5 Things I Screwed Up As A Junior Golfer

All right, what's going on guys? So today I'm going to be going over 5 things that I messed up as a junior golfer that kept me from being able to play Division 1 golf. If you don't know much about my backstory, I was a junior golfer. I started when I was 16, I was scratch by the time I was 17, but unfortunately I didn't know a lot of the things that I know today and really held me back in being able to reach my potential. And I make videos like this and I coach students to make sure that they don't make the same mistakes that I did. So if you enjoy videos like this where I break down junior golf and what to do, what to focus on, and also what to avoid, go ahead and hit that subscribe button for more videos like this every week. So I thought it would be funny to go through some of the things that I made mistakes with as a junior golfer share with you guys so that you don't make those mistakes and also don't let your junior golfer make those mistakes. So if you guys have seen The Hangover, you know what this is referencing. But that's, that's really the crux of this. These are just things I wish I could go back. If I had an opportunity to go back and redo, I would. So first things first, I couldn't really control this one, but as I said, I started playing golf when I was 16 years old. So that's super, super late. When we think about college golf and college recruiting, a lot of the times coaches have already picked out who they want to recruit by the time they're 16. And then even if you— let's say you're an anomaly, you're extremely talented— there's still kind of a tournament hierarchy you have to work your way through, especially if you're a boy and especially if you want to play Division I golf. And so when we really look at that, having enough time is— is— I can't stress this enough of how crucial it is, especially when you talk about the anxiety, the burnout, um, all the things that go into that. For me, I was a workhorse, and I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second, but I worked my butt off. And so it didn't really matter because I just didn't have that much runway. I did the most with what I could, but I just didn't understand the timeline that I was on. So if you have a junior golfer, let's say they're 10, 11, 12, 13 years old, and you're like, I don't know, it's kind of early, definitely get them in tournament golf. Definitely get them on a track where they are going to position themselves to play college, if that's even something they think they might want to do. Because at the end of the day, it's not really that much harder or different than just playing golf for fun. Like, if their goal is just play for fun, fine, you know, they don't have to play in tournaments or anything. But if you're going to go through the effort of playing in tournaments, position them so that they're, they're in a position to be successful, you know, because it's going to be the same thing. It's going to be lower the scores as fast as possible and play in the best tournaments available. Those are— that's what I really need to do. And so it's just up to you to make the decision to actually pursue that earlier rather than later, to put them in a better position to be successful. It's also going to be a lot less stressful. So that's the first thing that I wish I would have done. Second thing, um, this is something that I definitely did and is something that I think a lot of junior golfers do when I talk to them, is they admire their strengths too much. You know, they think that— they think too highly of their strengths. A lot of times I see that, especially with players who hit the ball really far, whether it's boys or girls, all the same. They kind of look at it as like, oh well, I hit the ball super far, so I have to work hard at those other parts of my game. And they don't really take seriously the other parts of their game. They think that they can get by because they hit it before. Well, I'm 6'2", about 200 pounds, and I was, I was that size when I was, you know, 16, 17 years old. I hit the ball north of 300 yards at sea level, so I hit it pretty far. And I kind of thought to myself, well, you know, I can hit pitching wedge or less in every single green, and I should be able to shoot good scores, and that's all I need to worry about. And I really take seriously enough the fact that, you know, my wedge game probably wasn't where it needed to be. I definitely did not putt at the level that I needed to putt at. I didn't spend nearly enough time on the greens, and I didn't take it nearly seriously enough that I couldn't hit balls out of bounds. I just couldn't gloss over that and say, oh, that's cool. And I did that a lot, you know. I said, okay, well, I can hit it so far, that's this massive advantage. Everyone talks about how important distance is, and it's like Yeah, distance is valuable. Distance is definitely important. But if it comes at the cost of all these other things, you have to take that into consideration. I, I did not do that. And I see this a lot with junior golfers where they kind of look at all these things that they're good at, and it kind of creates this, this era of false confidence where they have this thing that they're good at and they just look at that. And that's fine if you want to feel good about yourself, but if we want to shoot lower scores, we need to spend a lot of time in the areas of our game that aren't very good. And so if I could go back in time, I wish that I could have told myself, be like, hey dude, that's awesome that you hit the ball far. And if you can figure out how to just keep this ball in play, you're gonna have a massive advantage. Let's make sure that you don't 3-putt. Let's hit as many greens as you can. Don't worry about hitting it close. And if you can do that, we're going to shoot some pretty low scores pretty easily because we hit