Medinah 2026: A Group Chat, Rookie Karaoke and a Fear That Never Left

On Tuesday at Medinah Country Club, nobody asked about green speeds or wind direction. The story of the day was a group chat named "Medinah '26" and three rookies forced to sing karaoke in front of the whole team.

Brandt Snedeker, the U.S. captain, told that story with the voice of a man who knows exactly what he is trying to soften. Thirteen years earlier, on this very course, he stood through a Ryder Cup afternoon when American fans used flip phones as flashlights to see the putting surfaces. He called that atmosphere "terrifying."

Not terrifying because of the noise. Terrifying because tens of thousands of people believed you were not allowed to lose, and you knew they were right.

Now Snedeker stands on the other side of that story. The first thing he did after taking the captaincy was to gather every player's phone number into a single group chat, name it "Medinah '26", and then laugh at how inventive the name was.

The detail sounds small. It is the entire strategic problem facing Team USA this week.

Medinah does not let anyone forget

Medinah Country Club sits outside Chicago, Illinois. Its Course No. 3 is one of the longest and hardest layouts American golf has ever placed on a major schedule: narrow corridors, tall trees on both sides, fast and severely sloped greens. The course has hosted three men's majors and a long list of elite team events.

What makes Medinah a different name in fan memory, though, is not the design. It is the 2026 Ryder Cup.

That Sunday afternoon, Team Europe entered singles with a 10-6 lead after two days. Team USA flipped the momentum, went ahead, then let it slip in the closing matches. Europe won 14.5-13.5. Fans stood around greens until darkness made the turf impossible to read, and flip phones — the dominant device of 2026 — became the only light source.

Snedeker was a player then. He was not watching that afternoon from outside. He was inside it, standing over putts while a grandstand that had waited too long erupted around him.

Thirteen years later he returns to the same venue in a different role. What stands out is how he talks about the memory: not with the excitement of a man returning to a place of glory, but with a word that functions as a warning.

For a captain about to lead a group containing multiple players who have never played a team match at this level, admitting that memory publicly is not naivety. It is a calculated strategic statement.

This year's U.S. team has Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns, faces already familiar with team golf at various levels. Mixed in are Jacob Bridgeman, Chris Gotterup and Jackson Koivun, three rookies who have never walked into a team locker room at Presidents Cup level. Koivun is 21.

A captain holding three rookies and a course famous for crushing his own spirit more than a decade ago has two options. The first is to emphasise gravity — build a solemn week so the rookies understand where they are. The second is to lower the temperature, turning the locker room into a place with laughter before it becomes a place with pressure.

Snedeker chose the second, and he did so with clear intent.

A group chat, karaoke, and one unwritten rule

Since taking the team, Snedeker has gathered every member's phone number into a shared group chat. He called it a great way to pull the young guys in, so they are not standing outside the inside jokes, the dinner plans, the schedule updates.

The chat is named "Medinah '26". Snedeker joked that the name was really inventive. It is the self-deprecation of a man who knows he is not a speech-making captain.

The peak of Tuesday was the rookie initiation: Bridgeman, Gotterup and Koivun each had to sing karaoke in front of the full team.

It sounds simple. But one detail matters far more than the singing itself: while the rookies performed, there were no phones and no videoing.

Two distinct things are at work here. The first is a team ritual, a small gate a newcomer passes through to become part of the group. The second is an information-control rule inside the locker room.

No phones and no videoing is not merely cultural colour. It is a defensive measure.

In an era when any internal moment can become viral content within hours, a clip of three rookies singing off-key can follow them for a career. Not necessarily because it causes serious harm, but because it turns a moment of trust into something that can be pulled out at any press conference.

The question I always ask when reading details like this is not "what happened". The question is "who decided it would not be recorded".

In a locker room with three rookies, that decision usually belongs to the veterans. Team USA setting a limit on itself shows they anticipated the worst-case scenario: an internal moment leaked and turned into a story beyond their control.

There is a more telling sign. Not every rookie was enthusiastic about the initiation. A few of them were not entirely comfortable.

Snedeker did not hide that. He left it in the story. A captain trying to build culture who admits not everyone enjoys his own ritual is either being honest or managing the narrative very skilfully. Both possibilities are worth watching all week.

"Team Kim" and the real threat of the week

While Team USA focuses on internal matters, the International Team has an entirely different story, and to my eye a far more troubling one for the hosts.

Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim. Two names bound together since the last Presidents Cup in Montreal, where they produced what the media called their coming-out party.

The striking statistic: paired together, they have gone 2-1. Not an overwhelming number. But the more important detail lies in singles. Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim have each beaten Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns in matches played separately.

Read that carefully.

Two Asian golfers have beaten two of the strongest names on the U.S. team, not in a four-ball match with a partner covering mistakes, but in head-to-head play where every error belongs to you alone.

For a U.S. team building locker-room culture, this fact belongs on the scale alongside the karaoke story. One side is comfort. The other is evidence that the opponent knows how to beat your best players.

Every statistic can lie; my job is to catch it in the act. A 2-1 four-ball record is too small a sample to conclude anything certain. But two singles wins over Scheffler and Burns are not small in that sense. They are a signal about handling pressure in a format where pressure cannot be shared.

