Complete Guide: How To Get Recruited To Play D1 Golf

All right, what's going on guys? So in this video, I'm going to be covering how to play Division 1 golf step by step. It's going to be a complete guide video. This might be one of the longer videos, we'll have to see how this ends up. My goal in this video is to make things as streamlined and as step by step for you as possible so that you in theory could go ahead, watch this video, implement the stuff that I'm about to talk about, and at least set yourself up or your child up for a high probability of being able to play Division 1 golf. If you're new to the channel, this is all we talk about is how to help junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back, uh, we got another good one for you. So let's go ahead and dive right into this. So the first thing you need to wrap your head around if you want to help your child play Division 1 golf is rankings. This is something that most families do not take seriously at all. They think that it's unnecessary or something, or maybe they just don't even know that it exists. So I'm gonna put you guys on some game here. So the first thing you want to do is go to juniorgolfscoreboard.com, and you want to go to this page, rankings and honors, college signings. And you're able to filter by boys or girls. So whether you got boy, girl, whatever, doesn't matter. Um, these principles are still exactly the same. It's one of the most common questions I get asked is, you know, it's different for boys or girls. Pretty much the same thing, um, slight variations, but for the most part, same general concept. All the way back to 2017, it'll show you which players got recruited and where they're ranked in their class and what their scoring differential was. Now, for the purpose of this video, you just need to understand scoring differential. It's kind of like a way of showing, uh, you know, how you perform versus the difficulty of the tournament or the golf course you're playing on. So for example, if you had two players who shoot even par but one plays at 6,000 yards, one plays at 7,000 yards, obviously the player who does that at 7,000 yards is a significantly better golfer, right? And so that's all this is showing. Now technically, this is only showing the top 75% of your round. So one of the common things that I see that freaks people out is their child goes out there and shoots a bad round of golf or a bad tournament, and they think that's the end of the world. And the reality is that's just not true. We'll get into that a little bit more detail here, but we're only looking at the top 75% of your round. So if it is truly terrible, it will not count on your overall scoring differential. But anyway, the big picture here is so that when you say, hey, or your child says, hey, I want to play Division 1 golf, you actually have a target. It's not just kind of this vague thing of like, oh, I need to go out and, you know, get connections with coaches, or I need to go to camps, or I need to, you know, go win a tournament. Um, that's what I thought when I was a junior golfer, um, and it was pretty dumb, um, to be honest. So, um, but a lot of people have that, and so I want to make sure that you guys have this clarity here. So you just want to be able to know, like, you know, if you're trying to play a particular program, you have the access to the information right here. You don't even have to sign up. It's free. Or if you just want to play general Division 1, um, you're just like, hey, I want to play Division 1 golf, I don't really know, you know, a particular program I want to play at, um, -2, uh, is a really good benchmark to kind of shoot for, especially for boys. For girls, you might be able to get away with -1 or -1.5. For boys, it's just a little bit more competitive because there's more boys that play, you know, junior golf in general. So anyway, that's kind of foundation number 1. Got to know kind of where our leaderboard is, what we're tracking. If you want to go to Harvard You got to know what your GPA is, you got to know standardized test scores. Same thing's true for, you know, playing Division 1 golf. You need to know where your scoring differential is at, where your ranking is at. Um, and, and scoring differential is really a thing to focus on. Ranking is just kind of a byproduct of that. It's how you're doing versus the other players. That's not a number you want to put a lot of stock in, because if you're thinking about the stuff when you should be, which is realistically, you know, from 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 years old, where we have a decent amount of runway before we're actually getting recruited you know, recruiting starts sophomore year, June 15th. Um, and we want to make sure that you have a little bit of runway there. There's not as many players who are going to be ranked at 12, you know, which is an advantage. Obviously you don't have as steep a competition. Um, and it also just puts you in a position where you don't want to put too much stock in like, oh, I'm ranked 50th in the country. It's like, yeah, it doesn't really matter that much. Um, you know, there's gonna be other kids who are gonna come in. You just want to make sure that you're consistently improving. Um, biggest thing I can say that also helps with kind of like the mental health of golf is just trying to focus on your own game, trying to get a little bit better every single day. Obviously there's like ups and