The 2025 PGA Tour season starts next week from Hawaii, and once again the year kicks off with the first Signature event on the schedule: The Sentry.
Long known as the Tournament of Champions, the PGA Tour event at Kapalua Resort's Plantation Course is now not just reserved for players to win on the PGA Tour since (and including) the last edition of the tournament. While winning on the PGA Tour in the prior year will still punch a player's ticket to Kapalua, there's now another way to get into the $20 million event.
How to qualify for the 2025 Sentry
The first way to get into The Sentry is to win on the PGA Tour in the year prior or be defending champion of The Sentry.
Scottie Scheffler won seven official PGA Tour events, taking down darn close to 20 percent of the total FedEx Cup schedule. (He also won the Olympic gold medal and the Hero World Challenge, which weren't a part of the FedEx Cup schedule.) So Scheffler reduced the number of players who could get into the Sentry by virtue of a PGA T0ur win. We'll see if that repeats itself in 2025, starting at Kapalua.
The second way in the field, though, is related to the FedEx Cup from last year.
The top 50 players on the year-ending FedEx Cup eligibility list gain entry to the tournament as well, a reward for getting to the second of the three-stage FedEx Cup playoffs. The 2023 season was the first with the much smaller starting playoff field of 70 players in the Memphis, which was cut down to the top 50 players for the second stage at the BMW Championship. With the PGA Tour wanting to offer a reward to players at each stage of the playoffs (getting into the playoffs guarantees full status for next year, getting into the Tour Championship offers a chance at the FedEx Cup), they came up with using the BMW Championship as a carrot to players to get into every Signature event in the following season.
With The Sentry becoming a Signature event (following on from the idea of designated events), that meant that the final FedEx Cup top 50 could lock up a spot in The Sentry in the following year to get a guaranteed payday and start off with a shot at elevated FedEx Cup points.
Of course, there's crossover between the top 50 and players that won on the PGA Tour last year. A total of 19 players in the final FedEx Cup top 50 wound up winning an official PGA Tour event in 2024, including JT Poston, who won in Las Vegas in the fall after finishing in the top 50 in the FedEx Cup season.
Players who qualify for the Sentry are not required to compete. The commitment deadline is December 27, 2024.
