Quail Hollow president Johnny Harris has big plans for 2025 PGA Championship — and beyond
In 76 days, Charlotte and the Quail Hollow Club will host one of the biggest events in golf — the 2025 PGA Championship.
It will be the second time that Quail Hollow has hosted the PGA Championship, one of the four golf majors contested each year. And if club president Johnny Harris has his way, it won’t be the last.
“We would want them to come back,” Harris said in an interview Tuesday, speaking of the tournament. “We hope they’ll come back. We want to be part of the game for a long time to come.”
Charlotte first hosted the PGA Championship in 2017 at Quail Hollow Club. That event was won by Justin Thomas, who was then 24, for his first major championship win.
Eight years later, Quail Hollow is gearing up for another major from May 12-18, with construction going on at a furious pace around the course. This event differs from the normal PGA Tour stop held at Quail Hollow each year — that one is now called the Truist Championship — in both scale and quality of the field.
Major championships require more build-out and attract more sponsors, too. Harris said the event will break “all the records” for previous PGA Championship sponsorship dollars.
And the world’s top golfers rarely skip a major, either, if they are eligible for it. So players like Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy, Thomas and Xander Schauffle should all be in Charlotte in May, about a month after The Masters in Augusta, Georgia.
“We’re going to have the best players in the world, dawn to dusk,” Jason Soucy, the 2025 PGA Championship director, said at the tournament’s media day Tuesday.
To accommodate this year’s PGA Championship, the Truist Championship is moving for one year to Philadelphia before it returns to Charlotte in May 2026. The Truist sponsorship contract runs through 2031, which means Charlotte is scheduled to go back to hosting its regular tour stop from 2026-2031.
Approximately 40,000 or more fans are expected at Quail Hollow each day, officials said Tuesday at a pre-PGA news conference. Although golf will be played all week, the 72-hole stroke play event will be contested from May 15-18. Tickets for the third round — on Saturday, May 17 — are already sold out, officials said. The other three days remain available, although Friday and Sunday are edging closer to capacity.
In 2017, the PGA Championship’s estimated economic impact on the Charlotte region was placed at around $100 million by the Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority.
The course was dramatically overhauled in 2017 to prepare for the first PGA Championship. “In ‘17, we really were taking a golf course that was a good regular tour stop and we were moving it toward being a great (golf course),” Harris said.
This time, Harris said, the golf course is being “tweaked,” not overhauled. What has changed more are the ways and the places that people will watch golf, as course officials have tried to increase opportunities for spectators to get closer to the action on many holes and to avoid crowd bottlenecks.
Additions such as double-deck hospitality areas and more streamlined concession options (such as the Championship Plus ticket, which includes food and non-alcoholic beverages) are also designed to help the fan experience.
In 2017, too, ride-sharing use in Charlotte to get to the course was uncommon. In 2025, Uber and Lyft have become so mainstream that the tournament has tried to make it far easier to use those services.
Said Harris: “We’ve got a new entrance that’s not only new to the members, but for the people and the patrons who are coming here to the tournament. It’s an entrance that allows us to handle not only bus traffic but also ride-share traffic. And maybe one of the biggest changes we’re finding in events like this now is that the rideshare is almost as important as the buses.”
If Quail Hollow were to attract the PGA Tour for a third time, that would be several years down the road. On its website, the PGA Championship shows that the event is booked through 2031, when it will be held at Kiawah Island’s ocean course in South Carolina. And Harris said he will wait to have that conversation with officials until after the 2025 PGA Championship in Charlotte is over, anyway, because he is certain by then the tournament will be considered a massive success.
“I’d rather build a boat,” Harris said, “before I got in it.”
This story was originally published February 26, 2025 at 6:30 AM with the headline "Quail Hollow president Johnny Harris has big plans for 2025 PGA Championship — and beyond."