And here is what I believe American media is underrating: the International Team does not need an evenly balanced roster across all pairings. They need two or three pairings that can win points in the early sessions, building psychological momentum before singles begin and before the home crowd heats up.

Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim are that pairing. They proved it in Montreal. They are at their physical peak. And they carry a psychological advantage as challengers rather than favourites.

Reading Medinah with different eyes

When analysing any team event at Medinah, people usually start from the 2026 Ryder Cup memory. That is emotionally reasonable but analytically dangerous.

The mistake is assuming the atmosphere at a golf course is a constant — as if Medinah is always terrifying in the same way, at the same intensity, regardless of who is playing or which event is on.

A golf course does not create atmosphere. Spectators do. And spectators change with each event.

The Ryder Cup has a completely different emotional structure from the Presidents Cup. At the Ryder Cup, Team Europe is a historic rival, the head-to-head past is dense, and every point carries a century of collective memory on both sides. At the Presidents Cup, the opponent is the International Team — a group assembled from many nations without that same shared historical narrative with the United States.

This does not make the Presidents Cup less important. It simply gives the pressure a different shape, and that different shape produces two opposing consequences.

First: pressure may be lower, meaning U.S. rookies are less likely to be crushed by expectation. Second: lower pressure also means internal motivation must come from the team itself, because the crowd will not generate it the way a Ryder Cup crowd does.

For Snedeker, that difference can be an advantage. He does not need to recreate the 2026 feeling. He only needs to ensure his rookies are not overwhelmed by an event they have never experienced.

His method is to turn the opening week into a series of social activities before it becomes a series of matches.

There is logic behind it: if a rookie has sung karaoke in front of the whole team and survived that moment, standing over a green in front of a few thousand spectators becomes relatively less frightening. It is a familiar coaching principle — create small pressure before big pressure so body and mind learn to respond.

But that principle has clear limits. The limit is this: no team ritual helps you read a downhill putt from three metres in a four-ball match that decides a point.

What the spreadsheets cannot measure

I believed the textbook for five years, and the biggest lesson I learned is that predictive models share one blind spot: they cannot measure the mental state of a collective.

Strokes Gained, head-to-head records, greens-in-regulation rates — all useful. Without them, analysis is just emotion dressed in vocabulary. But no metric answers this question: how will a 21-year-old react the first time he stands on a tee at a team event in front of a home crowd?

That is why I track details like the group chat and the no-video rule. Not because they predict outcomes, but because they show whether Team USA is solving the right problem or merely generating a nice story for reporters.

Those two things are very far apart. And the way to tell them apart is not by listening to what the captain says, but by watching the pairings sheet.

From a failed starting block to the commentary box: every scar is a map. Snedeker's scar from Medinah 2026 is why he knows what to do with a roster holding three rookies. But one man's map does not automatically become the team's map, especially when the young players have never walked that road.

The counterintuitive angle: comfort can be a trap

Here I want to question this article's own argument.

The common assumption in team sport is that the team with better chemistry wins. It sounds so reasonable that few bother to test it against data. But looking at results from major team events over two decades, the correlation between good locker-room culture and good outcomes is far weaker than media coverage suggests.

The reason is simple. Team culture is a necessary condition in certain situations, but never a sufficient one. You can have a wonderful locker room and still lose the first four-ball session 4-1 because your opponent putts better at decisive moments.

Worse, comfort can produce a form of complacency that is hard to detect from inside. Once a team is used to laughter and inside jokes, switching into ruthless competitive mode does not happen automatically. It requires an explicit trigger.

I do not know whether Snedeker has that trigger. But I know many teams have lost by confusing two things: cohesion and readiness to fight. They often travel together, but not always.

The International Team is heading in the opposite direction. They are not building a story about a happy locker room. They are building a story about a pairing that beat the opponent's best players, repeating it often enough that it becomes a psychological anchor.

If I had to choose between those two stories to predict on-course results, I lean toward the second. Not because I believe in individualism, but because match play is a format where a specific individual or pairing can make a far bigger difference than in stroke play.

This also explains why I am cautious about pieces like this one, even as I write one. An article about karaoke and a group chat reads far more easily than an analysis of putting on fast greens. But what reads easily is not what decides who wins.

The absurdity sits here: we know results are decided by shots, yet we spend most of our time discussing things that are not shots. And I always ask myself after such a conclusion: so what? So what follows is something much more concrete.

It is how Team USA structures its first-session pairings. If they face the possibility of Tom Kim and Si Woo Kim playing together, whether they have prepared a specific counter-pairing will say a great deal about how seriously they have read their opponent.

A cheerful group chat cannot answer that. Only the pairings sheet can. And the pairings sheet arrives after the karaoke stories have expired.

What I will be watching

Medinah will begin, and the group-chat story will vanish from the headlines within about two days. That is the fate of all culture-building content in sport: its value lasts exactly as long as the time remaining before the first match.

What lasts longer are the putts on the 17th green in late afternoon, when the light fades and nobody is thinking about karaoke anymore.

Snedeker knows that better than anyone. He was inside that moment, on this very ground, thirteen years ago. His decision to spend the early week making everything lighter is not a sign of complacency. It is the sign of a man who has seen what happens when everything becomes too heavy.

The final question is not whether Team USA has a good locker room. It does. The question is whether a good locker room is enough against a pairing that has already beaten their best players.

The answer will be on the scoreboard, not in the group chat.