Braden Shattuck is back in a familiar place this week, and this time the stage is Aronimink Golf Club, close to home. The 31-year-old PGA director of instruction at Rolling Green Golf Club earned his spot in the 2026 PGA Championship with a T-8 finish at the PGA Professional Championship at Bandon Dunes in April.
That result sends Shattuck into his third PGA Championship start, and he knows the work ahead. He played in the 2023 PGA Championship at Oak Hill and missed the cut after arriving there as the reigning PGA Professional Champion. In 2024, he returned at Valhalla and finished 72nd as the low-PGA club professional.
This week carries a different feel because the setting is so close to his daily life. Rolling Green is about 20 minutes up the road from Aronimink, and Shattuck said he will have a lot of family and friends coming out. He said he spent about two hours trying to send tickets to relatives and friends and collect email addresses, joking that he has been acting like his own manager to pull it all together.
The chance to play in front of that crowd comes after a stretch of work that did not leave much room for celebration. Shattuck said that after returning home from Bandon, he was right back to teaching, coaching and programming from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. He said he has been carving out breaks to hit balls or getting out early to play nine holes at Aronimink, trying to make the most of a course he has seen only twice in tournament rounds and has played only 3 to 4 times in the last couple of weeks.
He said he understands exactly what it takes to compete at this level. The fairways at Aronimink are not very wide and the rough is very thick, he said, adding that ball-striking and the full game need to be dialed in. For a player who had to rebuild parts of his swing after a 2019 car accident in Florida, that kind of precision matters even more.
A driver ran through a red light and T-boned Shattuck that year, leaving him with two herniated discs in his back. He said the pain made it nearly unbearable to swing a club, and the physical toll was matched by serious mental health struggles that sidelined him hard. He said he was in and out of the hospital quite a bit, worked with psychologists and psychiatrists, and lived with panic attacks almost daily, chest pain daily and anxiety for years.
That history gives this week a sharper edge than a standard homecoming. Shattuck is not just trying to play well at Aronimink; he is trying to prove again that a PGA professional who has already fought through injury, pain and years of anxiety can still belong on one of golf’s biggest stages.
