Finding Her Family

A lifelong competitor turned storyteller, Alexandra O’Laughlin brings a fresh voice to modern golf

By: Jim Bebbington | Photos By: Michael Ciago

Alexandra O’Laughlin, one of the hosts for the PGA Tour’s weekly chat-show The Drop, remembers precisely when golf entered her life. She was in middle school, growing up in Arvada northwest of Denver. She had played soccer and basketball most of her childhood but her legs were giving her fits.

“I had really bad shin splints and I needed to find something (else); I’m super competitive,” O’Laughlin said in an interview from her home in Nashville.

“I just decided kind of that night that I wanted to play golf. And I went to my parents and said ‘Hey, I’m going to play golf in high school… What can we do?”

Their house was along Westwoods Golf Course in Arvada. She had taken a class or two on golf. She had puttered around a driving range. But high school golf?

“My mom did so much research and she said, ‘OK, I know that when you say something, you take it very seriously,’ “ O’Laughlin said. “And she found Trent Wearner as being one of the best junior golf coaches, which he still is today. She said ‘We’ll help you get there, get you lessons. You need to put in the work.’ I don’t even think they needed to say that. I’m pretty sure they knew that was a given, but they found him. And I just remember thinking ‘All right, we’re doing this.’ So it was a full commitment.”

It was that commitment that put O’Laughlin on her career path. She grew up friends with some of the region’s top golfers – Wyndham Clark and Jennifer Kupcho. It led to her high school team, then college golf at Lewis University near Chicago.

And since joining The Drop in 2025, her work now takes her all over the world covering the top of the game, as well as golf destination resorts. Going into the week of the Memorial Tournament she interviewed Jack Nicklaus about his tournament. She got fellow Coloradan Clark – whom she’s known since they were teens – for a long sit-down interview during the PGA Championship week.

She also writes columns for Women’s Golf Magazine and Kingdom Magazine, and like anyone in golf media today is working to grow her audience on Instagram, TikTok and other social media platforms.

“I’m just interested in building community around golf, especially where luxury travel and belonging and women’s experience comes together,” she said… “But with everything I do, even from working with tourism boards and doing shows with specific tourism boards on Golf Channel, everything that I do is always catered to couples or families. That’s just kind of how I’ve seen golf and only have experienced it where it’s with people you know.”

O’Laughlin began in spring 2025 as one of the hosts for The Drop, the PGA Tour’s first weekly show originating from its PGA Tour Studios complex in Florida.

She received the opportunity to co-host The Drop by building off a career in modeling and in local sports radio in Chicago. Her youth golf coach, Trent Wearner, said he heard that the PGA Tour Studios was looking for on-air staff for their new show, and he passed that opportunity onto O’Laughlin.

“Some of the most impressive stuff (about her) is she would fly from Chicago to LA (for modeling jobs), graduate college in three years and be an athlete,” Wearner said recently. “She’s always ridiculously kind – I remember the Golf Channel was looking for a female correspondent who had some golf experience and we communicated it some how, and I put her in touch with the right person. She is highly motivated.”

Her parents have stayed part of the team still, even as she has moved to the other side of the country and married her husband Matt Killen, a long-time teaching professional whose clients have included Tiger Woods and Nelly Korda. Parents Mark and Elizabeth still live in Arvada and during the BMW Championship at Castle Pines Golf Club in 2024 she slept in her childhood home and her dad drove her to the course every morning for her TV work.

She and Killen were friends before Covid hit, then during the lockdown period O’Laughlin said she turned to him for help with her golf game because she was going batty with not enough to do.

“When Covid hit I called Matt and I said, listen, I’m playing more golf now that I’m not working as much, I would love to get my golf game dialed,” she said. “And it was kind of the first time I spent time with him away from work. And we were like, okay, that’s it; we’re getting married.”

With golf story-telling – whether on The Drop or in her magazine columns – O’Laughlin said she is trying to give people insight that they can’t get themselves.

“I think it’s really a peek into something they haven’t experienced,” she said. “On the tournament side, I really want to give exposure to the behind the scenes, what you’re not seeing at tournaments, kind of that exclusive access. (For the magazines) I’m always trying to showcase places that I think are awesome. And I’ve already done so much of the work experiencing it and learning about it, the pros and cons and how to get there, that I want to share those stories with people and make it super simple for them if they want to go to a golf destination.”

She’s on the road about 35 weeks a year. Home is now Nashville, but she’s often down in Ponte Vedra, Fla., where the PGA Tour has based its broadcast operations. “I put a lot of time and thought into how and where I want to be,” she said. In the future she’s hoping to continue her broadcast work and help golf fans enjoy the game. She and Killen play together whenever they have a chance, and she’s able to experience some of the best courses in the world in her work. (Her favorites? Royal County Down in Northern Ireland and The Dunes Club in Michigan, Bandon Dunes-founder Mike Keiser’s first golf project.)

“There’s just so many great golf courses and really at the end of the day, I’m just happy and feel so lucky to be playing golf and have a golf club in my hand,” she said. “So I will play anywhere. I will go to a TopGolf if I have the itch to hit balls and it is just about getting to swing the golf club.”