6 Things You Need To Play Division 1 Golf

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be covering what I believe are the 6 things that you need to be able to play Division 1 golf. These are things that need to be a part of your system, your process, your routine, your development plan throughout your, your junior golf years if you want to be able to play specifically Division 1 golf. These are things that I see where if a player has them, they're usually going to be successful. And if they're missing any one of these pieces, usually that's going to limit their ability to be successful, almost definitely. If you enjoy videos like this, then please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Pretty new here, so it really helps a lot. And if you enjoyed this video, then please leave a like below. Again, it pushes it out to more people so that, you know, people can see it and also learn as as well. So let's go ahead and jump right into this. And so thing number 1 right here is you need to have a concept of how you swing a golf club. This is, you know, probably something that a lot of players are maybe aware of, but it's really important that you have a clear concept of this. So a lot of the times players, they'll have a swing coach, right? They'll go for weekly lessons or bi-weekly lessons. But a lot of the time what happens is they have their coach, their coach tells them the thing to work on, the feel that they want them to have, and then they go and work on that, and then they start playing bad golf eventually, and then they come back and get another lesson. And that's not a great recipe for long-term success. Usually when we see players who are very successful what ends up happening is they're kind of working on the same things pretty much forever. Because the reason for that is, if I'm a really good player, well, I kind of have my ideal where I'm hitting it really good. It means I have a lot of control over my golf ball, probably hitting it relatively straight, but I have a really good control over my golf ball. And then I have kind of my reversion, or my thing that I fall back into, my bad habits. And at the end of the day, it's like, yeah, I don't want to do that, but I still know what's going on and I can still play around it. So a good player might, you know, when they're under pressure, they might start getting, you know, the club maybe a little bit more across the line. Maybe their grip gets a little bit strong, maybe, you know, club face gets a little bit shut. They want to hit fades and they start hitting pulls, or maybe they start hitting push draws and they're used to be hitting a pull fade. Now that might not be ideal for them, but odds are they're they've been playing with that a lot of their life, and so they still know how to get around. And they also know that the fields that they need to go to in order to start hitting the ball a little bit better, a little bit more, um, what they're looking for. And this is kind of juxtaposed to a player who, if they're always changing stuff, they're always searching, and they kind of have a belief that one day I'm going to figure it out, well, they're really going to struggle because there is no one day where you have it figured out, so to speak. You're always going to be on a spectrum of perfect to, you know, kind of your, your default, you know, old habits type golf swing. You're probably gonna be somewhere in the middle there. It's probably not going to be quite perfect. Maybe it is on the driving range for a few, you know, hours, but it's not going to be in general in tournaments, right? It just has to be good enough often enough, right? And so That's where we kind of want to see the good player. But like I said, a lot of players tend to be in the space where they're either hitting it good, maybe they're hitting it straight and they're like, all right, cool, I'm gonna shoot good scores. They might shoot something really, really solid, might be par, might be better. But when they are not hitting it well, they're completely lost. That ball's going everywhere. They can't control it. And not only that, it's not like a good player who's like, oh, I didn't play too good. I shot 75. It's like I went out there and shot 85 when I'm a scratch golfer, right? That's kind of what you would expect to see in those kind of differences there. So it's very important to have a concept of how you're swinging the golf club, where your keys— it probably needs to be somewhere between 1 and 4 keys in your golf swing that makes it work. If it's going to be more than that, it's just going to be really difficult to apply it consistently. Um, But you need to have those basic kind of fundamentals because you can always go back to those. You can always look at your swing on camera and be like, ah, this is what's going on. Okay, easy fix. I'm hitting it good. All right, cool. And this is a process that refines over time, but it's something that you need to have. And if you see that missing, if you're working with a coach for an extended period of time and you don't have this, that's a massive red flag. You need to be going to a coach that's going to help you understand how your golf swing works. You're always kind of working on the same things. And you guys can stay on the same page. So that's thing number 1 you need to have if you want to play Division 1 golf. Next one is you need to have stat tracking. You need to be tracking your stance. I have not met an elite player who does not track their stats. And so when I say elite, I'm talking about players who are going to go on to play, you know, Division 1 golf, high-level Division 1 golf. Every one of them at this point is tracking their numbers. Golf is just too difficult to not have this as, as an advantage. Because at the end of the day, we have a limited amount of time, especially for students. You've got to do— you've got homework, you've got a life, you've got friends, you've got other responsibilities that you need to be partaking in. So we need to be as efficient as possible with the time that we do have. And the only way that we can do that at the highest possible level is to know objectively what does your game look like, what are the problems, not your opinion but what's actually going on? What's keeping you from being