Search continues for new title sponsor for Mississippi’s PGA tournament
RIDGELAND, Miss. (WLBT) – The search continues for a new title sponsor for Mississippi’s long-running PGA championship, weeks after Steven Fisk birdied to win the 2025 Sanderson Farms Championship.
“We’re having conversations in conjunction with the PGA Tour. They’ve got a group that looks for sponsors for tournaments. We’ve got our board of directors and everybody having conversations,” said Century Club Charities Executive Director Steve Jent.
“Nothing to announce yet. But I mean, obviously, this was the 58th year for a PGA tour to be held in the state of Mississippi. We’d love to keep that going.”
Last year, officials with the championship announced that 2025 would be Wayne-Sanderson Farms’ last year as title sponsor for the event.
“They’ll be a partner with us going forward past this year into 2026, and to help Century Club with our charitable efforts. But this was their last year as the lead sponsor for the tournament,” Jent said.
[READ: Sanderson Farms Championship makes major announcement on future of tournament]
Jent has been executive director of Century Club Charities and the championship since 2013.
Since then, Sanderson Farms has been title sponsor. The last year the tournament was without a sponsor was the year before Jent took over as executive director. That year, multiple corporations came together to sponsor the True South Classic, after Viking pulled out.
“They put together a consortium, with some help from different entities to kind of keep it going for one year… kind of back in a day when our purse was a little bit smaller things were a little different,” he said.
So how much does it cost to be a title sponsor? Jent couldn’t say how much Sanderson Farms paid but said title sponsorship is in the “seven figures,” meaning that the sponsorship has to be right for the company.
“From either a marketing standpoint or customer entertainment standpoint, it has to make sense,” he said. “It has to fit in their business goals, what they’re trying to accomplish.”
He explained the sponsorship worked well for Sanderson Farms, in part, because of Joe Sanderson’s appreciation of golf, and the company’s appreciation for what the tournament means for Mississippi.
“About every four or five years, we have Mississippi State’s Extension Services group do an economic impact study for us… We didn’t do one in 2025, but we did it in 2024, and they estimate it’s somewhere in that $25 to $30 million impact from a direct tax standpoint to spending at hotels, restaurants, dining and shopping,” Jent said.
“I mean, there’s 132 players, 132 caddies, a hundred Golf Channel folks, a hundred people from the PGA Tour, all come in that week, including all the folks that Wayne-Sanderson brought in that one week… for [the] pro-am,” he added. “So, it’s somewhere in that $25 to $30 million range.”
The tournament also means a lot for local nonprofits. In 2024, Century Club Charities raised more than $1.7 million for local groups, including $1 million for Friends of Children’s Hospital.
According to its website, Century Club raised $18.95 million for charity since 2013, the year Sanderson Farms took over the title sponsorship role. That’s in addition to the more than $7 million Century Club raised in the decade before that.
“Our mission statement says, you know, ‘Impacting local charities through the game of golf.’ So, right now, we’re focused on 2026 and trying to make sure that we continue professional golf,” he said. “I think we will do something in 2026… If it can’t be a professional golf or PGA Tour, we want to keep something going.”
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