The Sentry

The Sentry

After its brief sabbatical the PGA tour returns to our screens this week with its traditional year opening curtain raiser in Hawaii, The Sentry.

As has been the case for many years now this event marks the first of a two week stint in Hawaii as next week will see the first full field event of 2025, The Sony Open in Honolulu.

The Sentry was actually founded way back in 1953 and over the early years was played in Nevada and then California, before relocating to its current venue, The Plantation Course at Kapalua in Maui in 1999 and it has remained here ever since.

Current title sponsor Sentry Insurance took over these duties in 2018.

For the second successive year not only is the event open to all winners on tour from the previous calendar year but invites are now extended to all players who finished in the all-important top 50 on the PGA Tour last season. As a result the event is now known as The Sentry as opposed to the Sentry ToC!

Allowing for the current format we have a field of 60 players teeing it up this week made up of 31 winners from 2024 and a whopping 29 players who finished in the top 50 without posting a win. Beneficiaries on the latter front include Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Sungjae Im, Sahith Theegala, Ludvig Aberg, Adam Scott , Matt Fitzpatrick and Sam Burns.

One player who will not be here though is Scottie Scheffler who has required a minor hand surgery following a Christmas Day accident with a broken glass. The world Number One hopes to be ready to return for the Amex in a few weeks time.

In addition Rory McIlroy along with fellow Europeans Tommy Fleetwood and Shane Lowry have chosen to swerve the event and they are expected to start their 2025 campaign in Dubai on the DP World Tour.

With Scheffler absent the market is headed up by Xander Schauffele. Schauffele is then followed by Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas.

COURSE

As noted above the event has been played since 1999 on the Plantation Course at the Kapalua resort in Maui.

The Plantation Course was co designed by Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore and features wide undulating fairways and larger than average undulating Bermuda Greens.

The course measures just under 7600yds long.

The greens are TifEagle Bermuda

The course is unique on the PGA Tour in that it plays to a Par 73 as there are only three par three’s to go with 11 par fours and four par fives. Allowing for its length you would be forgiven for thinking it would favour bombers, however plenty of average to shorter length hitters have performed well here over the years such as Stricker, Spieth, Reed and Zach Johnson.

Bigger hitters have certainly had their share of success here over the years as well though with Dustin Johnson posting a 430 yard drive along the way to his win in 2018.

During 2019 the course underwent a major redesign/renovation project under the supervision of the original designers Coore & Crenshaw, which we saw in play in the 2020 edition.

The main aim of this was to firm up the greens and the course in general thus returning it to playing how it was originally designed.

In addition some holes saw bunkers repositioned in order to have more impact on the modern day players.

Finally some holes were lengthened and some shortened to fit more in line with how the ‘Trade Winds’, which effect the course tend to blow.

I noted in 2021 that with the wind playing a fairly significant part in the 2020 edition we had to be a little cautious as to how much impact the course changes had in bringing us a winning score ten shots higher than the previous year and this indeed turned out to be the case as the 2021 edition saw normal scoring service resumed with Harris English triumphing with a 25- under total. In 2022 with conditions again co-operating we saw the course taken apart with Cameron Smith pipping Jon Rahm with a 34- under total!

The following year Rahm triumphed with a 27- under total while list year Chris Kirk posted a winning score of -29.

HISTORY

Perhaps not unsurprisingly for a tournament who’s field, until recently, has been made up purely from winners from the previous year, over recent years the Sentry ToC has very much become the domain of players from the very top of the game.

This can be seen from the fact that only two of the last 12 winners, Harris English and last years champion Chris Kirk, were either not already, or have not subsequently become major champions.

An even more striking stat that hit me when looking at the event is the number of starts players had previously made in Kapalua before first tasting victory here.

Let me expand further…. You would think that in an event, which historically is purely open to winners from the previous year and therefore which inevitably includes a bunch of first time winners making their debut here, we would have had some winners over the recent years who were making their first start in the event having posted their first PGA Tour win the previous year.

This though is not the case at all, in fact if we look at the list below showing the winners back to 2013 and how many previous wins they had on the PGA Tour, we can see experience appears to be key.

2024 – Chris Kirk – 5 previous wins.