that next level? What's keeping you from getting a shot better and being able to zero in on that? We can only do that with data. We can only do that when you're tracking your stats and we know, okay, cool, here's what your game looks like, here's where the holes are at, and here's how this is trending over time. Because that's as important as anything, you know. If I just have a bunch of data but I don't have any time that I'm looking at, if I don't know if this is over the last 10, 20, which the direction of things, I can't really tell you a whole lot, right? It's not very useful. And so a lot of times I know players get kind of psyched out by saying, oh, here's how I compare versus this arbitrary benchmark compared to a PGA Tour player. That's not the way to use statistics. The way you want to use statistics is to understand, okay, I'm here right now and I was at this point a month ago or 3 months ago or a year ago. That's really what we wanna pay attention to, 'cause we can say, okay, cool, I'm here right now. These are my goals. I need to improve by this much over this period of time. And then I can look backwards and say, am I on pace for that? Or what do I need to do to get there? And so that's, that's the second biggest thing that you need. And the next thing, this is something that I've built for my students that I work with, is you need to have a way of interpreting your statistical data, right? You know, there's lots of information out there. Lots of data points and stat tracking tools. And to be honest, a lot of it's kind of useless, especially for a player who might be shooting in the mid to high 70s or even the low 70s. A lot of the times, especially for junior golfers, it's just a bunch of unnecessary data. For example, you don't need to know that from 100 to 150 yards you're hitting it to 27 feet instead of 29 feet. Is it cool? Yeah, I guess, maybe. But you can't even see that from a distance. And so having that information doesn't really tell you what to do with that or tell you how to prioritize your time. So you need to have a way that you can look at all of your numbers and say, okay, right now this is the most important thing for me to address, and I'm going to focus on this single-mindedly until it's fixed and leave everything else the same, because we can't fix everything at once. And every time we try and fix something, we, we run the risk of making it worse, right? And so you may have experienced this if you're a junior golfer watching this, or if you're a parent watching this, you might have experienced this with your child. They try and make a fix or they try and improve something and it ends up getting worse. And it can be a frustrating experience. And so that's why it's so important that anytime we make a change, we understand the risks associated and we're able to do this in an intelligent way. And so, you know, knowing we can make something worse, if something's already really, really good, well, it doesn't make sense to touch it unless it's the worst thing relative to every other part of our game. And so, you know, this is just an example that I have. You know, in this case, we've got two different datasets here. We've got, you know, kind of the main stats that I like to look at, and we can just run down the list and in this spreadsheet and see, okay, cool, if we change these variables, which one has the biggest impact? And you have highlighted in green here, if we cut down 3 putts by 5%, that's gonna have the biggest impact of all these different numbers. If we improved it by that much, it's gonna improve it by about 0.9 shots. And that's not very sexy. You know, that doesn't look like the craziest thing in the world, But that's why this is so powerful because we can say every other part of the game, let's just leave it as is. It's good enough. Um, you know, if I wanted to go into my lesson and say, oh, well, you know, your swing is getting a little bit, you know, in this kind of weird position, I want it to be a little bit tidier. Let's say we make that change. You lose a little bit of feel and you go from 62% to 59%. Okay, well, it didn't really move us forward and we have all these other low-hanging fruit. It makes a lot more sense to look at, you know, putting and say, well, why do we 3-putt 9% of the time? Why can't we 3-putt 4% of the time? And it's probably a lot easier to make a dent in that as opposed to going from 62% to, you know, 67%, right? And so in this case, you know, just for, you know, thought experiment for everyone who's watching this, to go from 62% greens regulation to 67% as opposed to going from 9% 3-putts to 4% 3-putts it's a lot easier to go from 9% 3-putts, 4% 3-putts, than it is to go from 62% greens regulation to 67%. And when we layer in the fact that, you know, improving that much in your 3-putting, it's worth almost a shot, and if you're improving that much in your greens regulation, it's not worth— that's probably about 3/4 of a shot— it becomes a very obvious decision to say, okay, cool, we need to prioritize this 3-putting, at least for now. Now that's not saying in the future the Greens regulation might not be the biggest opportunity, but it's just for the current time, that's the biggest opportunity, right? And so that's why this is so important because it really helps you narrow down all the noise around statistics and it actually helps you use it to your benefit. So you can actually say, okay, I'm moving forward, I'm moving toward my goals. And you'll have lots of different ways to validate that you've actually moved toward your goal instead of just looking at the vibes or looking how you feel emotionally. So that is the third thing that we really want to have here. The next thing is practice plan. You wanna know how you're practicing. And so I just have an example of a plan that I wrote out for a student. And you'll notice a few things here. Number one, this isn't very complicated. And that's the reality of pretty much all things in life. They aren't complicated. They're fairly ordinary. But they're deliberate and they're consistent. And so that's, that's really the biggest thing. So in this practice plan, you can just kind of see here we're touching every part of the game through an off the tee, approach, short game, putting, right? And we have