Best Junior Golf Tournaments In 2024
In this instructional video, Connor Stirling Peterson explains how parents and junior golfers can effectively select tournaments in 2024 to maximize development and college recruiting prospects. He begins by outlining why tournament play matters—providing competitive experience, measurable scores, and visibility to college coaches—then discusses optimal timing, recommending that aspiring college players start competing around age 11 (or earlier for Division I hopefuls). Connor emphasizes the need to track scoring averages, targeting roughly a 74 stroke average for Division I eligibility, and uses this data to gauge progress. He introduces the Junior Golf Scoreboard as the primary tool for finding ranked events, advising families to start with local tournaments, then progress to higher‑profile events such as AJGA, Junior PGA, and IMG Junior Worlds once a golfer’s average reaches the mid‑70s. The video also highlights frequent parental errors, including excessive travel without clear objectives, undervaluing the importance of rankings, and overreliance on high‑school golf, which Connor argues offers limited recruiting benefit. Throughout, he stresses aligning tournament choices with the golfer’s specific goals—whether simply for fun, general college play, or Division I competition—so that resources are used efficiently and development is optimized.
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How to find the best tournaments for your junior golfer in 2024. What's going on, guys? If you guys are new to the channel, my name is Connor. I help junior golfers develop to be players that coaches actually want to recruit. And in this video, I'm going to go over how to find the best tournaments for your junior golfer in 2024. If you're new to the channel and enjoy videos around junior golf recruiting, you want to learn more about it, maybe you golfer yourself, then go ahead, subscribe to the channel, leave a like on this video if it's helpful for you. Now, what we're going to be covering in this video today is why should your junior golfer play in tournaments at all, when should your junior golfer play in tournaments, right, which tournaments are the best for your junior golfer, and the most common mistakes that parents make when selecting tournaments for their child. Because I see a lot of parents out there They try and find, you know, what's the best tournament I can get into. They go travel all across the country, they spend all this money, and at the end of the day, they don't even understand exactly what is being accomplished by playing in all these tournaments. And a lot of times they don't end up accomplishing their goals. We're going to go over all of that in this video. But starting with first things first, why should you, you know, golfer, play in tournaments at all? Well, number one, it's just fun to compete. You can go out there And there's no harm if you just want to say, hey, you know, my kid, they just want to play golf for fun. They don't want to compete. They don't like competing. That's totally fine. But it's a lot of fun to go out there and compete and figure out who you can be at your best. You know, what caliber golfer you can be. And it's really a great opportunity to be able to present to your child, to overcome all sorts of adversity and so on and so forth and really grow. There's all sorts of benefits. From it. And at the end of the day, and maybe this is just jaded from playing competitive golf, but to be honest, no one really cares if you go out there and shoot a good score by yourself, or, you know, it doesn't really matter. But it's really cool, you know, if you shoot a 65 in a tournament, like, that's a big deal. You shoot par in a tournament, that's a big deal. So that's just one reason you guys should consider that. And the other one is, it's how college coaches can can see them. So if you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf, maybe they want to play Division I golf, then they need to be playing in tournaments so that coaches can see them. That's just super critical. They're not going to get that from just playing high school golf. They need to actually go to tournaments so that they can play in them and get seen. Now, next question, when should your junior golfer play in tournaments? Well, number one, they should do it when they want to, right? I'm not advocating for kids to just go out and play and everything because they have to, or they're behind on timelines or whatever. Yes, there are timelines to this stuff. If you have a junior golfer who's 17 and never played a tournament before, they're probably not gonna play college golf. That's fine, just accept that. But when should they get started? When they want to. Kids start as early as 6 or 7, I've seen plenty of times. But if yours is a little bit later, then that's completely fine too. But what if they wanna play college golf? When should your child, really start playing in tournaments? Well, my recommendation is they should at least be playing in tournaments as soon as possible if they're not already at this age, but at least around 11. And the reason for that is if we're starting off, let's just say we're able to successfully— we're breaking 100, we're probably breaking 90, we're 11 years old— we want to start prepping ourselves and getting ready to play in some of the bigger events like the AJGAs You know, the junior PGA, stuff like that. And if your child isn't playing competition at that point, that's fine, but you don't want to be in the headspace of saying, well, you know, we're just going to wait off until high school. And yeah, they can, you know, kind of break 80 sometimes, but like they're not quite there yet. That's fine, but the level that is expected for them to be able to play college golf, they need to to pretty much be there a lot earlier than that. And so 11 is kind