This weekend marks what should have been the start of the 2026 PGA Tour season.
But The Sentry, the tour’s annual season opener in Maui, was canceled in October due to a complicated water supply issue on the Hawaiian island.
Since then, sources in the golf industry have privately expressed doubt about the PGA Tour’s future in Hawai‘i altogether, with many pundits and other stakeholders publicly acknowledging the uncertainty, too.
A particularly confusing development is that the Plantation Course at Kapalua Resort is back open for play, with recent images of plush green grass showing a stark contrast to the brown, dead fairways that sparked The Sentry’s cancellation last fall.
“We could have prepared to PGA Tour level this week,” Kapalua Golf GM Alex Nakajima tells Front Office Sports.
The Plantation Course is booking 18-hole tee times from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. local time most days, trying to recoup at least a little bit of the revenue the PGA Tour event would have brought in; the local economic impact for tournament week is estimated to be around $50 million.
“Well, the island’s empty,” longtime golf commentator Mark Rolfing, who lives on Maui, tells FOS. “West Maui, in particular, there’s nobody here. It would have been very busy.”
Many hotels around Maui weren’t able to fill the slots that had been saved this week for tournament organizers and volunteers, Nakajima says.
At Kapalua, the Bay Course remains closed because the resort is directing its entire water supply to the Plantation Course, which is now the primary source of business. “Not having the tournament, if we would be on TV this week, it would have been a slam dunk to show that, ‘Hey, we’re good,’” Nakajima says. “We lost that opportunity.”
The water issue—which has turned into a legal dispute—that led to The Sentry’s cancellation is the latest obstacle that has plagued Maui, following the Lahaina wildfires in 2023 that came just as the general public was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In five years, we’ve had three unbelievable incidents,” Rolfing says. “And it’s really taken a toll on this island.”
Sentry executives, including chairman and CEO Pete McPartland, were on Maui this week to follow through with charitable efforts and discuss future options. The Wisconsin-based insurance company donated $1 million to three Maui-based nonprofit organizations. The Sentry is signed on to sponsor the annual PGA Tour season opener through 2035.
Rolfing—who will start his 41st year covering the PGA Tour at next week’s Sony Open in Honolulu with a new NBC and Golf Channel contract—predicts upcoming schedule changes may cut the seven-event Hawaiian and West Coast to just four tournaments. But Maui’s event doesn’t have to go away in his mind.
“If you played the second week in January, it costs a couple million dollars less, just because you’re not shipping everything over Christmas, and tripling the airfares and hotel rooms,” Rolfing says. “You can put together all these huge costs going over the holidays—don’t do that. It doesn’t make sense. We can find a better, more logical place.”
Moving forward, the PGA Tour will no doubt keep the water supply issue in mind when considering returning to Kapalua, which Nakajima admits will remain uncertain. “At the moment, during the litigation, we don’t have that security that this amount of water will continue to flow to the golf course,” he says.
“It’s just a very, very sad situation,” Rolfing says. “It’s hard to deal with it all. People don’t really quite understand the situation.”
In recent years, the PGA Tour has announced its following year’s schedule in August around the Tour Championship, which gives Maui stakeholders roughly seven months to plead their case for hosting the tour again in 2027 and beyond.