it far. But don't just lean on that and be like, oh, I hit it far, and then go out there and shoot 79 or 83. And that's what I see so many players do, is they have one part of their game that they think is really good and they boast about how great it is and how I hit it past the tour players. And it's like, that's great, what shoot last time? I shot 77. Maybe you need to look at that. So that's the next one, thing number 2. Thing number 3 is I put way too much emphasis on my golf swing and make my golf swing look technically good. And I see a lot of junior golfers do this. I see a lot of parents kind of lead their kids into this, this process as well, where it's kind of— the belief is like, if we just get the golf swing right, if we just get the right position, all of a sudden we're gonna start shooting lower scores. We're gonna go from shooting 83 to now we're gonna shoot, you know, 65 every time we go out there, and it's just going to be all figured out. Or you have that amazing driving range session and then you go out there and you lay an egg in a tournament. Or you've been playing good all week and you're playing good at your home course, you go into a tournament and crap the bed. All those scenarios. And it really kind of stems from this, this idea and this belief that it's like it's the golf if I could just figure out my golf swing, then I'm gonna shoot lower scores. And this is just like, newsflash, I wish I could have told myself this. That's not, it's not the end of the world. Like, golf swing is just— it exists to serve a function, which is for you to be able to generally hit the ball flight that you want to hit. It's in general meant for you to be able to hit more greens, right? And so if you try and do all these crazy things with your golf swing, you try and hit the 9 ball flights and all that stuff, and you go out there, even if you can do it, if you don't know basic stuff like exactly how far your golf ball carries, what the wind's doing, how elevation change impacts it, how different lies impact— all these things that you can't figure out on the driving range, you can't just like technically change, you know, your golf swing to fix all those problems. You have to go out there and play golf in order to figure that stuff out. Well, if you don't have that, you're still going to play bad because what's going to happen is you're gonna have all these holes where you do really good, you're just gonna pure it you're gonna get kind of frustrated because you're like, I should be making birdies. You're gonna make a bunch of pars. You're gonna have one or two holes where you airmail the green, make a 7 or 6 or an 8. And when you kind of stack that up at the end of the round, you're like, oh well, I feel like I should have shot 71, and I watch these other kids who are just as good as me, or probably not even as good as me, beat the crap out of my score. And it's like, well, what's wrong? I need to go hit more golf balls. Or if they putt bad, I need to go work on my putting stroke. And that, that really isn't the case. That isn't what your junior golfer needs to do. They need to go understand the game better, understand the specific area that's really holding them back. And then if it is their golf swing, they need to know specifically what they're trying to fix. Maybe if they don't know how far their ball goes, so they need to go and measure that. They need to figure out what is my exact carry number, not just like a range of, you know, 5, 10 yards, but what's the specific, you know, number. I hit my 7-iron 152 yards. They should know the answer to that question because that's going to have a much bigger impact on their scores as compared to just having a technically good swing where the other coach is like, yeah, it looks like they're gonna go out and shoot a really good score. That's not how it goes. The, the coach is always going to say that. They want you to feel good about it. They want your child to feel good about it. But at the end of the day, that's not golf, and you probably experienced that. So next thing— that's the next thing I wish I could have gone back and told myself. Next one here is tournaments. I did not know anything about tournaments. I played on my high school golf team, I played in the kind of local events, I played in some whatever future champions, I think I played an AJGA qualifier, I played my state organization, I think I did the U.S. Junior qualifiers. I had no clue, I had no clue what I was doing, and I just went into those tournaments just because it sounded like a good tournament. And I think that that's what most junior golfers do, is they go— or more likely that, you know, you guys as parents watching this, is you just look up the tournaments that sound good. You know, it's like, oh, well, this one says the Masters, so it must be good. And there's no kind of coherent approach to that. And it's really important that, that you not make that mistake. All the tournaments that your junior golfer can play in, they should be working together, and they should be working to help them accomplish a goal. Right. And so the first step is going to be just like, what do they shoot? Most junior golfers don't even know what they shoot. And I ask them, they say, well, I shoot this. I'm like, okay, cool. What's the best round you've ever shot? And they'll tell me pretty much that number. And it's like, then that can't be your average. Just mathematically, that's not possible. And so the first thing for a junior golfer that they need to do is know exactly where they're at in their game so that then they can say, okay, well, it makes sense playing this caliber of tournament. right? Because let's say an AJGA event, they need to qualify with, uh, 76, right? That's going to be probably close-ish to the average qualifying number. Maybe it's 75, somewhere in that ballpark. Well, if your junior golfer has a scoring