Brent Paladino
A USGA qualifying steward
Most of PGA professional Brent Paladino’s clients are not looking for golf lessons, tee times, a new putter or shoes.
Their focus is playing in USGA championships.
USGA staffers Brent Paladino (left) and John Bodenhamer during the 2024 U.S. Open.
Chris Keane, USGA
As the senior director of championship administration, Paladino oversees the wide scope of the entry and qualifying process and administrative support for the USGA’s 15 yearly competitions (43,000 entries in 2025) and he admits that very few PGA professionals do what he does.
An excellent golfer (he won the New Jersey Open in 2023), his ultimate goal is to qualify for the PGA Championship. He grew up in Connecticut and earned the state’s Player of the Year Award in 2007 on his way to playing collegiately at the College of William & Mary.
After college, he worked as an assistant professional for three years and in 2013, he joined the Connecticut State Golf Association, in a hybrid communications and competitions position and earned his Class A PGA certification.
Paladino began his online MBA studies at Xavier University as he transitioned from the CSGA to Golf House Kentucky (which includes the Kentucky Golf Association and Kentucky PGA Section), where he served as the executive director from 2018-19.
“It was a full learning experience,” Paladino said of his job at Golf House Kentucky. “Looking back, it was a great way to learn how to run an organization. Prior to that, I had never managed a full team and I learned a lot from that experience.”
With a small staff of seven that conducted more than 200 events across the state each year, Paladino emphasized the broad scale of the job. “It was a great way to learn the various challenges that AGAs [Allied Golf Associations] and golf courses face every day.”
The USGA job opened in 2019, and Paladino was ready to apply his broad stroke of experience to the competitions of the national governing body, whose schedule ranges from May through October each year but entries are open as early as February.
Paladino chuckled when asked about the best story from entries for the U.S. Open (you can Google some classics over the years), but he remembered one that sparked what he called “positive change.”
“One of my proudest accomplishments is introducing exemptions for state and AGA amateur champions and creating a direct pathway to the U.S. Amateur.”
A man who lost a fantasy football bet entered U.S. Open qualifying where he shot about 130, and that spurred the championship administrative staff to begin some long-range thinking.
“How do we ensure the players who are ready for the national championship level are the ones playing in qualifying?” said Paladino, who lives in New Jersey with his wife and two daughters. “It made us look inward to see how we can evolve qualifying and make it more sustainable.”
He explained that securing courses to use for qualifying has been a nationwide issue for AGAs and his team has reduced the number of qualifying sites across the board for championships from 750 to 600.
“One of my proudest accomplishments is introducing exemptions for state and AGA amateur champions and creating a direct pathway to the U.S. Amateur,” Paladino said of the new two-stage process for the USGA’s oldest competition.
The USGA now recognizes more than 200 state or AGA events for full exemptions directly into the championships or exemptions through local qualifying.
“This year’s U.S. Amateur was the strongest male amateur event in [World Amateur Golf Ranking] history,” said Paladino, who is also part of the U.S. Open course setup crew.
“Our focus is to look at what we have and get as good as possible at what we do,” he said.
Pete Kowalski
Photos courtesy USGA
