ORLANDO – Viktor Hovland has made another coaching change.
The seven-time PGA Tour winner and past FedEx Cup champion has split with Grant Waite and reunited with T.J. Yeaton, who he worked with briefly early in 2025.
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Yeaton walked inside the ropes with Hovland during his Wednesday practice pro-am ahead of the 2026 Arnold Palmer Invitational, and Hovland confirmed to Golfweek that he went to visit him in Nashville, Tennessee, last week.
Viktor Hovland working with TJ Yeaton at Bay Hill ahead of the 2026 Arnold Palmer Invitational.
“He’s someone that I worked with before and communicated with at times and I think he’s really smart,” Hovland said. “I’ve worked with a lot of different smart people. It’s a complicated puzzle and sometimes it’s just a matter of a different perspective, just looking at it from a couple of different ways or just saying things a little bit differently. What T.J.’s been telling me has resonated a lot, been seeing a lot of good stuff in practice.”
Hovland, 28, began working with Waite last year after he missed the cut here at Bay Hill a year ago. He would go on to win two weeks later at the Valspar Championship.
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Hovland, who enters this week at No. 17 in the Official World Golf Ranking, has made four starts this season – a T-14 at the DP World Tour’s Hero Dubai Desert Classic, T-10 at the PGA Tour’s WM Phoenix Open, T-58 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and T-41 at the Genesis Invitational – said he’s been more consistent but he’s seeking better control, especially off the tee. He pumped three drivers off the tee at No. 8 at Bay Hill during the pro-am.
“I may be wired differently, but I take more pleasure, I guess, or I get more satisfied when I see that I’m hitting the shots that I want to hit,” he said. “I know that I’m really good at golf. I can overcome a lot of things, but it doesn’t give me a lot of confidence week in, week out if I have a lot of things to overcome. But if I can step up out here and hit most of the fairways out here on this golf course, that’s when stress levels go down, my confidence in my game goes up.”
Viktor Hovland working with TJ Yeaton at Bay Hill ahead of the 2026 Arnold Palmer Invitational.
Hovland said he tried a variety of Band-Aids on the West Coast Swing, including a shorter driver, trying to find anything that went straight but sacrificed too much distance. [He said he plans to go back to the Ping 425 driver this week.]
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“To Grant’s credit, we’ve worked really hard because at times my swing looked really far off from where it’s been and we did a good job to just get it in a way better spot, but I still felt like there are a couple things missing because I didn’t necessarily hit the shots that I would like to see.”
More: Viktor Hovland’s unusual golf swing drills are paying off at Riviera
Hovland has shuffled through coaches since winning the 2023 FedEx Cup. He parted ways with instructor Joe Mayo shortly before the 2024 season. He bounced from Dana Dahlquist to Waite and returned to Mayo that May and nearly won the PGA Championship at Valhalla, settling for third. But the reunion proved short-lived as Hovland and Mayo split again before the 2025 season began.
Yeaton consulted for a stretch last January before Hovland teamed up with Denny Lucas, who coached him for 2 ½ years during his time at Oklahoma State, for a month. He and Waite, a one-time Tour winner from New Zealand, nearly made it a year before Hovland pulled the plug again.
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Asked what he’d say to those observers who think that he changes coaches more often than some golfers change out their wedges, Hovland said, “I don’t care too much, but I get from the outside that it looks weird, and ‘Oh, a couple years ago, you played great, and then you started changing everything.’ I’ve heard that narrative a thousand times, but that’s not how this game works, you know? You’re always fighting entropy and things change whether you want them to or not and now you have to work your way back to it. That challenge sometimes is trickier than other times, you know? Then you start to compensate on top of things and now it becomes complicated. So, I just ultimately want to get back to where I was a couple years ago.”
Viktor Hovland working with TJ Yeaton at Bay Hill ahead of the 2026 Arnold Palmer Invitational.
In the past few years, Hovland has become so frustrated with his play that he has pulled out of tournaments to dig it out of the dirt on the practice tee and he noted that he has felt that urge again but he has continued to search for answers on the course and he’s encouraged by his recent work with Yeaton.
“I’ve played great golf here before,” he said of Bay Hill, site of this week’s signature event. “If the driver behaves this week and I get things going my way, I absolutely believe I can win. I just wanted to get where I can expect to be in contention instead of like, oh, I hope I end up there.”
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: Viktor Hovland makes another coaching change, reunites with T.J. Yeaton
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