2023 – Jon Rahm – 7 previous wins

2022 – Cameron Smith – 3 previous wins

2021 – Harris English – 2 previous wins

2020 – Justin Thomas – 11 previous wins

2019 – X Schauffele – 3 previous PGA wins

2018 - D Johnson - 16 previous PGA wins

2017 - J Thomas – 2 previous PGA wins

2016 - J Spieth – 6 previous PGA wins

2015 - P Reed – 3 previous PGA wins

2014 - Z Johnson – 10 previous PGA wins

2013 - D Johnson – 6 previous PGA wins

As we can see from this table only three players over this period, English, Schauffele and Thomas, have won here on their second visit, whilst all of the others had made multiple starts on Maui before getting the job done, with the most recent winner Kirk triumphing on his fourth start here.

There are two possible reasons for this, first and foremost it could just be a case that course experience, getting to know the large undulating greens here, how the Trade Winds can effect shots etc, is key.

Secondly I do think that it is quite possible when a player tees it up here for the first time they don’t necessarily have their full ‘game head’ on and instead get caught up in the whole ‘I’ve made it to Maui, let’s bring the family for a vacation’ vibe, thus forgetting there is an event to be won.

Either way, whatever the reason, it seems clear that historically this has not been an event for first timers.

It is also worth noting that one of those three winners who have triumphed on their second visit, Harris English in 2022, had not won in the previous season and was eligible based on his top thirty Fedex Cup finish. From that point of view he was not arriving in Maui with the ‘first time winners’ mindset as noted above but rather with a hunger to post his first win since 2013 on the back of a really solid 2020. With motivation then potentially more of a driver to the ‘non winners’ from the previous year it is perhaps worth looking closely at the players with previous course experience, who are teeing it up this week despite having not won in 2023.

Finally in a continuation of the ‘experience counts here’ mantra by my reckoning only five first time players here have posted a top five finish in the past eight years, Sungjae Im in 2021, Jon Rahm in 2018, Tom Hoge and Tom Kim in 2023 and Byeong Hun-An last year.

WEATHER FORECAST

It looks like we are in for a reasonably fine start weather wise to 2023 on the PGA Tour with temperatures hovering around the low 80s. There is some potential for some showers through the week with Saturday looking the most likely day on this front.

The wind, which is more often than not a factor here doesn’t look to be much of a factor this week with nothing much more than 10mph in the forecast as I write. Conditions should then be comparable to similar for scoring to what we have seen the last couple of years.

As I always so though, this could all change!

PICKS

There is always a fair bit of speculation involved for this first event of the New Year as you can never be quite sure as to how prepared the field will be. Who will come ready to win and who will have spent the festive period with their feet up reflecting on their achievements?

Having weighed everything up I have decided to go with four players this week as follows;

JUSTIN THOMAS –  12/1 – 2.5pts E/W - 1/5 odds 1st 6 - FINISHED 26th

I will start 2025 in the same way I finished 2024 by siding with Justin Thomas.

JT arrives on Maui after a winless 2024 and with the last of his 15 PGA trophies coming way back at the PGA Championship in 2022 he will clearly be highly motivated to get back in to the winners enclosure as he starts the New Year.

While 2024 was a winless year for Thomas if you include his third place last time out at the Hero in December he posted seven top tens including five top fives over the , so it was a vastly improved performance compared to his 2023 efforts.

The main reason for JT’s improved year last year was that after an uncharacteristically bad year by his standards with his iron play in 2023, he bounced back to form in this department in 2024 ranking ninth. Equally though the reason he could not quite get the job done with regards to winning was the flat stick, for which he continued to struggle, ranking 174^th.

My hope this week on that front though is two-fold, firstly I expect he will have been putting in a lot of work on the greens during his down time, which could lead to an uptick, in addition and more pertinently, with experience on the greens here very much key, one would hope that JT’s undoubted advantage on that front will hold him in good stead.

Talking of his experience here as a two time winner of the event with three further top five’s in his last five visits it is clear Justin is hugely at home on the track.

At the Hero in December Thomas put a new driver in to play, which helped him add some extra yardage and on a course with similar characteristics this week I expect him to be relishing unleashing that weapon again.

