[PHOTO: Gary Kellner/PGA of America via Getty Images]
A decade has passed since Valhalla Golf Club last hosted the PGA Championship, where Rory McIlroy held off Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler to hoist the Wanamaker Trophy in 2014. The club in Louisville, Kentucky returns to host its fourth PGA Championship, and if the finish at this year’s PGA is like either of the past two contested at Valhalla (Tiger Woods defeated Bob May in a thrilling playoff in 2000), then we’re in for an exciting week.
In the next decade, the PGA will continue to return to familiar host sites – notably Quail Hollow in 2025, Baltusrol in 2029 and Kiawah Island’s Ocean course in 2031 – but also will visit courses last seen on the men’s side when they hosted the US Open, including San Francisco’s Olympic Club and Congressional, located just outside Washington, DC.
Also slated to host the championship in 2027 and 2034 is the Omni PGA Frisco Resort, the new headquarters of the PGA of America that features two new courses designed by Gil Hanse and Beau Welling.
Scroll on to see every course that is scheduled to host the PGA Championship:
2025: Quail Hollow Club, Charlotte, North Carolina
Few golf-course projects had more national attention in recent years than Quail Hollow, mainly because its front nine was redesigned just a year before it hosted the 2017 PGA Championship, won by Justin Thomas. The par-4 first and par-3 second holes were completely torn up, replaced by a new, long, dogleg-right, par-4 opening hole. Several hectares of pines to the left of the fifth tee were removed to make room for a new par-3 fourth. (With its knobby green fronted by three traps, it proved to be the most frustrating hole for pros in the 2017 PGA.) More pines were removed to the left of the par-4 11th, replaced by bunkers, and even more trees chopped down on a hill left of the par-4 18th to make room for money-making hospitality boxes. There’s no question that this latest remodelling, rushed though it was, improved the course. The course was also rerouted for the 2022 Presidents Cup.
2026: Aronimink Golf Club, Newtown Square, Pennsylvania
Aronimink is an object lesson in architectural evolution. After Donald Ross completed his design in 1928, he proclaimed, “I intended to make this my masterpiece.” That didn’t keep club members from bringing in William Gordon in the 1950s to eliminate out-of-play fairway bunkers and move other bunkers closer to greens. The course was later revamped by Dick Wilson, George Fazio and Robert Trent Jones. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Ron Prichard, one of the profession’s original restoration specialists, began returning Aronimink back to Ross’s conception based on the architect’s drawings and field diagrams. But there was always a discrepancy between what Ross drew in plans and what was actually built in 1928. A more recent renovation by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, who live nearby, has put the course’s architecture more in line with what aerial photographs depict of the early design, particularly the bunkering that might have been imagined as larger in scale but built in smaller, more scatter-shot formations.
2027: PGA Frisco, Fields Ranch East, Texas The East course at the Omni PGA Frisco is one of two courses to open at the new Fields Ranch Golf Club. Alongside the Beau Welling-designed West course is the East, built by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, which measures more than 7,800 yards (7,130 metres) from the championship tees and puts a greater emphasis on driving than the West, demanding length, accuracy and the courage to take on cross-bunkers and central hazards. The greens, perched above bunkers and chipping runoffs, are smaller and require controlled approaches, and the holes of the second nine prowl the basin of Panther Creek. Both courses opened in May 2023, and the East has already hosted the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship. It is set to host a number of other prestigious events, including the PGA Championship (2027, 2034), the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship (2025, 2031) and the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship again in 2029.
2028: The Olympic Club (Lake), San Francisco, California
It seems fitting that, in a town where every house is a cliffhanger, every US Open played at Olympic has been one, too. For decades, the Lake course was a severe test of golf. Once it was a heavily forested course with canted fairways hampered by just a single fairway bunker. By 2009, the forest had been considerably cleared away, leaving only the occasional bowlegged cypress with knobby knees, the seventh and 18th greens were redesigned and a new par-3 eighth added. Despite those changes, the 2012 US Open stuck to the usual script: a ball got stuck in a tree, slow-play warnings were given, a leader snap-hooked a drive on 16 in the final round, and a guy name Simpson won. If the past was predictable, the future of the Lake course more mysterious. The holes are being remodelled in 2023 by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner in preparation for the 2028 PGA Championship, and it remains to be seen what version of the Lake course will ultimately emerge.
2029: Baltusrol Golf Club (Lower), Springfield, New Jersey
Jack Nicklaus won two US Opens on Baltusrol’s Lower course, setting a tournament record each time. Phil Mickelson and Jimmy Walker won PGAs on it. But the Lower’s most historic event was the ace by architect Robert Trent Jones in 1954 on the par-3 fourth, instantly squelching complaints of critical club members who felt Trent’s redesign made it too hard. Trent’s younger son, Rees, an avowed A.W. Tillinghast fan, lightly retouched the Lower’s design for the 2016 PGA Championship. But there has been another changing of the guard at Baltusrol, as architect Gil Hanse and his team took over as the club’s new consulting architects, and re-opened the restored Lower course – after carefully examining Tillie’s old plans and reclaiming green size and rebuilding bunkers – in May 2021.
2030: Congressional Country Club, Bethesda, Maryland
Congressional’s Blue course had been an icon of traditional American parkland golf since the 1964 US Open. Prior to that event, Robert Trent Jones combined nine remodelled Devereux Emmet holes with nine new ones of his own to create the modern Blue, and those holes were remodelled and reshaped several times by son Rees Jones for the 1997 and 2011 US Opens. All the while, the trees around them matured, creating dense, shadowy corridors of wood. Drainage issues and declining course conditions motivated the membership to consider a major overhaul in 2020, and that’s what they received when architect Andrew Green reimagined the course as something that Emmet might have originally designed, denuding the property of its forests and creating broad, rollicking fairways that tumble through meadows of long fescue punctuated by fearsome bunkers and bold, segmented greens. Parkland golf Congressional is no more, and the remodel, which included a new, drop-shot, par-3 10th hole, earned the course US Golf Digest‘s Best Transformation award for 2021.
2031: The Ocean Course, Kiawah Island, South Carolina
Often considered to be the first course designed for a specific event – the 1991 Ryder Cup – this manufactured linksland-meets-lagoons layout might well be Pete Dye’s most diabolical creation. Every hole is edged by sawgrass, every green has tricky slopes, every bunker merges into bordering sand dunes. Strung along nearly five kilometres of ocean coast, Dye took his wife’s advice and perched fairways and greens so golfers can actually view the Atlantic surf. That also exposes shots and putts to ever-present and sometimes fierce coastal winds. The Ocean course will forever be linked with Phil Mickelson and his improbable victory at the 2021 PGA Championship.
2034: PGA Frisco, Fields Ranch East, Texas Same as the 2027 championship, above.