Day 1: Rough bites, two internationals lead, and darkness stops the show

Fairways were everything on the opening day of the 126th U.S. Amateur. At both Merion and stroke-play co-host Philadelphia Country Club, thick rough turned a wayward tee shot into a scramble for par, and the players who kept it in the short grass pulled away. “The rough is gnarly,” said 2024 runner-up Noah Kent, who opened with a 3-under 67. “Making sure you keep it simple and don’t overcomplicate things is important.”

When play halted for the day, two teenagers-turned-college-standouts from outside the U.S. sat on top. Hong Kong’s William Lisle, 17, a Texas commit, shot 5-under 65 at Philadelphia C.C., matched by Germany’s Finn Koelle, 21, a Washington rising senior who reached 6 under at Merion before bogeying the iconic 18th. Illinois’ Max Herendeen made the late charge, birdieing four of his last seven for a 66, while BYU-bound Drake Harvey was 4 under with two holes left when darkness fell. Nine players posted 67, among them world No. 4 Miles Russell and Kent.

The tournament’s biggest names have work to do. World No. 1 Preston Stout opened in 75; defending champion Mason Howell, 2025 champion Ethan Fang and U.S. Open co-low amateur Ryder Cowan all shot 74. With the two courses playing nearly identically hard — stroke averages of 73.28 at Merion and 73.26 at Philadelphia C.C. — nobody ran away from the field, and the cut line projects to be tight.

A late-afternoon thunderstorm suspended play for 54 minutes, and darkness ended the day at 8:02 p.m. with 39 players unable to finish. They resume at 7 a.m. Tuesday, when Round 2 also begins. Everyone switches courses for the second 18 before the field is cut to the low 64 for match play, which starts Wednesday at Merion.

The 126th U.S. Amateur is underway at Merion Golf Club, and it would be hard to script a better stage. From Aug. 10–16, a field of 312 of the world's best amateurs — distilled from 5,111 entries — takes on the East Course in Ardmore, Pa., where Bob Jones closed out the Grand Slam in 1930 and where the wicker baskets have watched nearly a century of championship golf.

This page is our home base for the week: schedule, TV and streaming windows, the full field picture, a hole-by-hole look at both courses, and every round recap as it happens. Bookmark it.

At a glance

Day-by-day schedule

Seven days, two courses, and a bracket that shrinks by half every session once match play begins.

How to watch: TV and streaming

The championship draws at least 15 hours of broadcast coverage across Golf Channel, NBC and Peacock, with Rolex as presenting partner for uninterrupted windows. All times Eastern.

Both weekend windows cover the closing 18 of a 36-hole match, so the morning halves of Sunday's final will play out untelevised — follow those here on our live scoring.

How the format works

The U.S. Amateur is two tournaments stitched together. The first is a 36-hole stroke-play sprint that exists only to sort the field; the second is a week-long knockout where every score resets to zero.

All 312 players play one round at Merion East and one at Philadelphia Country Club across Monday and Tuesday. The low 64 totals advance, and because ties for the final spots are common, a playoff is run to trim the draw to exactly 64. Everyone else goes home Tuesday night. The player with the lowest 36-hole total earns medalist honors — a nice line on a résumé and, historically, no guarantee of anything after that.

Match play then runs single elimination over 18 holes per match, all at Merion East. The Round of 64 fills Wednesday. Thursday is the brutal day: Round of 32 in the morning, Round of 16 in the afternoon, 36 competitive holes with a lunch break in between. Quarterfinals Friday, semifinals Saturday, and Sunday's final stretches to 36 holes — the last 36-hole final in American championship golf.

The field: 312 players, 36 countries, one trophy

Merion's field is deep, international and unusually accomplished. The 312 competitors average 22.85 years old and range from 15-year-olds Landon Tudor and Bento Assis to 63-year-old Michael McCoy. Forty-five U.S. states and 36 countries are represented, while 47 of the top 50 players in the World Amateur Golf Ranking are entered as of Aug. 5.

The defending champion

Mason Howell returns one year after entering match play as the No. 63 seed and leaving The Olympic Club with the Havemeyer Trophy. Howell defeated Jackson Herrington, 7 and 6, in the 36-hole final, then represented the United States in the Walker Cup. Now 19 and preparing to enroll at Georgia, Howell will try to become the first repeat champion since Tiger Woods won three consecutive titles from 1994–96.