downs, right? But if you apply the stuff I'm gonna be talking about in this video, then the ups and downs are gonna be much more mild. So anyway, and you're gonna have some tools on kind of like buffering that stuff out. So perceptually that it's easier for the player. So anyway, that's that. The second question that you should be asking, right? It's how do I get ranked, right? You might be watching this video and you already have your junior golfers ranked. Congratulations, you're ahead of the game. But you might be asking yourself that question. So I'll just cover that very simply. Same thing, tournaments and results on Junior Golf Scoreboard. Go to search for tournaments, and then you can just search, you know, whatever, you know, month, or realistically any, just search your state and, you know, go ahead and mark the year for the tournaments that are available that are ranked. Um, and you'll just do the whole like, you know, I'm not a robot thing. They'll show you every single tournament in your state that's ranked. Um, you don't necessarily want to always take tournaments a tournament at their ward for, oh hey, yeah, this gets Junior Golf Scoreboard points. And most of the time it does, but to be fair, sometimes it doesn't, and you don't want to get confused by something like that. To be clear, you need to have 4 tournaments of at least 36 holes to be ranked. So if one of those rounds of golf gets cut off, you know, let's say you have bad weather or something like that, then it won't count. You have to play in another tournament. Um, but long story short, you just need to play in those 5 rounds so that you can be ranked. And then what we're going to be able to do is really wear the I don't know if I'd call it secret sauce, but you know, it's kind of the next layer to this, is you're going to have your target, right? Let's just say it's -2 for the sake of simplicity, and you're gonna have wherever you're at, wherever your child's at, right? They're gonna have a scoring differential, and they're gonna be able to say, okay, cool, you know, we're 12 years old right now and we want to be at -2 by the time we're 16. So we got 4 years ahead of us, maybe a little bit less, but let's just say for easy math, you got 4 years ahead of us and we need to improve by this many shots. Now I can tell you just from having researched extensively on Junior Golf Scoreboard, the average improves by about 1.19 shots per year. So if you're doing this, just take out your handy-dandy calculator and take 1.19 times the number of years your child has until they're about 16 years old, or whenever the kind of end of their sophomore year would be going into their junior year. Um, if they're able to get to -2 with that improvement, then you're probably good to go, probably good to do just, you know, whatever the normal thing is. That said, when I work with players and my coaching program, they improve by an average of 3.6 shots per year. And so again, you can pull out your handy-dandy calculator and, um, you know, multiply 3.6 by the number of years, and your child might be, you know, in a better spot as a result of that. So if you feel like they're a little bit behind, don't worry about that. There are people out here who can, who can help for that particular thing. I've got a link below in the description, um, if that's something you're interested in. Long story short, what we do is everything that's in this video, but more specifically We help your child track their stats so they know which stats are they're tracking and how to track those stats, show them how to practice and actually use that information in, you know, their on-course strategy, their mindset, and actually just like knowing what to do when they're out there practicing so they're not just doing a bunch of random stuff. We update that practice every 10 rounds so that way it stays up to date. Then we give them ongoing coaching as far as, you know, just the day-to-day stuff that comes up throughout the week. Questions that come up, they'll have that support, and that way they're able to consistently improve. It's a very different kind of approach than, you know, most people just go to their coach and, you know, try and work on their swing and hope things get better. Um, you know, my process, very data-driven. And so if you're into that type of thing, I really encourage you, um, check out the link in the description to learn more about that. Anyway, back to the video. So we've got our target, you know, we've got where we're at, and we've got where we want to get to, right? Like, we've got those two variables. Now how do we go about doing that? Well, let's go ahead and I'll pull up one of the students that I'm working with just as an example so you guys can see this. So Moses, in this case, I want to say Moses is 13, but we can see his scoring average and we can see all the tournaments that he's played in over this past year. Um, and we can see his current scoring differential. We started working together in July, so he started off with a scoring differential of 8.15. Now we're down to about 5.3. I would say Moses is, um, you know, maybe overperforming a little bit on kind of like what my normal student is, but you know, not, not by a ton. You know, I would say he's kind of on normal pace where he's probably going to improve by about, you know, 3.5, 4 shots over, over our kind of time working together. And, um, you know, hopefully we continue to do that in the future. Anyway, let's just