This week marks a “close to home” game at Aronimink Golf Club for Braden Shattuck of the Corebridge Financial Team.
The 31-year-old Shattuck -- PGA Director of Instruction at Rolling Green Golf Club about 20 minutes up the road from Aronimink – secured his spot in the 2026 PGA Championship thanks to his T-8 in the PGA Professional Championship at Bandon Dunes in April.
It’ll be his third PGA Championship start following appearances in 2023 at Oak Hill (missed cut) where he arrived as the reigning PGA Professional Champion after his first start in that Championship as a PGA Member and 2024 at Valhalla where he left as the low-PGA Club Professional, finishing 72nd.
“I will have a lot of family and a lot of friends coming out,” he said Monday. “ I'm really excited. I spent about two hours last night trying to send tickets out to family and friends and getting e-mail addresses. It's been -- I'm like my own manager. It's been a lot but it's really exciting to have some extended family coming to this event that normally they don't watch or play golf.”
That support will be nice, but Shattuck was quick to note that despite his close proximity to Aronimink, he probably won’t know the course better than anyone else in the field, having only played two tournament rounds here. Though he says he has played it 3-4 times in the last couple of weeks.
“Preparation probably wasn't exactly what I wanted it to be,” he admitted. “As soon as I got home from Bandon, it was right back to work, teaching, coaching, programming from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day. Trying to find some time at the beginning or the end of the days to get my game to where it need to be compete in a tournament like this, it's a little bit of a challenge. So it's been extra-long days ever since I got back, trying to schedule breaks during the day to hit some balls or getting out early, maybe 4, and trying to get nine holes in over here at Aronimink.”
Shattuck is hopeful that although his prep may not have been what he wanted coming into the week, his past experience playing in the PGA Championship will be a benefit.
“I know what it takes,” he said. “Your ball-striking and your entire game needs to be super-dialed in. The fairways are not very wide. The rough is very thick. So my game needs to be better than it is normally, just to compete and I haven't had the time that I need to but this week with practice rounds and fully focusing on the tournament, I'll have the time and the resources to dial my game in to where it needs to be.”
What Shattuck has been able to accomplish over the last several years is remarkable when you consider he had to overhaul his swing following a horrific car accident in 2019 in Florida when a driver went through a red light, T-boning Shattuck and leaving him with two herniated discs in his back.
The pain caused because of that accident made it nearly unbearable to swing a club for Shattuck and he had to revamp his swing to manage the pain. Then there was the mental side of things that Shattuck had to overcome and still works on.
“I had some mental health problems during that time that were significant and sidelined me pretty hard,” he said. “In and out of the hospital quite a bit and working with psychologists and psychiatrists and you name it I've worked with them. Having panic attacks almost daily, having chest pain daily, dealing with anxiety was by far the hardest part of that, and I dealt with that for years. I had to go to work and put a smiling face on for everybody and that was quite a challenge. I'm finally on the back end of that after six or seven years of it, however long ago that accident was. It was a grind, physically and mentally, that I wanted to give up on at times.”
With the help of a lot of people, Shattuck has managed to collect Philadelphia PGA Player of the Year honors the last four years in a row.
But he still considers his comeback a work in progress.
“Mindfulness, acceptance, commitment has been a program I've been working on with a psychologist friend of mine, David Clemens,” Shattuck said. “And he's been incredible to help me with that. And on a daily basis, I'm always practicing mindfulness, whether it's, you know, folding clothes or washing a different or just focusing on my breathing.”
Shattuck says he so good at trying to help his anxiety that he thinks it helped with his golf game, where he’s been able to bring his heart rate down significantly in just seconds.
“I could bring my heart rate from 140 to 80 in just ten seconds,” he said. “All of those struggles have -- have helped me with that but meditation and mindfulness have been really, really key in kind of helping me get past all that stuff.”
Shattuck credits his wife, Veoletta, for where his finds himself now.
“She's my rock and she helps me calm down and be a normal person again,” he said. “She's been huge in my successes,” Shattuck added, “just from keeping me sane and she's actually been helping me with some of the changes I'm making in my swing because she's an exercise science undergrad and she's going to be going to continuing education for physician assistant school. So she's very well-versed with the human body, so it's been helpful to bounce a lot of ideas off of her. It's just been a blessing to have her.”