Herrington is back as well. The Tennessee junior earned a place in the 2026 U.S. Open through last year's runner-up finish and arrives with another opportunity to finish the job.

The top-ranked contenders

World No. 1 Preston Stout leads a field containing nearly every highly ranked amateur in the men's game. The reigning NCAA individual champion won four times during the 2025–26 college season and returns after earning stroke-play medalist honors at the 2025 U.S. Amateur.

Also returning from deep runs at The Olympic Club are semifinalist Niall Sheils Donegan and quarterfinalists Eric Lee, Jacob Modleski, Jimmy Abdo and Russell. Noah Kent, the 2024 runner-up, gives the field another player who has already reached a U.S. Amateur final.

Thirteen USGA champions

The field contains 13 USGA champions: Lawrence Allan, Evan Beck, Grady Brame Jr., Louis Brown, Hamilton Coleman, Stewart Hagestad, Brandon Holtz, Mason Howell, Bryan Kim, Noah Maclauchlan, Tyler Mawhinney, Matthew McClean and Michael McCoy.

Hagestad owns three U.S. Mid-Amateur titles and is making his 17th U.S. Amateur appearance. McCoy, the 2013 U.S. Mid-Amateur and reigning U.S. Senior Amateur champion, leads the field with 21 appearances. He is also the only player entered this year who competed in the 2005 U.S. Amateur at Merion.

Maclauchlan arrives only weeks after winning the U.S. Junior Amateur at Saucon Valley. He entered that championship as an alternate before defeating Russell, 6 and 5, in the final.

Pennsylvania's home contingent

Ten Pennsylvania players will compete in their home state: Charlie Barrickman, Nicholas Gross, Patrick Isztwan, Hank Kancher, Michael Lugiano, Matthew Mattioli, Logan Paczewski, Joshua Ryan, Hunter Stetson and Chuck Tragesser III.

Barrickman grew up less than 30 minutes from Merion and survived a seven-for-five playoff in final qualifying. Gross, Isztwan, Lugiano and Ryan qualified at nearby Llanerch Country Club, while Stetson earned his exemption by winning the Delaware Amateur in a seven-hole sudden-death playoff.

How the field was built

The USGA accepted 5,111 entries. A total of 173 players were fully exempt through championship results, international team selections, rankings and victories in recognized amateur events. The remainder advanced through local qualifying at 48 sites and final qualifying at 19 sites.

See every player who qualified for Merion in our complete site-by-site tracker →

Field information and rankings current through Aug. 5, according to the USGA.

The courses

Merion Golf Club, East Course

Merion began in 1896 as a nine-hole course built by members of the Merion Cricket Club in Haverford. When the Haskell rubber-core ball made that layout obsolete, the club handed the job of designing a new course to one of its own members, Hugh Wilson — an insurance man, not an architect. The East Course opened in Ardmore in 1912 and has been arguing with distance ever since. A restoration led by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner rebuilt every bunker and green complex to pull the course back toward Wilson's original lines.

At 6,939 yards it will be the shortest venue on the championship calendar this summer, and one of the hardest: a Course Rating of 75.3 and a Slope Rating of 153, numbers that belong on a course 500 yards longer. The defense is angles, green complexes and the Quarry — not the tee shot.

Two holes stand out on that card. The 13th plays 119 yards — a wedge that can win or lose a match in one swing, and the kind of hole match play was invented for. The 18th is a 501-yard par 4 climbing back to the clubhouse, the hole where Ben Hogan hit the 1-iron that forced a playoff in the 1950 U.S. Open. Yardages are subject to change through the week.

Philadelphia Country Club

The stroke-play co-host opened in 1890 and is a William Flynn design, more recently restored by Jim Nagle of Forse Design. At 7,201 yards it plays 262 yards longer than Merion to the same par of 70, with a 75.4 rating and 144 slope — a different kind of test entirely, and a real factor in how the two stroke-play rounds compare. Its par 5s at the 3rd (601) and 12th (618) are among the longest holes either field will see.

