Who has home course advantage in 2026 Presidents Cup at Medinah?
The Presidents Cup, played every two years between the top PGA Tour players from the United States and a select team of international stars from all parts of the world except Europe, hasn’t created much excitement since its debut in 1994. The U.S. holds a 13-1-1 edge in the series.
Medinah Country Club hosts the next staging, in September of 2026, and it’ll have an intriguing twist. The opposing captain of the International squad, Australian Geoff Ogilvy, will know the course better than his U.S. counterpart, Brandt Snedeker. Ogilvy and Snedeker were named to their respective posts last week.
Snedeker played for the U.S. in the 2013 Presidents Cup and was on the U.S. Ryder Cup team in 2012 and 2016. He was an assistant captain for the U.S. in the 2024 Presidents Cup and is a vice captain on this year’s U.S. Ryder Cup team, which takes on Europe at New York’s Bethpage Black this September.
Ogilvy played for the International side three times and has been a captain’s assistant for the Internationals in the last four Presidents Cups, so both know all about team golf. Ogilvy, however, knows all about Medinah’s No. 3 course. His Australian-based design firm, OCM, oversaw the renovation of the historic layout, a two-year project.
The new Medinah No. 3 re-opened last summer. It has larger greens, scale bunkering, wide fairways and a new routing. Snedeker saw it for the first time in a walk-around last week.
“Geoff did a great piece of work,” Snedeker said, but it’s going to change for the 2026 Presidents Cup.
“We’re going to redo the routing a bit,” he said. “Hole four will be the first hole. That way, the routing is going to be a little bit different. Geoff is going to have intimate knowledge of this course. He has his fingerprints all over it. He knows it better than anybody is going to know it. That’s something we’re going to have to deal with.”
Ogilvy downplays his apparent advantage.
“This may be a little advantage pre-tournament,” he said, “but by the time we get to Thursday morning (of tournament week) it will be pretty nullified. Touring professionals can learn a course really quickly. By the time we tee off I imagine the U.S. team will have it pretty well worked out.”
HERE AND THERE: Next week’s PGA Championship at North Carolina’s Quail Hollow almost had a Chicago-connected player in the field. Andy Svoboda, head professional at Butler National, and Dakun Chang, the Illinois PGA Player of the Year in 2018 when he worked at Twin Orchard, tied for 20th in last week’s PGA Professional Championship in Florida. But they were eliminated in a four-for-one playoff for the final spot at Quail Hollow. The top 20 in the Professional Championship earned spots at Quail Hollow.
The IPGA Match Player Championship, first of the Illinois Section’s four major events, concludes its four-day run Thursday at Butterfield in Oak Brook.
University of Illinois rivals in the May 12-14 regional at Atkins Golf Club in Urbana include two teams ranked ahead of the No. 14 Illini nationally — No. 2 Oklahoma State and No. 10 North Carolina. Marquette and Illinois State are also in the 14-team field that sends the top five teams to the NCAA finals May 23-28 at Omni LaCosta in California.
The fifth annual Jackson T. Stephens Cup will be played Sept. 15-17 at Shoreacres in Lake Bluff. The event, named after a former chairman of Georgia’s Augusta National, features 12 men’s and women’s collegiate teams plus individuals from the U.S. Military Service Academies and Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Northwestern will have teams in both the men’s and women’s divisions.
Illinois senior Jackson Buchanan has been named the winner of the Byron Nelson Award, which cites academic and community excellence in addition to golf performance. Buchanan shot a 5-under-par 67 on Monday and shared low score with Wheaton’s Tee-K Kelly and Aurora’s Bryce Emory in a U.S. Open local qualifier at Briar Ridge in Schererville, Ind.