U.S. Senior Open venue SentryWorld has become a force in the golf world by getting whatever it wants

STEVENS POINT, Wisconsin — It’s the kind of decision that can cement a legacy, for better or worse, and for Pete McPartland, it came without a safety net or any time for second-guessing.

When McPartland took over as CEO of Sentry Insurance in 2012, he was immediately staring at a major decision that would ultimately define the future of the company: What to do with SentryWorld Golf Course?

Wisconsin’s first destination golf venue, which opened in 1982, was foundering after not getting the attention it needed and was no longer living up to the vision then-CEO John Joanis had for the course when he commissioned Robert Trent Jones Jr. to do the original design.

McPartland figured he had three options: sell the course and get out of the golf business; let it continue on the path it was on with perhaps some modest enhancements; or make an investment in the course with the hopes it would pump life back into a dying dream.

“The management team that had been running Sentry had not invested in the golf course and I believe, not to speak for them, but they felt it was an ancillary and possibly even distracting part of our business,” McPartland said Wednesday while sitting in a hospitality suite overlooking the 18th green.

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Sentry CEO McPartland makes tough decision

It was a monumental decision for anyone, let alone for someone still feeling his way as the “new guy” on campus.

He solicited feedback, which was mixed, but ultimately the decision was his alone.

“It had been a subject that was sensitive to talk about,” he said.

After much deliberation and handwringing, McPartland decided. Sentry would go “all-in” on the golf course and what he calls the hospitality business, and it changed not only the fortunes of SentryWorld but also the insurance company.

“I didn’t feel pressure,” he said. “I absolutely knew it was the right thing. But I also knew the conscious willingness to let the golf course and, for that matter, restaurant that we have atrophied was a conscious decision that I was flying in the face of prior management. There were a lot of people that felt for financial discipline reasons, spending money on recreation, in essence, inherently represented unwise judgment. I knew there were a lot of people that think that.

“But I knew that it was certainly affordable given the size and success of the company and this would attract more customers and we needed, as an insurance company, to engage more with our own customer base. We were not as outwardly projecting as an insurance company as we needed to be.”

Restoring SentryWorld was the first step

A decade later, the fruits of McPartland’s decision were evident this week when the United States Golf Association brought the U.S. Senior Open to central Wisconsin for the first time.

McPartland said it was important at the time to return SentryWorld to its place in history as the state’s first destination golf course.

“This course means a lot to central Wisconsin. … It ushered in the era of the Kohlers and Erin Hills and, ultimately, Sand Valleys and so on,” he said. “This course had a place in history that was important.”

The first step in bringing SentryWorld back to life was getting in touch with Jones Jr. in 2013 to ask about redesigning his original layout, along with his young protégé and highly respected golf course designer Jay Bilasi.

“We asked Bob at the time, is there anything you would have done over in retrospect now that you’re an older designer and you were a young designer when you built SentryWorld? And he said, ‘You know, there’s five or six holes that have been bugging me for a long time.’ We said, ‘Great, you have a do-over.’ So he had a do-over and redesigned it,” McPartland said.

The course reopened in 2015 to rave reviews. That was followed by revitalizing the restaurants at SentryWorld, the USGA bringing the U.S. Junior Girls Championship to the course in 2019, and building The Inn at SentryWorld, a hotel that runs along the 18th fairway that opened in 2022.

The USGA was so impressed with SentryWorld in 2019 that it announced in February 2021 it would bring the U.S. Senior Open to SentryWorld in 2023, which prompted another round of renovations at the course the past two years to prepare for this week’s event.

‘Anything that this golf course wants, it gets’

McPartland calls SentryWorld a “support piece” to the insurance company, with the massive resources of the core business being used to maximize the hospitality side of the business.

“The golf course became — I use this term when I talk about it — the golf course became the spoiled daughter of the insurance company,” McPartland said. “Anything that this golf course wants, it gets. Anything that (general manager) Mike James, who runs all of this, wants for the golf course or for that matter anything else, he gets.”

McPartland believed the golf course, an adjacent hotel and other amenities at SentryWorld would make it more likely customers and business partners would come see them, rather than Sentry employees having to travel to visit them.

“We reasoned that having a real neat golf course would make our campus and the desire of people to come see us more attractive,” he said.

It has worked exactly how McPartland envisioned. Not only has the USGA found a home at SentryWorld, but Sentry has found a home alongside some of the major players in the golf world.

Sentry has prominent place in golf

In 2017, Sentry became the title sponsor of the PGA Tour’s season-opening Tournament of Champions in Hawaii. That agreement was extended last August to go through 2035, and Sentry has become active in the Maui community as well as brought many of its customers and business partners to the island through the years.

PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan also asked if Sentry would like to become involved with First Tee, a program that introduces younger, often economically disadvantaged kids to the game of golf.

“If you become a part of the pro golf fraternity, if you’re a well-behaved, good member of it, and I certainly think we have been, other kind of accoutrements will come our way,” he said. “Didn’t solicit it. Didn’t push for it. It became a part of it. So somewhere along the line, I think we fit in and we got kind of taken under the wing by the PGA Tour and the USGA and others.”

So with all that has happened for Sentry and SentryWorld, it’s natural to wonder if McPartland thinks about the road not traveled.

What if he had decided in 2012 to get the company out of the golf business forever?

“I don’t dare think about that because my mind stops. I don’t want to think about that,” he said. “I do think a little bit if we hadn’t done everything we’ve done, where would Sentry Insurance Company be and the answer is we wouldn’t be as large, we wouldn’t have grown within our Fortune 1000 rankings the way we’ve grown. We’ve grown significantly as a Fortune 1000 company. So the branding, the customer engagement, the extent to which that helped define the culture of us as an insurance company, we couldn’t have done it without the game of golf and without the investment that we’ve done in hospitality on this campus.”

As he watched the game’s best senior golfers and thousands of fans walk around SentryWorld the past few days, McPartland couldn’t help but get a little sentimental about what has transpired since taking over in 2012.

“It really hit me this week,” he said. “Here we are, a major USGA tournament and, by golly, we have our own golf course and I’m hearing good things from the players about our own golf course in our own campus. So this week it hits me like a frying pan in the head the totality of everything that we’ve done. It’s very warming.”