The Story
SentryWorld exists because an insurance company decided its hometown deserved something extraordinary. In 1981, Sentry Insurance broke ground on a rocky, wooded swampland beside its Stevens Point headquarters, and Robert Trent Jones Jr. transformed it into a championship parkland course in roughly eighteen months — half the time such a build usually took. When it opened in 1982, it was Wisconsin's first true destination golf course, drawing players to a quiet central-Wisconsin town decades before Whistling Straits and Sand Valley made the state a pilgrimage. Jones told the press at the opening, 'I like to refer to this as my Mona Lisa.'
Then there is the 16th. The par-3 'Flower Hole' — a mid-iron over a sea of tens of thousands of blooms in every shade of pink and red — became one of the most photographed holes in America. Every spring a crew hand-plants more than 30,000 flowers around the green over two or three days, arriving by the semi-truckload, so the hole is literally reborn each season.
Rather than coast on nostalgia, Sentry closed the course in 2013 for a two-year renovation led by Jones's firm and Wisconsin-born architect Jay Blasi, rebuilding it to modern championship standards. The reborn SentryWorld reopened in 2015 with bigger ambitions — and the USGA answered.
The course had hosted the U.S. Women's Amateur Public Links back in 1986 and welcomed the U.S. Girls' Junior in 2019, but its defining week came in 2023, when the U.S. Senior Open arrived and 65-year-old Bernhard Langer authored history: the oldest champion in the event's history, and a record-breaking 46th PGA Tour Champions title that moved him past Hale Irwin. The USGA has since committed to returning — proof that Jones's Mona Lisa is still being painted.