of a good age to really like mark down in your calendar as kind of a do or don't portion. If they're just playing golf by themselves, that's totally cool. But if you want to, if they have the desire to play at an elite level, then at least by 11, if not earlier, like I said, there's plenty of kids who are very good, shooting the 30s reliably for 9 holes, they're playing at 7 years old. So again, Figure out what's best for your child, but 11 is kind of a good point for that. Now, what if they wanna play Division I golf? We would probably move that back just a little bit. Maybe we look at 10 or 9, but it really comes down to them understanding like what is expected of them in terms of, or maybe you as a parent, what is expected of them in terms of what they need to shoot at different points in time. And I've got other videos on this channel that go really deep into what scores they need to shoot at different points in their career. But in general, you, you want to aim for your child to be able to shoot 74-ish on, on average in order to play Division I golf. Probably around freshman year of high school, they should be able to do that fairly reliably. And so when you think about that, like, golf is hard, playing competition is really hard, and so you want to give them enough time to figure out how to get there. And so first things first, getting them into tournaments, the first 10, 20 tournaments, it, it shouldn't be about who are the other kids in the field, is this tournament big, whatever. It should just be an opportunity for your child to feel a little bit of pressure, go out there on a golf course that they probably don't play all the time, and to see what they shoot on average and, and compile that. Um, you know, make sure you're tracking those numbers, average those numbers out, and just see where they're at. And then you can see, okay, cool, well, we know that we need to get to, you know, 74 or better on average. Right now we're at 87 on average, well then that tells you how many years your junior golfer has in order to kind of bridge that gap and how fast that they need to do that. That's really the way to think through that problem because a portion of playing Division I golf comes from, you know, your junior golfer scores, and a portion of that comes from the tournaments that they play in. Now they are not going to be able to play in the best tournaments in the country if their scores are not already dialed in. So that's the first thing you want to get sorted out. That's not already sorted out, that's priority number one. And then that's how they kind of work their way into the higher-end tournaments. I'm going to show you guys this in just a second here of how to find all the different tournaments and all the different levels that they should be at. But that's kind of how to think about when they should start. Obviously, if you've got a situation where you have a junior golfer who's 16 and they already have a scoring average of 74 or 73 or 72, Well, then they're in a great spot. Maybe they don't have to be playing tournament golf that long. It's not a hard and fast rule. It's just to say that being really good at golf takes time. Playing really well in competition takes time. So the more time you can give your child, the better. Now, this is kind of the meat and potatoes of this video. Which tournaments are best for your junior golfer? If they're just starting out, then pretty much any tournament is good for your junior golfer. It— and that— what I mean by that is their biggest problem is they've never competed. And so the best thing that you can do for them is just put them out there, put them under a little bit of stress, and just see what happens. And track their numbers. I can't stress that enough. Track their scores, not to judge them versus all the other kids in the field, but just to see like, here's what you shoot on average. And maybe they feel like they're— they should shoot scores that are way better than that, But that's cool. Now you can figure out, well, why does that not happen? What are the skills that break down? Okay, cool, we can fix that problem. But if they're just starting out, just any tournament is good. Now there's going to be kind of stages in this, and the next stage after that is, is to say, okay, cool, we're playing in tournaments, we have some idea of what scores we're shooting, but what's next? What's the next step? Well, we're going to jump into that in just one second. It's also important to understand what are their goals because that's gonna show you kind of the limits here. If they don't have the goal of playing, let's say Division I golf, let's say they just have the goal of playing just college golf in general, well then you really don't have to look at any type of travel. You can just play local events. There are going to be some national and regional organizations that you guys can look at, and I'm gonna give you guys a tool for that in just a second, but you don't really have to strain yourself that much. Much. Now, if they want to play Division I golf, they might need to travel a bit more. Not as much as you probably think, but they might have to travel a bit more. But they're probably not going to be playing in quite as many tournaments either. It's just a little bit of a different look. And again, I'll kind of show you guys some reference points on that. So let's go ahead and jump over here into, um, my favorite website for, for college recruiting, Junior Golf Scoreboard. And this is available to everyone. You don't have to pay for this or anything like that. Just go to tournaments and results and then search for tournaments. And then you're going to want to go to the state that you're in. And let's just say for the sake of this video that I'm in North Carolina, and I'm going to search tournaments. And so this is super, super important. If