After his poor 2023 JT missed out on this event last year for the first time in nine years so I expect him to be raring to go this week and as a player who has shown here before that he can produce the goods when fresh I expect a big performance from him.

AKSHAY BHATIA –  33/1 – 1.5pts E/W - 1/5 odds 1st 6 - FINISHED 32nd

Next up this week for me is Akshay Bhatia.

Bhatia continued his surge to the top of the game in 2024 by bagging his second PGA Tour win, along with three further top five finishes if you include his fourth place at the Hero.

A winner on the Korn Ferry Tour in the Bahamas in 2022 Akshay was fourth when defending that trophy twelve months later, that tells me two things, one that he is prone to going well when fresh at the start of the year and two, that he is comfortable by the coast. This second point is rubber stamped by the fact that he has a second place in Puerto Rico and a fourth and tenth in Mexico over the past couple of seasons by the coast. In addition as noted already he was fourth at the Hero when returning to the Bahamas in December and there is no doubt that event links well here.

Akshay made his debut at Kapalua last year posting a very creditable 14^th place finish, which was highlighted with rounds of 64 and 66 on Friday and Saturday before he faltered slightly with a closing 71.

Clearly an aggressive player capable of serious low scoring Akshay should be ideally suited to the test this event offers and I expect him to improve on his debut here last year and be very much in the hunt come Sunday.

NICO ECHAVARRIA –  110/1 - 1pt E/W - 1/5 odds 1st 6 - FINISHED 32nd

Next up I will take a chance that Nico Echavarria can keep the ball rolling from his great run of form at the back end of last season.

As mentioned earlier it is hard to know how players will come in to this week and there is always the danger with Nico that he will have put his clubs away at the end of his 2024 campaign and will come in to this week rusty and in a ‘comfort zone’. That said there are enough pointers to the fact that this is a test, which should really suit him to make me more than happy to pay to find out at the triple digit odds being dangled.

On that front and the biggest pointer to the track being to the Colombian’s, is that in his time on tour to date he has shown he is very much at home by the coast. Firstly of course his maiden win on Tour came at the Puerto Rico Open in 2023, meanwhile his only other top 25 finishes that season came when he was 12^th at the Sony Open and 23^rd in Bermuda.

More encouragement can then be found from last season when he found form in the spring to produce a solid run of 24 21 15 in Mexico, at the Cognizant and back in Puerto Rico. He then posted a 14^th at the Corales before rounding out his year with a sixth in Mexico and a runner up finish in his final start at the RSM. Finally he produced a solid 25^th place on debut here last year when having shown no form at all at the back end of 2023. Basically whenever Nico tee’s it up with the sea in his view he seems to up his game.

Coming in to this week then and with confidence surely sky high I do feel Nico is being somewhat underestimated by the layers and I am happy to take my chances that he will start 2025 in comparable fashion to the way he finished last year.

PATTON KIZZIRE –  175/1 - 1pt E/W - 1/5 odds 1st 8 - FINISHED 40th

Finally in an event that, allowing for Scheffler’s withdrawal, the absence of McIlroy and of course the lack of presence of former course horse Jon Rahm, might not take as much winning as it has in past years, I will roll the dice on Patton Kizzire at huge odds.

Kizzire earned his return to Maui courtesy of his win at the Procore Championship in the Fall, a victory, which saw him return to the winners enclosure for the first time since 2018.

That last win of course came in Hawaii at the Sony Open and with his maiden tour win having come in Mexico at the back end of 2017 there are certainly some potential comparisons to be drawn to the 38yr olds return to Hawaii this year.

Since his win at the Procore it must be said Patton has somewhat gone off the boil again missing two of his final four cuts of 2024 and posting nothing better than 43^rd in those events, however that is very much factored in to his odds. Instead then I will focus on the fact that the three time tour winner has finished 15^th and eighth in his two previous starts in this event, in addition to bagging the trophy at Waialae previously.

In this event last year we say Chris Kirk put a poor run of form from the back end of 2023  completely behind him to bag the trophy and with so many question marks coming in to this week around the field as a whole I am happy to speculate on Kizzire to produce something similar.