BATON ROUGE - It was probably a moot point once he captured the PBA World Championship, but EJ Tackett of Bluffton, Indiana, was named last week to receive the 2026 Chris Schenkel PBA Player of the Year award, marking his fifth career and fourth consecutive Player of the Year honor.

Tackett is now one of four players in PBA history to win the award at least five times joining Jason Belmonte (7), Walter Ray Williams Jr. (7) and East Anthony (6).

Tackett also became the first player to be named Player of the Year in four consecutive seasons.

He won the PBA World Championship in each of those seasons, becoming the first player in PBA history to win a title event in four consecutive years.

The 34-year-old received 85.46% of votes among PBA members and media.

Brandon Bonta, Patrick Dombrowski, Graham Fach, Alex Horton, Marshall Kent, Boog Krol, Spencer Robarge, Anthony Simonsen, and Zach Wilkins also earned nominations for the 2026 Player of the Year award. Bonta, Dombrowski, and Wilkins each received at least 3% of votes.

Tackett led the PBA Tour in every statistical measure except titles. He lapped the field with 32,335 points and $324,075 earnings and set a new PBA Tour single-season average record at 229.79 across 438 games.

His average during the past two seasons — 229.37 in 2024 and 228.60 in 2025 — also rank third and fifth, respectively, all time.

Tackett led the tour with 10 top-five finishes, 13 top-10 finishes, and 17 cashes in 18 title events. He finished runner-up in two major championships — PBA Players Championship and USBC Masters — earning the top seed and losing the title match of each.

While it was a year in which first-year and first-time finalists won events most of the year, somewhere in the TV finals was Tackett, knocking on the door for titles. His effort in the PBA Championship in an over-the-air televised event was such that his fourth consecutive year to win the World Title made everything else just a little outside what was necessary to capture the award.

2031 Open Championship To Vegas

Well, a window that USBC Executive Chad Murphy said had closed for Baton Rouge to get another host year for the USBC Open Championship has been made official with the announcement that Las Vegas would be the site for the 2031 Opening Championships as the event returns to the South Point Bowling Plaza, which is already on pace to post record-setting numbers for the tournament venue next year.

The 2027 event currently has more than 12,000 teams registered to compete, which puts the tournament in position to be the largest in USBC’s partnership with South Point. Next year’s trip to Las Vegas also is trending toward the largest team count at the Open Championships since 2011 which means it would top Baton Rouge’s team count in 2012 and 2025.

It would also mean that we are back in the same situation that has become prominent for the Open Championship in that other than in 2028 in Greenville, South Carolina, the Open Championship will be held in Nevada in 2027, 2029, 2030 and 2031 with the latter two in Las Vegas.

There are open spots in 2034 and 2037 if Baton Rouge is interested once the proposed renovation of the Raising Canes River Center is supposedly completed. So, we’ll see what happens downtown and what interest the two groups have in each other when the next decade rolls around.

That’s it this week.

Back with you next Monday.

                        Until then, good luck and good bowling,

                                                                                Kent Lowe