average of 80 and they think that they have a scoring average of 76, they go into that tournament, they shoot 82, they're going to beat themselves up. They're going to be like, oh, I suck, you know, whatever. And then they're gonna have a hard time getting into AJGAs because they've already played in a few, didn't play that good. It's just kind of a self-fulfilling thing. First, if they win in that tournament and said, oh, I know that my scoring average is 76, which means a decent portion of the time I'm gonna do better than that. I can just play my game, focus on my game, and if I do this 2 or 3 times, the probability that I qualify once or twice is reasonably high. And then I— the probability that I play decent in the tournament is reasonably high. Now I've got some stars and it gets a little bit easier. So understanding how these tournaments all work together is something I really wish I could have gone back and done. And then there's other tournaments as well that aren't, you know, like Hurricane Tour where pretty much anyone can get into the event. But those are really great for a junior golfer to experience. Like if they haven't had a lot of tournament pressure or they need to work stuff out where, you know, particular problems come out in tournaments, well then that's a great place to do that because they're going to get plenty of reps. And once they get comfortable, then it makes the sense to, to go into an AJGA or, you know, go to the PGA or some of these other qualifiers where the opportunity to play in higher level fields. So that's, that's the next thing I wish I could have gone back and done is understood tournaments a little bit better. So that we could have got a little bit more bang for buck. But also, I just could have understood how I was progressing, where I stacked up, without being delusional. And yeah, that's just kind of— I was completely lost on that. So the last one here, and I think this is probably one of the most important things, is I spent way too much time on the driving range. I spent way too much time practicing. I would— I was a workhorse. I would spend 8 hours a day out there. I was in, um, pretty, pretty hot conditions for a while there. I was out in Vegas and I would just work hard because that's what I thought. I thought I could earn my way into college golf by working hard, and that's just not true. That's, that's not how the world works, unfortunately. But see so many junior golfers make that mistake, is they're out there, they're grinding, they're working on their swing, and they think their game is good but then they haven't played a round of golf in weeks, or they, they play, go out there and they play 5 holes and they get kind of, you know, they kind of struggle, so they go back to the driving range. And then, you know, a month later they played like 1 round of golf and they're going to a tournament, they're like, I feel like my game is pretty good. I'm like, you have no idea what your game is, but I'm pretty sure it's not going to be good because you haven't really played any golf. And a lot of the problems you're going to experience, the reason why you're not going to score It's because you haven't played that much golf. The first time you make triple, it's gonna freak you out. And so this is one of the things I stress so much with the students that I work with, is like, we want to have an appropriate ratio between our playing and our practicing, and it needs to be at least 1 to 1. If it's 2 to 1, as far as like they play twice as much as they practice, I like that. In general, when I've worked with players who go on to play Division 1 golf those are tend to be the players who play the most golf. I've worked with kids where they play 5 rounds of golf a week. And so when you think about a junior golfer trying to prepare themselves for, let's say, 36 holes, 54 holes, 72 holes, when you take into consider like qualifiers and stuff, and they struggle on that, it's like, well, when's the last time you did that in a week? Ever? Okay. So it shouldn't be surprising to you that you struggled a little bit with that in a tournament, just on mental bandwidth and how much stress that causes. You know, if we consider it, it's like Saying you want to run a marathon, but every time you run a marathon or you try and practice for a marathon, you run like 5 miles. Your coach looks at you and be like, oh yeah, running form looks amazing. And you're like, yeah, I feel really good. My lungs are giving out, like, really good. My legs feel good. Do this every day, I feel great. And then you go into a marathon, 27 miles, you run 20 miles and you're like, oh my God, I can't finish this. I feel terrible. I don't know what's going on. Like, I worked on my technique. And then instead of being like, oh well, duh, I'm trying to run 27 miles and I've never run 27 miles before, so I don't know the problems that come up around mile 20 or mile 22. The same thing with junior golfers, like going to these tournaments, they don't play well, and then their solution is, well, let me just go and practice more. And they don't understand that the problem is that they're practicing too much already and they need to dial it back and they need to play more golf. And ideally they need to compete more often so they just get comfortable with competition. They get comfortable with being anxious and making mistakes and having bad things happen on the golf course and they get comfortable with that rather than trying to avoid it. So I hope this is helpful for you guys to just kind of understand these are just 5 things that I wish that I would have done differently that hopefully you can help your junior golfer to avoid and put them in a position to achieve as high as possible. And if you enjoyed this video, I'd really appreciate if you leave this video a like, um, just to let me know you guys enjoy this stuff so I can do more videos like it.