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By Sarah Kellam
Former Blue Bay LPGA champion Minjee Lee finished solo second in the 2025 edition of the event, carding a 5-under 67 in the final round at the Jian Lake Blue Bay Course to earn her second top-five result of the 2025 season.
Lee was 2-under through 36 holes in the People’s Republic of China, opening with a 2-under 70 on Thursday and then posting an even-par 72 on Friday. The Australian turned up the heat on Moving Day, firing a 4-under 68 with two chip-in eagles on her scorecard, a third-round effort that moved her from T15 to T5 with 18 holes to play.
Sunday saw Lee get off to a bit of a slow start. She made two early bogeys on holes two and four to drop back to 4-under for the tournament and then went birdie-bogey on five and six, a frustrating start for the 28-year-old who needed to race up the leaderboard quickly if she had any hope of catching rookie Rio Takeda. But the two-time major champion remained undeterred by those early stumbles, chipping in on the par-3 7th hole for birdie to get back to 5-under and then holing another chip on the par-5 8th hole for eagle to climb to 7-under overall.
Lee parred her next three holes before landing a pair of back-to-back birdies on holes 12 and 13 to get to 3-under for the day, and she then picked up two more birdies on 15 and 18 to close out her round, posting a 67 to finish six strokes behind champion Takeda.
“I chipped in four times, so that’s obviously going to help,” Lee said of her week in China. “I think I made three eagles and a birdie chip-in, so that’s always nice to see it go in. I think for most of the week, I was hitting it pretty solid. Just try to capitalize on the shots that I hit close. It’s quite hard if you’re not on the right sections of the greens here, so I did have a few putts over hills. Other than that, nice week this week.”
It’s the second time that Lee has finished in the top five on the LPGA Tour this season, as the 10-time winner tied for fourth in her tournament debut at the Hilton Grand Vacations Tournament of Champions after carding a 10-under 62 in the final round. It’s the fourth top-15 result that she has recorded at the Blue Bay LPGA, as Lee tied for 14th in 2015, won the tournament in 2016 and then tied for fourth at the Jian Lake Blue Bay Course last season.
Her runner-up showing should serve as a welcome confidence boost for the Aussie as the LPGA Tour schedule starts to pick up at the end of March. She made some offseason changes, including switching to a long putter, that have clearly paid off considering her early-season performances, and as she continues to search for that elusive 11th career victory, Lee has plenty of positives to glean from her play in her first four starts of the year.
But fans will have to wait a bit to see Lee in action again, as she isn’t scheduled to tee it up next until the T-Mobile Match Play presented by MGM Rewards, taking a bit of an extended break from competition to reset and refocus as major season gets underway with The Chevron Championship in late April. And when she does return to play, Lee is certainly a player to keep an eye on, one that could rip off two or three wins pretty quickly if her upward trend continues.