standards here. So in this case, this player is hitting fairway roughly 60% of the time with the driver, and we're just trying to hit it 7 out of 10. So we're gonna hit 10 balls, we're gonna hit 7 out of 10, right? So it's challenging them just a little bit. Um, approach play, same thing, you know, from 100 to 125 yards, hitting the green 56% of the time. We want to do just a little bit better than that. So again, we're rounding a little bit. We're trying to do 7 out of 10, or we're breaking that into subsequent distances so we can say, okay, let's make sure we have all these shots, not just one, not just a full swing. We've got all the in-between shots. And so we've carried that all the way through short game. Short game is pretty basic. We need to be able to carry the ball a particular distance. And so we want to get good at carrying the ball those particular distances. I see coaches all the time where they have, you know, a landing spot for players, and that's cool. But we want to be, you know, we want to be able to be as specific as possible. And so this kind of allows you to say, let's just take everything out of play and just say, let's put a tee in the ground. Can we carry at a particular distance? Okay, cool. Let's take a few steps back. All right, can I carry a little bit further? What do I need to do in order to make that happen? What adjustments do I need to have? And then when I'm on the golf course and I've got a 12-yard pitch shot, okay, well, I know my ball rolls out about 2, 3 yards, so I need to carry this ball about 10. Okay, do I have room for that? Okay, yes I do. All right, cool. What's the swing for that? All right, it's about this far. Okay, cool. It doesn't have to be exact, doesn't have to be perfect, but at least gives us a reference point. And with putting, I've broken it down into 3 different drills that address, you know, or making sure that our stroke is good, making sure that we're able to make our shorter putts, and then making sure that our lag putting is solid. And so if we're touching each one of those things, we'll those are the basic skills that we have on the golf course, right? We need to be able to hit the ball and play off the tee. We need to be able to hit a predictable shot shape. We need to be able to hit our irons, especially from the distances that we're the weakest at. Again, if I'm going to work on any part of my game, I want to work on the weak areas because again, we always have that chance we can make something worse. I'd rather take something that's bad. If I, if I suck at it, if I make a bad change, it's like, it doesn't really hurt me that much because it was already bad to begin with. It's worth the risk. Um, short game, same thing. We're making sure we're getting a little bit of reps there. And then putting as well, we're making sure they're really fundamentally hitting on the basics. So out of all these, whatever's the most important, that's the place where we're taking stuff apart. Everything else, we're just putting reps in. All in all, this practice plan ends up taking about 2 hours, so it doesn't look like a ton. But again, we don't want something that's super complicated to figure out how to do. We want something we can go out and do that consistently, and we're going to be able to see our progress in that. All right, next one, um, pretty simple. I don't have a great visual for this one, but it's having a schedule. Um, if you're going out to practice is based on your emotions, then you're really going to struggle because what's going to happen is you're going to play bad in a tournament and you're gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna grind all week on my putting or whatever, and it just becomes this kind of like up and down thing where it's like, let's say you go out there and you grind, you grind, you grind, you grind, you go out and you putt again and you putt like crap, then it's like, I put in all this work for nothing. And that's just not a very healthy kind of emotional cycle there. It's a lot more healthy to know, okay, I'm going to consistently do these things, I'm going to measure these things, and over time I'm going to see progress or I'm going to see not progress. And if I'm seeing not progress, I'm going to go talk to my coach and say, okay, what do we need to do? Differently, right? That, that's how we want to set things up. And so that's just super, super crucial. If you're running a business, you won't want to be emotionally making decisions every single week, um, or every single month. You would want to be strategically saying, I'm going to do these things consistently, and then I'm going to look at the results, and then I'm going to adjust accordingly. It's pretty straightforward. Um, but the same thing is true for, for junior golf when we consider all the other things you're going to need to do. You're going to have academics, you're going to have homework, you're going to have friends, etc., etc. Just makes a lot of sense to say, okay, I'm going to pencil in what I need to do, when I need to do it, which days I'm going to be doing it, and then I just go in and do it. I don't have to think about anything. I don't have to think about drills I'm going to do. I don't have to think about what's going on in my swing. I know all my fundamentals. I just need to go out there and do it. Stop changing stuff around. And then the last one here is you need to have a tournament schedule that orients you towards something. A lot of times I see players where they're just playing tournaments because they think that they're supposed to play in tournaments, or I see parents trying to pick out tournaments because because it sounds good, or a particular tournament sounds good. Or I have kids ask me like, oh, should I play in tournaments? And none of those are really great questions. The way that you want to think about tournaments is, what is our objective right now, right? And so for the most part, when I'm working with players, I'm not working with beginners, right? If you're a beginner, go play as much golf as possible. But assuming we're shooting, you know, somewhere consistent scores then we're going to be playing in tournaments for specific reasons. When you're getting started, it might be we're just going to try and bring down our scoring