Remaining in the U.S. Am? A junior star, a major champ’s son, and DIII underdog

This is where it starts to get good, people. The 2025 United States Amateur is down to eight, and those four matches get underway on Friday afternoon at The Olympic Club in San Francisco.

And the remaining participants? It’s a solid group. First, here are the matchups (all times ET):

4:30 p.m. — Niall Shiels Donegan (Scotland) vs. Jacob Modleski (Indiana)
4:45 p.m. — Jimmy Abdo (Minnesota) vs. Jackson Herrington (Tennessee)
5 p.m. — Mason Howell (Georgia) vs. John Daly II (Arkanas)
5:15 p.m. — Miles Russell (Florida) vs. Eric Lee (California)

Where to start? It could be with Abdo, the 4,292nd-ranked amateur in the world, a rising sophomore at a small Division III school (Gustavus Adolphus College) in Minnesota.

Or maybe with Daly, the son of two-time major champion John Daly. Or perhaps Russell, who last year at age 15 became the youngest player to make the cut in a Korn Ferry Tour tournament. And then there’s Shiels Donegan, whose family relocated to the Bay Area when he was 3. This is essentially a home game for him, and it showed during one wild post-round interview on Thursday.

But first, let’s go back to Abdo, who has been the underdog this week.

He didn’t play tournaments until he was in middle school and admitted he wasn’t “anything special” in high school. As he slowly started to improve, he got into some bigger events. This was his first time trying to qualify for the U.S. Amateur. Now he’s in the quarters.

“I never felt like I was ready. Coming out of high school, I was never really recruited at all,” he said. “That kind of adds into this underdog story where no one really believes I’m capable of playing good golf like this. I know I am, and I’ve had that confidence even when I was in high school. I didn’t play in the state tournament lineup until junior year of high school, and in high school it’s not too hard to be in your top six. That just kind of proves I had to grind it out and keep working at it, and now I’m here.”

While it might be surprising for Abdo to make it this far, the same can’t be said for a few others, including Modleski (the 15th-ranked amateur), Russell (16th) and Lee (29th).

Russell, at just 16 years old, is the top-ranked junior amateur in the world. His list of accomplishments and accolades is longer than most in the field, and it includes things like surpassing Tiger Woods as the youngest winner of the AJGA Rolex Boys Player of the Year award, which he did in 2023.

On Friday afternoon, Russell will face Lee, a 20-year-old rising junior at Oklahoma State who not that long ago earned the winning point for the Cowboys in the 2025 NCAA National Championship.

That’s the final match of what should be four riveting ones, and it will give way to two semifinals matches on Saturday and one 36-hole final on Sunday.

You can catch Friday’s matches from 6-7 p.m. ET on Peacock and 7-9 p.m. on Golf Channel.