Philadelphia C.C. became the seventh member club of the USGA in 1899 and is one of the four founding clubs of the Golf Association of Philadelphia. It has hosted four previous USGA championships, including Byron Nelson's 1939 U.S. Open win.

Merion's championship history

With this week's championship, Merion becomes the first club to host 20 USGA championships — passing Oakmont (18) and The Country Club (17). Three moments define its place in the game.

The full ledger at Merion: six previous U.S. Amateurs (1916, 1924, 1930, 1966, 1989, 2005), five U.S. Opens (1934, 1950, 1971, 1981, 2013), four U.S. Women's Amateurs, the 1998 U.S. Girls' Junior, the 2009 Walker Cup and Curtis Cup Matches in 1954 and 2022. This will be the 97th USGA championship conducted in Pennsylvania.

Names on the Havemeyer

The champions list reads like a survey of American golf: Francis Ouimet, Chick Evans, Jones (five times), Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Deane Beman, Lanny Wadkins, Craig Stadler, Mark O'Meara, Hal Sutton, Jay Sigel, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods (1994, 1995, 1996), Matthew Fitzpatrick, Bryson DeChambeau and Nick Dunlap. The runners-up list is nearly as good — Tom Kite, Ben Crenshaw, Patrick Cantlay, Hunter Mahan, Corey Conners.

The Havemeyer Trophy: lost, burned, stolen

The trophy has one of the strangest provenances in sport. It was presented to the USGA in March 1895 in honor of the association's first president, Theodore A. Havemeyer, and handed to C.B. Macdonald after he won the first U.S. Amateur at Newport later that year.

That original silver cup, made by J.E. Caldwell and Company in Philadelphia, passed from champion to champion for three decades — until Nov. 22, 1925, when it was destroyed in a fire at East Lake Country Club, Bob Jones' home club in Atlanta. Rather than copy it, the USGA commissioned a new trophy: a tall steeple cup in solid gold, presented in January 1926.

That one was retired in 1992 and then stolen from the USGA Golf Museum in the spring of 2012. It has never been recovered. What today's champion receives is a 1992 copy. The USGA also recreated the original 1895 silver trophy in 1996, working from two surviving photographs.

What Sunday's winner gets

No prize money — that's the point. What the champion gets instead is arguably worth more.

The runner-up receives a silver medal — and, in most years, a long winter.

U.S. Amateur FAQ

Where is the 2026 U.S. Amateur being played?

Merion Golf Club's East Course in Ardmore, Pa. hosts the championship, with Philadelphia Country Club in Gladwyne serving as stroke-play co-host for the first two rounds.

What channel is the U.S. Amateur on?

Peacock streams Wednesday through Friday from 3–6 p.m. ET. Saturday and Sunday, Peacock carries 3–4 p.m. and NBC takes over from 4–6 p.m. ET.

How many players make the cut for match play?

The low 64 scorers after 36 holes of stroke play advance. If more than 64 players are tied at the cut line, a playoff is conducted to reduce the draw to exactly 64.

Who won the 2025 U.S. Amateur?

Mason Howell of Thomasville, Ga., then 18, beat Jackson Herrington 7 and 6 in the 36-hole final at The Olympic Club. He was the No. 63 seed and the third-youngest champion in championship history.

Who is eligible to play in the U.S. Amateur?

Any amateur golfer with a Handicap Index of 0.4 or lower. There is no age limit — this year's field spans teenagers to senior amateurs.

Does the U.S. Amateur champion get into the Masters?

Historically, yes. The champion receives a likely invitation to the following year's Masters Tournament provided he remains an amateur, along with exemptions into the U.S. Open and The Open Championship.

Why does Merion use wicker baskets instead of flags?

Merion's flagsticks are topped with woven wicker baskets rather than cloth flags — a tradition dating to the club's early years. Practically, it means players get no read on wind direction from the pin, which adds a genuine layer of difficulty on an already demanding course.

Future U.S. Amateur sites

Later commitments run through 2051, including Pinehurst No. 2 (2038), Baltusrol (2039), Bandon Dunes again (2041), Ridgewood (2042), Southern Hills (2044), Oakland Hills (2047) and Saucon Valley (2051).