Parents of AJGA exempt junior golfers should strategically choose tournaments to boost their child's Rolex ranking. Exempt players need at least five AJGA events plus one ranked non-AJGA event like IMG Junior Worlds or Dustin Johnson World Junior. A top 64 ranking unlocks invitations to elite invitationals like Carlton Woods and Rolex Tournament of Champions.
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All right, so you should be watching this video in case your child has AJGA exempt status. This is what you're going to want to do with it, and this is how it's, it's productive. Make sure that you first watch the, the two videos above this one, that way you have the proper context for this. But long story, because I'm going to be building off those other videos, but long story short for you, there's a couple things that happen. Number one, we don't need to play in quite as many tournaments. In general, we are going to bias away from playing a lot of the local stuff unless it is a very good tournament. And when I say good tournament, I mean it's a very long, difficult golf course, makes sense to play in. We should in general avoid all kind of like shorter golf courses, less serious events. At this point, your child is in a position where they can be picky about the tournaments that they play in. If we look at the best players in the country, using this player as an example, he's ranked 2nd overall, these are the tournaments that we see them playing in. So we see Rolex Tournament of Champions, you get into that by winning an AJGA event. The US Junior, the Team TaylorMade Invitational, this is an invitational, you have to actually get invited, and I'll go over how to do that. Um, Sage Valley is an invitation-only event. I'll go over though how to kind of get in the range where you can in theory get there. Dustin Johnson World Junior, um, this is one of the regional tournaments that I mentioned in the prior video. Where I'll also have a list below, and we'll be going into that a little bit more detail technically, why it's a good tournament. And then Carlton Woods is another high-level, um, tournament as well that we have to get exempted into. So essentially, at this point, your child's in a spot where we've got plenty of tournaments we can play in. The question is playing in the right ones. Um, so when we're doing that, the first things we want to just kind of get on the board are the AJGA events that we want to play in, because again, they're still the least free the least flexible. If you want to go play in the US Junior, there's going to be a few different qualifiers you can try to get into. But if there's a particular AJGA event you want to play in, like, that's, that's literally the only, you know, AJGA event that is that particular event, right? There's not multiple. Um, in your case, you don't have to worry about qualifiers, but still, that's like the only event. So what you want to do is go to rankings and then scroll all the way down here. Um, there are different tiers of events here, so I just want to be upfront about this stuff. Um, these are all the 225-point events. What that means is these are the majors of junior golf, and you can see, you know, these are for boys, these are for girls, when they are. And these are the non-AJGA majors of junior golf. So I, like, I talk about US Junior, Junior PGA, Sage Valley Western Junior, right? Those are the biggest events. Um, then here is a list of kind of the hierarchy of different value, um, events in AJJ. They have different numbers of points. I'm not going to go overly deep into this for one very specific reason. For the most part, this is the way the rankings work. When once we get to this, we've moved, we've graduated from stars. Stars are now irrelevant. We're really concerned about the AJGA points system. The way it works is you get a certain number of points based on your finishing position, based on the value of an event. So if you play in a 225 event and you win the event, you get 225 points. Simple enough, right? If you play in an AJGA Open that is just your kind of like default AJGA Open, it will have 40 points, and if you win it, you get 40 points. Now here's the thing to think about: in order to get 40 points in the US Junior, you need to finish 8th in the US Junior to get You know, if you actually have to finish better, you have to finish 7th to get more than 40 points. Now, in my mind, it's a lot easier to win an AJGA event than it is to finish 7th in the US Junior. In my mind, it's actually more impressive to finish 7th at the US Junior than it would be to win an AJGA event. But at least those are comparable as far as outcomes go. So this really only matters if the psychology is, well, it's like, I'm going to go into this event and and I'm going to win it, which is all well and good, that's cool. And if you're gonna go win in every single event, you know, okay, like we can talk about that. But in general, what I would recommend until we're running off, you know, AJGA wins every other weekend, my recommendation is— because it's like, even like you finish second, you get 24 points. Like, where'd you have to finish in the US Junior here? You'd have to finish, you know, What is this? You'd have to finish 11th at the US Junior in order to do that. And it's just like, those are at least pretty comparable, right? So it's overall just like the level of golf we want to be playing. So we still— so we want to max this out, but we want to be intelligent about it. We don't want to do, you know, too much crazy stuff and be like, well, you know, I really need to go travel all the way across the country to play in the, you know, I don't know, any number of these events, right? Just because they're 100 points or 120 points or what have you. Yes, the best players in the country, they can get away with just playing these, right? Um, now why can't you play one of