Both Presidents Cup rosters were finalised this week, and by the time U.S. captain Brandt Snedeker had worked through his six selections on a live show from PGA Tour Studios in Ponte Vedra Beach, one name had absorbed most of the oxygen in the room. It belonged to Jackson Koivun, 21, five PGA Tour starts into his professional career, and now a Presidents Cup player at Medinah before most people outside the game had learned to pronounce his surname.
Koivun’s case on paper is thin by the usual standard. He sat 48th in the U.S. points race and 66th in the world ranking when the picks were made, comfortably behind players Snedeker passed over to take him. What he does have is a win at the 3M Open in just his third start as a professional, an amateur résumé that includes time at the top of the World Amateur Golf Ranking, and a captain willing to bet on upside over résumé. “I know what this guy is capable of,” Snedeker said in explaining the pick. “He brings a lot to the team room, he brings a lot in terms of pairings. What he did at 3M, what he has proven in his amateur career, is something we wanted to take a hard look at.”
The full rosters
The U.S. team is built around six automatic qualifiers from the FedExCup points list: Scottie Scheffler, Cameron Young, Wyndham Clark, Russell Henley, Sam Burns and Collin Morikawa. Snedeker’s six picks complete it: Chris Gotterup, Xander Schauffele, Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay, Jacob Bridgeman and Koivun.
The International side qualified Si Woo Kim, Hideki Matsuyama, Ryan Fox, Tom Kim, Min Woo Lee and Adam Scott automatically, with captain Geoff Ogilvy adding Corey Conners, Nico Echavarria, Sungjae Im, Ryo Hisatsune, Nick Taylor and Christiaan Bezuidenhout. Both squads run deep, and on pure form the International team arrives with less to prove than it has in most recent editions, given how many of its automatic qualifiers spent 2026 near the top of leaderboards rather than making up the numbers.
Who got left out
A pick is only as interesting as who it displaces, and Koivun’s selection meant no room for Ben Griffin, Ryan Gerard, J.J. Spaun or Akshay Bhatia. Gerard’s omission drew the sharpest reaction, arriving as it did on the back of a third-place finish at the Tour Championship, traditionally the kind of form a captain rewards rather than overlooks. Snedeker’s answer, in effect, was that Koivun’s ceiling mattered more to him than Gerard’s recent floor. Bridgeman and Gotterup are also first-timers, which means three of Snedeker’s six picks have never played a match of this kind, a fact that will shape how he builds his pairings sheet as much as anything on the leaderboard.
Koivun’s path here is unusual even by the standards of a sport that likes a fast riser. He reached the PGA Tour through the PGA Tour University Accelerated programme rather than qualifying school, turned professional out of Auburn, and needed only a handful of starts to win. Bridgeman and Koivun are now the first players to reach a Presidents Cup after previously competing in the Junior Presidents Cup, which says something about how quickly the pathway from amateur golf to a team room has compressed.
Medinah’s first Presidents Cup
The matches run September 24 to 27 at Medinah Country Club’s Course No. 3 outside Chicago, a course better known in team golf circles for what happened there in 2012, when Europe overturned a four-point deficit on the final day to complete the Miracle at Medinah and retain the Ryder Cup. This will be the club’s first Presidents Cup, though hardly its first major event, having also staged two PGA Championships, three U.S. Opens and the 2019 BMW Championship on the same course.
What Snedeker has done, whether it pays off or not, is make his team more interesting three weeks out than the points list alone would suggest. A captain’s picks are usually read as a statement about who a team trusts under pressure. This one reads as a statement about who a captain thinks is about to arrive.