Connor Stirling Peterson walks parents through building a 2026 AJGA tournament schedule for juniors scoring 77 or better. Start with preview events for automatic exemptions, add Junior All-Star tournaments (max four), then AJGA Opens (max five). Prioritize your home state first, adjacent states second, and use the Junior Golf Scoreboard to fill in other events.
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All right, perfect. So this video is for you if your child is ready to play in AJGA events. What that means is that they are already ranked and they have a scoring average that is 77 or better. If they're not already there, watch the video above this one that's going to go through just how to build out their just basic tournament schedule where you're playing in ranked events. But they're all going to be primarily local events because I don't want you to have to, you know, do some crazy gymnastics to get in all these tournaments. when we don't even have the scores to realistically be competitive in them. So this is for you if you're in that spot, assuming you're in, in the right spot here. What you want to do, go to tournaments, schedule 2026, and then you want to select your state. So I'm going to use California as an example here, and based off of, um, a few things here. So if your child has never played an AJJ event, you want to look at the previews first. So let's Let's look at that. A preview gives them an automatic exemption, and so they'll get in right away. It's an opportunity to earn stars. And so we just want to make sure that we play that first if we have the opportunity. We don't need to bend over backwards for that, but ideally, you know, that would be the case. So find a preview. You are going to get priority in your state first and foremost, and then you'll get secondary priority in the adjacent states. So when I say adjacent, I mean the state is literally touching your state on a map. So it's not just like, hey, it's kind of close, it's literally touching. Okay, so like Oregon is adjacent to California, Washington is not adjacent to California even though it's relatively close. So if you've never played AJGA, the first thing you want to do is get this on the calendar. So let's say we wanted to play in this one. What we're going to do, copy that, go over to our tournament spreadsheet here, then paste that in so that we have that particular event. Okay, then just go ahead and mark the date. And what you want to do once you've got that is if your child is 15 or older as of June— or, um, as of January, then they have to play— they can't play in Junior All-Stars anymore. If they are under 15 as of January, they can play in Junior All-Stars. Bear in mind, Junior All-Star events tend to be about 6,500 yards, 6,600 yards, so we want to make sure we're comfortable from those distances. But assuming that's the case, You go over here, Junior All-Star, and once again search through this list. We want to get as many of these on the board as possible. You can play in a maximum of 4 Junior All-Star events, and so we just want to make sure that they're on the board because they're the most difficult. Um, they're not very flexible, right? Um, versus some of the— a lot of the other events we're going to talk about, we have a lot more options here. So we want to get all these Junior All-Stars on the board. So you're just gonna go one by one. Copy, um, paste special, values only. That way you don't have the weird formatting stuff. And then you'll sort of have that filled out. Now once you've got that, if your child is ready to do some AJGA opens, they're able to play long enough yardages, then we want to go in here and click open. We want to go through and get all of the opens on the board as well. So we want to just know where these are. We're not playing in every single one of them, but we want to know what they are in the state. There's no reason— we're always going to have worse priority if we're looking at like Texas comparatively. If we're in California, we don't want to be looking at Texas. We want to look at California first. Now California obviously has a lot of options here. You know, let's say you're in Georgia as another example. You're not going to have— Georgia still has a bunch, so let's look at another one. Arkansas. So in Arkansas, there's also— okay, so I made a mistake. So if you click this subsequent thing, it'll, um, it'll select the states back to back, which can be helpful from, from just figuring out like all the adjacent states. Yeah, so Arkansas here, we've just got this one tournament. So in Arkansas, you're going to pull up the map and say, okay, what are the states touching Arkansas? And you just want to add those to this. That way you have a better pool to choose from. But you want to go ahead and put those opens into this event. Opens make sense if your child is either 15 or older as of January, or we're trying to kind of push it a little bit, so we're probably going to play in maybe 3 or 4 Junior All-Star events and maybe 1 Open would kind of be what that would look like. If they're only playing in Opens, they could play in a maximum of 5, but there's no guarantee we get in every single qualifier, and so we want to have as many on the board first, apply for them as they come up And then if you get in, fantastic. If you don't, we've got plenty on the board, so it's not a big deal, right? So we just want to get as many on the board as possible, at least in your state or in the, in the adjacent states. So hopefully that makes sense. Once you've done this, you're just going to go back through the same process that I covered in the video above this one, where you're just going to fill out any other tournaments you want to play in with Junior Golf Scoreboard tournaments and results, search for tournaments, and just pick out again within your state, hey, we want to backfill, um, we want to play in some more events. Maybe you don't have as many AJGA events and you want to go back to Junior Golf Scoreboard. And then I will also have a linked resource below of other tournaments that you should look into based on the region that you're in. There are particular tournaments that make a lot of sense for you if you're on the East Coast, for versus Midwest versus the West Coast. They're all technically national tournaments, they're all big tournaments, um, but I want to make sure that you've just got a list, you know. It's like if you're in California, I'm not going to tell you to go play in a tournament that's in Virginia, but if you're in South Carolina, I'm going to say if, if we're taking the tournament seriously, we go to Virginia, right? Um, so hopefully that makes sense. And then I'll also provide a list for you of the national tournaments that are worth trying to qualify for every single year. Those are things like the US Junior and the Junior PGA. So hopefully this video made sense. If there's something you get hung up on, again, again, um, post a comment below, shoot me a DM, or bring it up on the weekly calls. I want to make sure I have a resource for you guys, but I want to make sure we at least have a solid foundation first. That way everything, you know, is as smooth as possible.
