Vilips will further his progression when he plays his first major championship as a professional at the US PGA Championship starting late tonight AEST, the 23-year-old paired with Thorbjorn Olesen and Laurie Canter for rounds one and two.

A maiden PGA TOUR win in just his fourth start at the Puerto Rico Open in March earned Vilips his place in the field at Quail Hollow Club, and gave Ogilvy further cause to sit up and take notice.

Named captain of the International team for the 2026 matches in Chicago a fortnight ago, Ogilvy has been aware of Vilips from his day as a pint-sized precocious kid with his own YouTube channel collecting junior trophies across the globe.

That he is now being considered a contender to take on the might of the US is a surprise even to the man tasked with engineering an International win more than 25 years in the making.

“I’m not massive on social media, but I was always pretty aware that he was pretty good,” said Ogilvy.

“He went to Stanford and went all four years, which was impressive because these prodigies usually end up getting out there too early. That was really smart.

“Then he comes out of college and just goes win-win bang. And now he’s out here and he’s won on the main Tour. It’s pretty impressive.

“If you look at the top players in the world, usually they’ve had lives like him. Tiger (Woods) and Justin Thomas and (Phil) Mickelson and all these guys, and Ernie Els, they start golf when they’re starting to walk.

“And Karl was the same.

“That transition from college or amateur golf to pro golf is not easy – we’ve seen a lot of guys stumble at that hurdle – but he’s just made it look pretty easy.

“The future is bright for him. He’s definitely on my radar.”

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Vilips first came on the radar of Jason Day’s long-time coach Colin Swatton at the 2014 US Open at Pinehurst when introduced by Karl’s father, Paul Vilips.

It wasn’t until Vilips broke his finger playing basketball and was enduring a challenging period in his development that Golf Australia’s High Performance Director, Brad James, reached out in 2020 to see if Swatton would coach a talented teen in need of direction.

“I met a kid that was extremely low on confidence, didn’t know really the direction his game was going to come out on the back end of the surgery,” Swatton shared.

“He was looking at changing grip positions because of the broken finger and he had some stuff going on in his swing that was definitely a red flag.

“Paul basically asked me to get involved from a short-game perspective and it wasn’t long until I was working with him from a long-game perspective.”

As he refines a swing and overall game that has already proven itself at the highest level, Swatton has marvelled at Vilips’ mental make-up.

Before he had played his first event as a PGA TOUR member, Vilips was speaking excitedly about playing the RBC Heritage at Harbour Town, one of his favourite golf courses.

The issue, as Swatton saw it, was that the RBC was a limited-field Signature Event worth $US20 million that his rookie charge was a long shot of playing.

And then Puerto Rico happened.

“I just thought to myself, here’s a kid that saw himself somewhere months before it happened,” Swatton added.

“And it’s the law of attraction. What you focus on is what will become your beliefs and your future.

“He wasn’t focused on anything else other than where he thinks he needs to be.

“It took Jason three years to figure out how to win on the PGA TOUR and he’s won within the first four events of being on TOUR.

“He’s definitely ahead of the curve and I think he could be really, really special.

“Given the right environment, given the right people around him, given the right information, I think he could be one of Australian’s great golfers.”