kind of like show you guys the overall trends here. The thing we've got here is we've got the difficulty of the tournaments, which you guys will notice post-July, um, or starting work together, the tournaments get longer, right? So here he's had some, some events that are already scheduled. We started working together end of July here, so August we had one more. Tournaments get longer, and so as a result of that, that's part of why his scoring differential has gone down. So he's shooting pretty much the same scores but on harder golf courses, right? Even this last one was fantastic because he literally, he literally broke his leg, came back, fires a 71 on a long golf course. All right, that's— can't ask for more than that. Like, it's pretty sick. Um, anyway, So we got that, and we got a scoring average. We started working together. Scoring average, I want to say it was about 77-ish, uh, maybe, maybe it was closer to 78. I will take a look at that in a second. But we've been able to bring the scoring average down, and we've been able to make the golf courses longer. A big part of that was being able to track his statistics and being able to see, okay, cool, well, if we make the golf course longer, what's going to happen to our approach shots, right? Because that's really the punishment that happens when you play longer golf course. You have longer approach shots coming in, so you need to know, like, how often do I hit the green from these different distances, right? So for example, if from 75 to 100 yards you hit the green, let's say, 80% of the time, and I move you back to your average approach shot now is not 75 to 100, it's, you know, 125 to 150 yards, but you still hit the green 70% of the time, you're not actually going to be punished really as far as like playing a longer golf course. Not really going to matter for you. And, you know, if you're going to play that longer golf course, let's say it is, you know, drops off to 50%, guess what we're going to be doing in our practice? We're going to really double down on making sure that we have that skill set so that when we're out on the golf course, that doesn't hurt our scoring, right? We're focusing on the right areas. And this is one of the things that I think that most people don't really get with, um, with junior golf specifically. Um, and I've had the opportunity to, to really be around a lot of guys who, you know, teach on the PGA Tour, teach very high-level players. Um, and obviously just, you know, you're kind of like run-of-the-mill golf coach who, you know, works with everyone that comes by. You know, they've got their 80-year-old and, you know, they've got their junior golfer and everything in between, right? And one of the things that I find that gets overlooked is for a junior golfer, a lot of these skills are still developed, right? So, you know, for example, a PGA Tour player can take the advice of like push the ball as close to the green as possible on like, let's say, a par 5, because a PGA Tour player tends to be, you know, have developed a lot of skills. Like, you know, they can hit a 40-yard pitch shot on the green, you know, reasonably well. 30-yard pitch shot on the green— I don't know how long you've been watching junior golf, but I'm sure you've seen plenty of junior golfers lay the sod over it or blade it over the green from 40 yards. And so there's an advantage for that player to just know, be like, hey, I'm going to develop a skill outside at some point. But right now, let's just go ahead and lay up to 7,500 yards, give myself a full wedge, and keep things easy for me because I got other responsibilities. I got to do well in school. I have a limited amount of time that I can practice golf. I'm not a professional golfer where I can have all the skills and have the Trackman and everything, so I need to keep things easy for me. Um, and they're really just not losing that many shots by laying up. Um, in the same sense, a lot of the time for junior golfers, you know, A lot of emphasis on around like putting instruction tends to be on like mechanical stuff because again, the best players in the world, they're not bad at all the other stuff. They need to like have better mechanics, right? But a junior golfer needs to spend a lot of time on speed and making their very short putts. I'd say anything inside 5 feet, that way that they're just not 3-putting. Well, those things— there's a reason that those things are not taught is because most people aren't looking at the data and saying, oh wow, this junior golfer that I'm working with, they 3-putt. You know, 15% of the time. Like, we just brought that down. That'd be very easy to do, wouldn't take a lot of effort. Um, and a lot of the time it's just knowing that and being able to follow those statistics, which is what I do with all my students. That's a big part of why they're able to improve as fast as they do, because they're not just working on mechanics, they're actually working on developing those scoring skills. Um, and also, to be clear, I said earlier the average player improves by 1.19 shots per year. Most of that is because the player is hitting the ball further. There's only about 0.25 shots of that that's actually the scoring average going down. Um, the majority of that is just because the player ends up hitting it further over time, so they play longer golf courses, and that's where the, the technical, like, improvement comes from. Um, so if you really want to bring down scores, you