PALM HARBOR, Fla. – Viktor Hovland isn’t quite sure what’s going on, but he’s getting there.

This week’s Valspar Championship, contested at a tight, tree-lined Copperhead Course at Innisbrook Resort, isn’t exactly the place to emerge from a mini-slump. Hovland entered the week on a skid of three straight missed cuts, including an opening-round 80 at THE PLAYERS Championship last week.

“I don’t have control over what I’m doing,” Hovland said Friday.

Yet, he is squarely in contention through 36 holes at the Valspar. The Norwegian opened in rounds of 70-67 at the Copperhead, rising the board on a windy Friday morning when many of his TOUR peers were drifting backward, struggling to solve the twisting layout and its closing three-hole stretch known as the Snake Pit.

Hovland, conversely, rose from T23 onto the leaderboard’s first page.

“I still feel like I am getting max out of my game right now,” Hovland said Friday. “Not to put myself down, but for it to be sustainable at that level, I need to strike it a bit better and it needs to be a bit more predictable. So I'm still working through some changes and, yeah, I just need to keep working on it. But it's nice to see that the things that you're working on is leading to better results immediately, and it's always a good sign.”

Hovland recently began working with instructor Grant Waite, a former TOUR pro with whom he previously worked but split in 2024. A year ago, Hovland desired to keep things simple and wasn’t willing to assimilate a wealth of information, he said Friday. Now he is. It means their process might take a while to bear fruit – Hovland is just taking things one day at a time – but the early returns have been positive. He has felt solid contact for the last two days at the Valspar, a far cry from Wednesday’s pro-am round where he “hit a lot of bad shots.”

Might Hovland be exaggerating a bit? Perhaps. TOUR pros can do so at times. He ranked in the field’s top half in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee and Strokes Gained: Approach the Green as of early Friday afternoon. He made his hay with the flatstick, gaining nearly four strokes on the greens in his second-round 67 – more focused, competitive putting practice has helped, he said Friday. But respectable play from tee-to-green offered him some chances on the greens, where he made five birdies Friday morning.

In the early stages of reuniting with Waite, he has found some feels to remain competitive amid changes.

“He's really smart, and I think I have a little bit of a different perspective now going through a lot of struggles the last year since we worked together, and he has a lot of knowledge and there's a lot of information and I don't think I was quite ready for it a year ago,” Hovland said of reconnecting with Waite. “I just wanted it to be super simple and I'll just find a feel and we'll make it work. Then we actually needed to put some more work and diligent kind of technical work into it to figure this out. And I think Grant is one of the few guys that can solve it.

“We're still working on it. Still doesn't feel quite that great, but at least it's improvement … truly identified what the root cause in my golf swing is and then it's working around a feel of, ‘Okay, how do we mitigate that? How do we go back to what it used to be like?’ That's tricky, because you can't really rely on your feels anymore, you have to reverse-engineer things a little bit and start from scratch. But we're making progress.”

Even though he feels uncomfortable, Hovland is still hungry for results when he’s inside the ropes. After leaving a chip shot 30 feet short of the hole at the par-4 second hole Friday, his 11th, he appeared laser-focused while taking three practice swings from the same spot, seemingly intent on figuring out what went wrong. After two-putting for bogey, he shook his head in disgust while walking to the third tee.

Two things can be true: Hovland’s demeanor outside the ropes is easygoing, almost slightly aloof, but he maintains a burning desire to extract the most out of his game. That’s why he changes swing coaches nearly as often as a supermarket cycles through BOGO sales – recent instructors include Denny Lucas (with whom he worked in college), TJ Yeaton, Dana Dahlquist and Joe Mayo.

Our minds are designed to create problems and then solve them; Hovland just might do so at a more hyperactive pace. It ties into his burning desire to be great, which earned him a TOUR card within four months of turning pro in 2019 and led him to the 2023 FedExCup title. He leans into it; he doesn’t shy away from it. Sometimes it might be a curse, other times it’s a blessing.

Since a third-place finish at the PGA Championship last May, Hovland has notched just one top-10 finish (a T2 at the FedEx St. Jude Championship last August). He missed the cut at the U.S. Open and The Open Championship last summer, and he began 2025 with middle-of-the-pack finishes at two no-cut events before missing the cut at The Genesis Invitational, Arnold Palmer Invitational presented by Mastercard and THE PLAYERS.

That’s a far cry from the expectations of a recent FedExCup champion.

“It sucks,” said Hovland of the mini-slump. “You have an ability that you can almost sometimes take for granted. You just wake up every day and you stand over the ball, and you just expect the ball to start in that direction and go that direction and end up somewhere close to the hole. Then it starts to not do that; it's pretty frustrating. You start thinking things you've never thought before. And this game becomes infinitely more challenging and it's already really challenging. So it is really humbling and, you know, kind of handling those moments, I mean, I think there's a lot of lessons to be learned there. And now that hopefully I can regain my ability and see those shots again, hopefully I can be in a better spot where I can handle that situation better.”

Two rounds at the Valspar (plus an encouraging second-round 68 at THE PLAYERS) is an incredibly small sample size. But it’s a start.

“I am hard on myself, yeah,” Hovland said Friday. “But that's also why I'm good. If I wasn't hard on myself, I probably wouldn't be out here. And yeah, I know that even with terrible mechanics I can still get out here and shoot a couple of nice scores.”