these? Well, the first thing we need to do is kind of optimize this rankings thing. So let's go back here. I apologize in advance, this is probably the most intense thing, you know, it's the most difficult thing to kind of sort ourselves through, but it's not too crazy, so bear with me on this. So how do the point system— how does the point system work? So this, you have the number of points, right? So if you get 225, it's 225 plus whatever the other event values had. You can also get bonus points. Those bonus points are, I believe, are for the winner of the US Junior and a couple other things. So we don't need to worry too much about bonus points. They're nice when they happen, but it's not, it's not a main thing. Main thing is you're gonna have total points. Then you're gonna have this number divided by 6. So if you have more than 6, then it'll be like divided by 7, divided by 8, however many tournaments you play in. But if you only play in 3 AJGA events, this number will still be divided by 6, okay? So it's really important we have those 5 AJGA events that we're playing in, plus 1 non-AJGA event that is ranked. So stuff like the IMG Junior Worlds or the Dustin Johnson World Junior. I'll kind of go back over those so you can kind of start looking at those, but we want to make sure that we play in one of those events just to have that 6 so that this is maxed out. Less relevant until we're really trying to just like max out this overall ranking stuff here. Now this average number, your average points, is what's going to determine your AJGA Rolex ranking, right? So, you know, Miles has an average of 141. He's got 40 being added on top of that, which is how we get that number. You know, let's go the next one down here, you know, and he's far and away the best, right? So next player here, he's got a better bonus than Miles does, but he doesn't have nearly as many points. He's played more events. So again, um, 585 divided by 7 gives us 83. Um, I'll show one more and then we'll call it a day here. Um, 530, he's playing a few more events, he's still got the 80-point bonus, and again, a little bit worse than the player ahead of him. Um, you can also see this tends to be biased toward the older players because AJJ takes time to actually kind of like work your way through, through the rankings, right? It's, it's not something you can snap your fingers and do overnight, it takes multiple years. So Anyway, what does that mean that you should do? What that means is playing your 5 ranked events. If you have stuff that is nearby, you can— you don't necessarily need to, but you can look at these points of the minimum point value and say, okay, we want to prioritize playing in some of these events. Now, in the prior video, I have links covering stuff like Dustin Johnson World Juniors. So if you're on the East Coast, it makes a lot of sense, worth 100 points. There's your non-AJGA event. But if you're in California, doesn't necessarily make sense, right? In theory, you can play at UCLA just, just on Toyota Cup. So I'm not going to say, hey, we got to travel all over the country. This is just, you know, how do we absolutely do everything we possibly can as far as tournament selection goes. Um, other events here, Southern Junior Championship, another, you know, 100-point event. Um, point being You know, Bubba Conley, another one, um, non-AJGA event. Um, Pete Dye Invitational, another non-AJGA event. So these are all events you can use to help kind of round out that 6 total events. If you want to play more than that, fantastic. Um, but what's the point of all this? Like, why do we actually get ranking points in Rolex? Like, why am I talking about this at all? How does that have to do with Junior Golf Scoreboard? Well, originally I mentioned stuff like Carlton Woods. In order to get invited to Carlton Woods, you got to be in the top 64. If you're in the top 64 on Rolex rankings, you get invited to that event. The cool thing with invitationals is there's no limit on how many that you can play in, right? So it's not just a limit of 5, it's just, you know, playing as however many as you want. And so in theory, you could play in 6 invitationals, and that's, you know, that's going to be perfectly fine. Um, it's also going to be filled up with, you know, those kind of subsequent spots. So if you're, you know, let's say you're player 65 and one of these 64 doesn't, you know, commit, then it's like, odds are you're still gonna get into the event. So long story short, we just wanna be better in those overall rankings. The way that we do that is we shoot generally low enough scores so that we're gonna be doing well in the tournaments that we're playing in as much as possible. And then we're playing in at least those 6 events. That way our ranking is as good as possible. Um, so hopefully that makes sense. And each one of these video— or each one of these events, you can see just whatever the criteria is for them, they're different. A lot of them have overlap, but it's, you know, they're all different. Um, and so that is just worth, worth noting here. So, um, hopefully this video made sense as far as what you need to be doing. Again, in summary, get your 5 AJGA events, um, get at least your 1 non-AJGA event. I have a list above, um, to kind of pick from those based on where in the country you are so it's not too crazy for you. This is not a mandatory thing by any means. This is very much a, hey, how do we be the best player in the country type of thing? So I expect you probably need clarification with this on me. So either comment below, shoot me a DM, bring it up on the weekly calls, or if we need to do a one-on-one call about it, then let me know on that as well. This is definitely the most kind of dense portion of all the tournament selection. That's why it's the longest video, but hopefully it's clear and makes sense. And if it's not, then we'll clarify.
