The Presidents Cup gets under way at Medinah Country Club on Thursday, and for once the most interesting name in the build-up is not on either team sheet. It belongs to Geoff Ogilvy, who is captaining the International side this week on a golf course he helped rebuild with his own firm two years ago. Golf has produced plenty of odd juxtapositions over the years, but a captain arriving at a venue he redesigned, trying to beat the team from a country he does not represent, on holes he personally widened, is a new one even by this sport’s standards.
The scale of what the Internationals are up against has not moved much regardless of who is holding the pencil on the golf course. The United States have won this event thirteen times against a single defeat, back in 1998, and one tie, and they arrive at Medinah as heavy favourites again, priced at around 2/7 to the International side’s 9/2. Eleven of Brandt Snedeker’s twelve players sit inside the world’s top thirty. Ogilvy’s side has four. Those numbers alone explain why an American win here tends to generate relief more than celebration, and why an International win, whenever it eventually arrives again, would be treated as one of the sport’s genuine upsets rather than a mild surprise.
Snedeker’s roster leans on six automatic qualifiers in Scottie Scheffler, Cameron Young, Wyndham Clark, Sam Burns, Russell Henley and Collin Morikawa, filled out by six captain’s picks he confirmed on the first of September.
Brandt Snedeker's six captain's picks for the U.S. Team!
— Presidents Cup (@PresidentsCup) September 1, 2026
🇺🇸 Chris Gotterup
🇺🇸 Xander Schauffele
🇺🇸 Justin Thomas
🇺🇸 Patrick Cantlay
🇺🇸 Jacob Bridgeman
🇺🇸 Jackson Koivun#PresidentsCup | #USTeam pic.twitter.com/nYvCxK3yTD
Snedeker left out Ben Griffin and JJ Spaun, who had finished eighth and tenth in the points standings, to make room for Patrick Cantlay’s experience and for the two names that generated most of the reaction: Jacob Bridgeman, fresh off the best week of his career at the Biltmore Championship, and Jackson Koivun. At twenty-one, Koivun is the second-youngest American ever picked for this event, behind only Jordan Spieth in 2013, and he has been a professional for barely more than a season, having turned pro out of Auburn and won the 3M Open in just his third start.
The future looks bright.
— PGA Tour (@PGATour) September 1, 2026
Jackson Koivun is set to make his @PresidentsCup debut at Medinah. pic.twitter.com/egDCONwgss
There is no gentle way into a debut like that. Team golf has a habit of exposing a rookie’s nerves in ways strokeplay never does, and Koivun will be doing it in front of a Chicago gallery that expects to win, alongside eleven players who mostly already have. Bridgeman, at least, arrives with the calmest possible frame of mind a player can have walking into an unfamiliar format: he is coming off a bogey-free 61 that turned a five-shot deficit into victory, the sort of week that tends to make everything afterward feel a little less daunting.
Ogilvy’s six picks read as a squad built for depth rather than star power. Corey Conners, Nico Echavarria, Sungjae Im, Ryo Hisatsune, Nick Taylor and Christiaan Bezuidenhout join automatic qualifiers Si Woo Kim, Hideki Matsuyama, Ryan Fox, Tom Kim, Min Woo Lee and Adam Scott. Si Woo Kim is the only International player inside the top twenty of the world rankings, which tells its own story about the gap this format keeps failing to close, even as the International side has occasionally taken the Americans to the wire in recent editions.
The golf course itself is the part of this week that has nothing to do with world rankings. Medinah’s Course No. 3 went through a two-year redesign completed in 2024 by the Australian firm OCM, with Ogilvy as one of its principals. Trees came out, fairways widened, greens grew, and the layout was reconnected to something closer to Tom Bendelow’s original 1928 design than the tree-lined, US Open-tightened version that had hosted majors for the previous two decades. Ogilvy will spend this week trying to beat the country his own redesign was, by any reasonable reading, built to be fair to. Whether a wider, more strategic Medinah favours a stronger, deeper team or actually narrows the gap by rewarding shot-making over sheer depth is one of the more genuine unknowns of the week, and it is the rare storyline in a lopsided contest that nobody has an obvious answer for yet.
Play begins Thursday and runs through Sunday, with thirty points on offer and 15½ needed to win. History says the destination is not really in doubt. Whether Medinah’s own architect can find a way to make the journey competitive is the more interesting question, and it is entirely his own making.