you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf, let me just go ahead and filter this out to 2024, then they need to get ranked. They need to get ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard ideally. Golfweek does their own ranking, AJGA does their own ranking, but Junior Golf Scoreboard is the broadest ranking. And these are all tournaments that are ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. A lot of the time I talk to parents and they find tournaments that say that they're ranked or whatever, but this is just— just go right to the source, you know. Um, so that's going to be the easiest thing for you guys to say, whatever state you're in Go ahead, look up your state, the tournaments that are in your state, and find tournaments that work for your, your schedule, how far you're comfortable traveling, age group, etc. And just pick out, you know, a handful of these. You know, you don't have to play in tons of them, but if you played in a couple per month, or junior golfer played in a couple per month, then they'll be in a really good spot. They'll get ranked, and you'll be able to see objectively, well, you know, our scoring differential is this, our scoring You won't necessarily be able to see your scoring average, but that'll give you a really good start because you'll know your scoring average because you'll be tracking it. It'll give you guys a really good start. You can actually see, okay, cool, how far off are we from our goals? And then you can start asking the really important questions, which is like, how do we bridge the gap there? And this is a little bit outside the scope of the video, but I'll do it for you guys anyway. We'll go into College Signings, just, if you guys, this is the first time here. And you can actually search to see what scoring differential do players have when they get recruited and where were they ranked in their class. So you get all those numbers by virtue of being ranked, but if you don't know where to start, this is definitely the place to start, pick tournaments from there. Once your junior golfer has kind of a scoring average in the range of, 77 in tournaments or better, then I would really recommend getting into some of the AJGA stuff. I recommend getting into some of the national stuff like Junior Worlds or the Junior PGA. Looking at those types of events would be the kind of progression there. But until they're there, just focus on playing those tournaments, getting the experience, and so on and so forth. Now here's the most common mistakes that I see, and I want to kind of finish on this. Is you have to understand what the objective is. If your junior golfer just wants to play college in general, well then you don't have to travel a bunch. You can just do exactly what I showed you there. Just find the tournaments that are local and you can look at where players need to get to and you can see if you're on pace and you can figure out what you need to do to get there. Just as a reference point, the average player improves by about 1.18 shots. So if you're looking at the scoring differential, you're looking at where they need to get to, you can do the math on that. And so that's true whether it's Division I or Division III or Division II, but just understand whatever that one is. Now, if their objective is to play Division I, they probably need to start a little bit earlier. In all of these cases, they do not need to be playing high school golf. In almost every case I've seen, high school golf is pretty much a waste of time. So I know that that's an unpopular opinion. I know a lot of people like the camaraderie and the teamwork building and all that stuff, but The practices don't do anything. They're not productive. I see a lot more chaos come out of that. I prefer to have students in a much more structured progress, but if your child is dead set on it, then fine. But again, it's not going to help them from perspective of playing college golf. So sometimes you have to make sacrifices, get the stuff which you want, and high school golf in general, I would say, is a sacrifice worth making. That said, that, that's really the most important context I can leave you with from this video is understand what are their goals, Goals. If they want to play Division I, they probably need to start a little bit earlier. They need to have really high-level coaching. They need to know exactly what they're trying to do because it's not easy to play Division I golf. It's harder than getting into Harvard. Um, to play college golf in general, same thing, but you can play a little bit more locally. But again, the earlier you can get the scores down, the better. That's really the most important thing. And then if they're just playing golf to have fun, then, you know, playing whatever tournaments they want to, it doesn't really matter. Um, but that's the perspective to, to go into tournaments. So when you say, what are the best tournaments for my junior golfer? It's going to be tournaments that are going to get them ranked first and foremost. And then from there, you're going to want to start looking at events like AJGA, IMG Junior Worlds, Junior PGA, etc. And it's really going to depend on your junior golfer's skill level, their rankings, and then options become available. You can't just go and qualify for something like the Junior Players, even though that would be an amazing event to get into. And so I'll probably do more complicated videos and stuff like that if it's not already on the channel. But that's the perspective, and I hope this video will get you started so your junior golfer can get out there, get ranked, and you can see where they're at and what they need to do to accomplish their goals. So once again, if you guys enjoyed this video, if it's helpful for you, go ahead, leave a like, comment your biggest takeaways, and subscribe to the channel if you want to get more videos like this.
