. Two years ago at the Evian Championship, Kyriacou found herself in unfamiliar territory: leading a major after 54 holes. It should have felt like a dream. Instead, at first, it felt terrifying. “I was scared to mess up,” she admits. “And then on the 13th hole, I kind of had a heart-to-heart with myself. I was like, What are you doing? This is what you dream of. Why are you scared?”
Everything shifted after that. She stopped protecting herself from failure and started chasing the moment instead. She attacked. She trusted herself. She made four birdies across the final stretch and finished runner-up after one of the most dramatic endings of the season. But the biggest thing she took from that week had nothing to do with the leaderboard.
“It was a big click for me mentally,” she says. “I realised your mindset is the most important thing.”
Reaching flow state
Every elite athlete has a version of it. That rare, almost inexplicable state where the noise drops away, the body takes over and everything that is usually hard becomes, for a stretch of holes or a stretch of time, effortless. Psychologists call it flow. Kyriacou calls it something she cannot quite explain, which might be the most honest answer of all.
“You never really know in the moment,” she says. “It’s weird. After, you look back and you’re like, Oh, that was actually kind of cool. But when it’s happening, it’s just happening.”
It is a quality that separates the good from the great in professional golf, the ability to get out of your own way at precisely the moment the stakes are highest. And yet, for all the sports science, mental coaching and pre-shot routine optimisation in the modern game, nobody has quite cracked how to summon it on demand.
Kyriacou thinks routine gets you closest. Doing the same things under pressure that you do when nothing is on the line. Trusting the repetition so completely that the pressure stops registering as something separate from ordinary play, so that a Sunday back nine with a major on the line starts to feel, in the body at least, like a Tuesday practice round.
“I think you can only really get better at it by going through the experiences,” she says. “Being in contention more. Your mindset only develops when you’re actually in it.”
She is, in other words, describing the only path that actually exists: through, not about. The flow state cannot be manufactured in a simulator or rehearsed in a practice round. It arrives on the other side of enough hard moments that the hard moments stop feeling hard.
That understanding feels significant when you watch where her career is heading. Because talent has never been the question with Kyriacou. That has always been there. What she gained at Evian was something harder to teach: belief under pressure. The kind elite athletes spend entire careers trying to unlock.
“You never reach a level in golf where you’re done,” she says. “You can always get better.”
Maybe that is why Kyriacou still lights up talking about side bets in practice rounds. Why she still sounds genuinely excited by the challenge of improvement. Why she can laugh about trying padel for the first time and discovering that, despite being one of the best golfers in the world, there is always something new to learn. And in this new era of women’s sport, that might be exactly what makes athletes like her so important.
Because young girls do not just need polished champions anymore. They need athletes who show them that ambition and vulnerability can exist together. That confidence can co-exist with nerves. That greatness does not have to come wrapped in perfection. Kyriacou represents something bigger than golf now, whether she realises it or not.
A generation of Australian sportswomen who are not waiting for permission to take up space.
And if the 13th hole at the Evian two years ago taught us anything, it is that when Steph Kyriacou dials in, the rest of the field had better be paying attention.
Photographs by Seb McNamara/Walker Golf Things, getty images/matt roberts, seb mcnamara/walker golf things,
getty images/raj mehta
