Us Amateur Golf returns to Merion Golf Club in Ardmore this week, and the 126th U.S. Amateur Championship opens with 312 players chasing the Havemeyer Trophy. The first two days belong to stroke play, with Merion sharing the load with Philadelphia Country Club in Gladwyne before the field is cut to 64 for match play.
That scale is what makes the championship feel different on day one. The field was drawn from 5,111 entries, a two-stage qualifying process winnowed it to the 312 in the bracket, and only 64 lowest scores after 36 holes will survive to Wednesday’s Round of 64. Forty-seven of the top 50 in the Men’s World Amateur Golf Ranking made it in, including Preston Stout, the No. 1 player in the ranking and the current Division I NCAA individual champion with Oklahoma State.
Stout is also part of the round-robin buzz at the top of the draw, set to play with Tyler Watts, ranked No. 3, and Miles Russell, ranked No. 4, at 1:30 p.m. Monday at Merion and again at 7:33 a.m. Tuesday at Philadelphia Country Club. Russell arrives after finishing runner-up at the U.S. Junior Amateur at Saucon Valley Country Club, while Mason Howell returns as the reigning U.S. Amateur champion after winning at The Olympic Club in San Francisco at age 18. He beat Jackson Herrington in a 36-hole final and became the third-youngest champion in tournament history.
Merion last hosted the U.S. Amateur in 2005, and the passage of time shows in one blunt number: Mike McCoy, now 63, is the only player in this field who was there then. The rest of the 312-player lineup is a different generation, drawn from 45 states and 36 countries, with 12 past USGA champions and 13 runners-up mixed into the week. Among the local names, Drue Nicholas stands out. He is 23, a Drexel graduate and the only Merion member in the field, and he arrives after winning his second straight Philadelphia Open and becoming only the second player in history to sweep the Philadelphia Open and the Philadelphia Amateur in the same year.
That is the quiet turn inside a championship built on history: the same club, a smaller field and a stricter cut, but a player pool that has turned over almost completely since 2005. After stroke play ends Tuesday, the tournament shifts fast. The Round of 64 starts Wednesday, the Round of 32 and Round of 16 follow on Thursday, the quarterfinals are Friday, the semifinals are Saturday and the championship match is Sunday.
