The PGA Tour announced Wednesday that the 2026 season opener, the Sentry, will not take place.
Strangely enough it wasn’t the only Kapalua-related announcement on Wednesday. The Plantation Course — the pride of Maui and longtime host of the first event of the Tour’s calendar season — posted a banner on its website proclaiming that it is now booking tee times after the course was closed for two months.
So what the heck is going on?
This is a story about drought, conditions of course, and about Hawaiian politics. But it has also become a story about the future of the PGA Tour, about its vision and strategy and its relationships with markets and sponsors. Let’s discuss some complicating factors together, question-and-answer style.
Wait – why don’t they have the Sentry in Kapalua like they normally do?
The simplest answer is that water restrictions on Maui (due to a combination of drought, infrastructure, streams, ditches, lawsuits, finger-pointing and more) called into question the course’s willingness to host a premier field in January. Tournament officials and PGA Tour representatives deliberated and ultimately decided last month that the Sentry would not take place as planned.
An earlier release about the decision cited conditioning concerns and explained that they pulled the plug early due to “logistical complexities unique to hosting a tournament on the island of Maui.”
“These include shipping deadlines, supplier coordination and the build-out of tournament infrastructure – all of which are intensified by the island’s remoteness,” the Tour said. wrote.
So just how bad is the course?
Honestly? If you’ve seen posts about shattered fairways on social media, it’s probably not as bad as you might think. There are two golf courses in Kapalua, the Plantation and the Bay, and the resort has redoubled its efforts to revitalize the plantation – while some of the more viral images, like the one below, come from the sepia-toned bay.
As for the plantation course? They have a live view of the first tee that you can watch hereand below is a screenshot from Wednesday afternoon ET.
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This is hardly proof of anything; for example, we cannot see up close how well grass has grown on the greens. But we are still more than two months away from the start of the tournament. If everyone involved had been committed to the idea that the Sentry must were going to be played in Kapalua this year, it seems like they could have done that. One way to think about this is that Tour doesn’t like uncertainty. The combination of complex local politics with the uncertainty of track conditions and whatever it takes to get equipment, vending machines and personnel to Maui contributed to the plug being pulled.
Wait, so why not have it somewhere else?
Good question! There was talk of holding the Sentry elsewhere. Torrey Pines, who hosted Genesis last year, was a possibility, as were others from Palm Springs to Florida. Ultimately, those responsible decided that the logistical challenges of pulling together a last-minute replacement location weren’t worth it. That’s not a particularly satisfying answer, but another way to think about it is this: the Tour and this tournament are each in reset mode. It wasn’t worth going out of your way to make the Sentry happen in a less than satisfying way.
There was also this comment from Sentry’s Stephanie Smith in the release:
“The Sentry is a jewel in the PGA Tour schedule,” said Smith, Chief Marketing and Brand Officer and Chief Golf Partnership Officer at Sentry. “We were committed to playing a signature-level event in 2026 – one that honored the tradition of the tournament and provided the quality of competition that players and fans have come to expect. Despite the Tour’s best efforts, it became impossible to do that. Sentry is committed to our long-term relationship with the Tour – which runs until 2035 – and the Sentry’s place as a premier event. Although 2026 will not go as we would have liked, we are optimistic about the future.”
Are there any other complicating factors?
There are! One of them is the fact that the Sentry is no longer the only early January competition on the golf calendar. The DP World Tour’s 2026 Dubai Invitational is scheduled for the week after the Sentry (January 15-18) and has already secured commitments from Rory McIlroy and Tommy Fleetwood; they are also among the top European teams expected at next week’s Hero Dubai Desert Classic (January 22-25).
There’s also TGL, which kicks off on Sunday, December 28 in Florida and then plays matches on Monday or Tuesday each week of January – which raised eyebrows when the schedule was released, as it’s difficult to combine a TGL match on Tuesday with a start time for a Thursday tournament in Hawaii.
So…where does the PGA Tour season start?
Technically, the first PGA Tour event of the season will be the Sony Open in Hawaii, with balls in the air for the first round on January 15. But it may not feel that way rather like the entire PGA Tour is going on; Top professionals who typically island hop from the Sentry to the Sony may not make the trip at all.
It will be interesting to see if we get a strengthened field when the Tour returns to the mainland with the American Express in Palm Springs from January 22 to 25. That will be followed by the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines (Jan. 29-Feb. 1) and the WM Phoenix Open (Feb. 5-8) before, finally, the first Signature Event, the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am (Feb. 12-15). From there, things will hit warp speed (eight Signature events plus the Players and all four majors over the next 23 weeks). But it is admittedly a slower start now that the Sentry is not on the schedule.
Does this mean the end of PGA Tour golf in Hawaii?
The answer there is very definitive maybe. No final decisions have been made on the future of the Sentry or Sony, but the Tour appears to be assessing all its options – and has been clear about the built-in challenges of hosting professional events in Hawaii.
On the one hand, there is a long tradition of early-season tournament golf in Hawaii. Cold-weather golf fans have grown to love being transported to the epic Hawaiian hills of Kapalua for primetime viewing during the first week of the year. Players who make the trek love to start their season there and also enjoy bringing their families. And Sentry recently extended its partnership with the Tour and that kickoff event through 2035.
On the other hand, hosting a major golf tournament on a remote island chain is expensive. It’s a logistical challenge from a tournament operations and TV production perspective. And Hawaii doesn’t have the population centers of its mainland counterparts, making revenue generation more difficult. Read between the lines of the Tour’s statementit sounds committed to the relationship with Sentry (“a great partner of ours”), but avoided any mention of the future of the tournament in Kapalua. Add to that the fact that Sony’s deal expires in 2026, and combine that with the Tour’s new leadership, and it’s easy to imagine a world where the season starts somewhere else – and in a place that’s easier to get to.
What does this mean for the future of the PGA Tour?
Nothing yet. But it is a reminder that change is coming. That everything is assessed. That the Future Competition Committeechaired by Tiger Woods, has been tasked with creating the Tour’s “optimal competitive model.” As Brian Rolapp, the PGA Tour’s new CEO, said in August:
“The goal is not incremental change. The goal is significant change.”
That committee also includes Tour professionals Patrick Cantlay, Adam Scott, Camilo Villegas, Maverick McNealy and Keith Mitchell – as well as ex-Valero CEO Joe Gorder, Fenway Sports Group’s John Henry and baseball executive turned sports visionary Theo Epstein. Over time they will have more say.
For the time being, we only know for sure that the first Tour event of 2026 is not on the schedule. We can only guess what changes will happen next.
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