average in tournaments. Okay, so we want to be ranked somewhere. Um, Junior Golf Scoreboard is my recommendation. We want to be ranked so we can see, okay, cool, I started here, where am I now? Did I improve? If yes, great. Am I improving at a rate that is acceptable to accomplish my goals? If yes, great. If no, change something. And it's, it's pretty simple, but you'd be amazed at how many, you know, people, um, don't think that way. And you might be watching this being like, oh, that's, you know, that makes a lot of sense. And that's really the goal of this, is to help you guys, um, miss, uh, not make some of those mistakes, right? So at the beginning, we're just trying to get our scores down. Once we've got pretty solid scores, you know, once we're kind of getting into the, you know, high to mid-70s as a scoring average in tournaments, that's when we're starting to look at how can I get more bang for my buck in tournaments. Um, the reason for that is the kind of distance between your scoring differential and your scoring average, junior golf scoreboard specifically. There's other videos I do that are more technical in that stuff, um, but you eventually get to a point where pushing your scores lower doesn't help you accomplish your goals. So you're going to have to look at, okay, which tournaments are we playing in? Are the golf courses difficult enough? Is the scoring average difficult enough? And then we're right back to square one where we're looking at, okay, we're playing these longer, harder golf courses. Which part of our game is breaking down? Um, not hitting as many greens because I don't hit it as far, and so either I need to hit it further or I need to get better at my longer approach shots, right? That's the way to think through this stuff. And hopefully you can see if you're missing any one of these legs, it's just going to be really difficult or it's not going to be nearly as easy as it could be. So obviously this is what I do when I work with students. I like to take the entire picture. I like to look at the entire process because if you just have, let's say, a swing coach, they're only concerned with the swing and they're going to say, oh, you should play in this tournament, that sounds good, or, oh, here's some drills to do. But they're not really going to say, okay, well, here's what I need you to do on Friday. Here's what I need you to do on Saturday. Here's what I need you to do on Sunday. Here's why I don't want you to do X, Y, or Z. They're only going to be concerned about whatever you're doing at the swing. In the same sense, you might go to a recruiting agency and they might say you need to play in these tournaments, right? But they're not concerned about some of the other variables that, that go into this. And so that's why, you know, when I work with students, I'm looking at the entire thing. And I think that's one of the reasons that I've had some good success is because I'm looking at all these variables not just one. And so the player can always understand, okay, here's where I'm at and here's the realities of the things that I need to fix, rather than just kind of living in la-la land where you're just kind of hoping things work out. Maybe you're super anxious, unjustifiably so, or vice versa. Maybe you're not anxious enough and there's a bunch of things that are kind of falling through there. And you can just imagine here, if we took out any one of these variables, you know, how are you going to improve consistently if you don't have a practice plan that's consistent, right? We're always doing chaos in our practice, you know, chaos in, chaos out, right? If we don't have a consistent schedule, well then the point of having the practice plan becomes kind of useless because we can't really compound that because we're not doing it consistently. We can do all the stat tracking and all that in the world, but if we're not playing in tournaments that matter, well, it's still kind of irrelevant, right? It's like, you know, um, you you know, just bear crap in the woods, um, so to speak. Yeah, it's like, okay, you're doing all this stuff, you're playing high school golf, but who cares, right? Um, you know, and all that, you know, as well, you can have a great looking golf swing, you can play all the tournaments, you can have the, you know, practice plan, but if you don't understand how it works, well, you're probably gonna struggle in tournaments because you're bound to have some bad days. And if you're just going out there and hoping things work out, like, that's a lot of anxiety to carry around with you. And so again, you need to have all 6 of these things if you want to be successful, because it's going to allow you to understand what you need to do conceptually, you know, with your ball striking, your short game, with your putting. It's going to help you understand what's going on in your game objectively. Let's take out the emotions out of it. It's going to help you understand, okay, based on all the stats and data, what do I actually need to prioritize? What's going to give me the most bang for my buck? What do I need to do specifically in my practice? What do those drills look like exactly? How long is that going to take me? When do I do it? And how do I do that consistently for a long period of time, not have this big spurt and then quit golf and then come back to it and rinse and repeat? What's something I can commit to consistently where I'm not going to burn out? And then how am I playing in tournaments that are helping me accomplish my goals? So hopefully this video was helpful for you guys in just understanding kind of the 6 main things you need to do. And if one of those is missing for you, um, to kind of like call that out. If you need help, um, feel free to reach out and I'll kind of point you guys in the right direction on that stuff. Um, and if it makes sense, then I'll kind of talk to you about working together. So, um, once again, hopefully this video was helpful for you. If it was and you want more videos like it, uh, go ahead and subscribe to the channel below. And if you enjoyed this video, go ahead and leave a like. Again, it helps push it out to more people. Um, but like I said, hope this video was helpful for you guys, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.