have to understand how all these pieces fit together, and then you have to be strategic about knocking those things down. And that's one of the things that'll happen where you have the player who's 12 and they'll jump up to playing longer golf courses, you know, maybe they're playing 5,500 you know, for boys, and they go to like 6,500 and just start trying to play in AJGA, and all of a sudden they're shooting bad scores. And it's like, you're not actually a worse golfer, you're just being exposed for skills that you didn't have, right? And we just need to make sure that if we're going to make that jump, we knew, oh hey, I'm going to need to start developing these skills. What do I need to do specifically in order to make that happen? So anyway, continuing on with the video, these are the two big variables. We want to bring scoring average down, we make— want to make the tournaments hurt. Pretty simple. Now I can't just tell you, hey, make, you know, make the scoring average go down. Yeah, thanks. Everyone's trying to do that, right? Everyone has in their head be like, oh well, I should shoot par, I should shoot, you know, 69 or whatever. Um, that's not really the way to think about this. What we want to do is focus on what's the scoring average and what are the big statistics that go into causing that scoring average, right? I see people talk about strokes gained, which is again fantastic if you're a PGA Tour player, but it's not as helpful if you're a junior golfer. Why do I say that? Let's look at off the tee, right? Off the tee, you're a junior golfer, you're probably losing like 7 shots off the tee because you hit it 240 off the tee instead of, you know, 300. Like, it's not helpful. But we want to be able to track something like penalty rate. Penalty rate's very important. It has a major impact on how you're going to score. Um, something like, you know, hitting the ball in the fairway versus rough doesn't really matter that much at all, you know, just, just to be completely transparent here. Most junior golfers— I would even say at least half the junior golfers I work with, I've seen their data for— they're as good out of the rough, if not better, as far as hitting the green than they are from the fairway. So, you know, sometimes that changes. I would say it's maybe a little bit more biased toward boys than girls, but, you know, thankfully girls hit the fairway a lot more often because they're not hitting this far. Anyway, I digress a little bit there. The point is we want to know what are the big variables we need to focus on. right? So in order to do that, we need to track your statistics, and we need to be able to segregate those statistics between tournaments, practice. We need to be able to look at the real amounts of data, right? If you play one round of golf or you play a tournament, that tells you like nothing, right? You need to be playing at least 5. Ideally, we're looking at 10 rounds at a time, because what will happen here is if your measurement of yourself is, oh well, I, you know, I, you know, played well in this last tournament, it doesn't really do much for us. But if we can say, hey, you know, these are my last 10 rounds, I just played a good one, I had a good one drop drop off, right? Just play a bad one, had a bad one drop off, or, you know, I had, you know, a couple of bad ones but my overall average is improving. That's really the thing we want to look at. It kind of improves the mental health to just say like, okay, where am I at? This is kind of slowly incrementally moving toward my target, rather than saying like, how do I make these giant leaps? Which is a lot of the time like the goals that the junior golfers have. It's like, hey, I'm shooting 85 right now, I think I should be shooting even par. It's like, yeah, that doesn't happen just overnight. Like, you can't— even if your ball striking just like magically is like, boom, now we got elite level ball striking, it's like you can ball strike your way to like 75, but you know, it's going to require some putting and some just like course management stuff to be able to shoot lower than that. So it's— you have to have a comprehensive perspective on your game, and we need to have enough data to be able to make that evaluation. So my preferred tool, a tool called Draw More Circles, really recommend it. Specifically, one of the biggest things that's awesome about it is you can look at custom date ranges, which is very valuable, especially if you're in a position where, you know, let's say the putter's not going well, we want to change out putters. Well, then we can measure, you know, how is this improving or not improving our statistics, right? Like maybe we go from, you know, a mallet putter to a blade putter, we feel like we've got better feel with the blade putter, right? Well, one of the things that could happen is maybe our feel does get better, maybe your lag putting improves, but our short putts, because the center of mass is a little bit different, like the moment of inertia, um, is a little bit different, now we start missing our short putts, right? And we want to be able to see like, okay, well, is that trade-off worth it, right? It's not just, hey, does it look good in the bag? Do I enjoy having it? It's, does this actually cause me to play better or worse, and by how much? We need to be able to measure these things so we can make intelligent decisions about what we should do next, right? So anyway, I said we also want to be able to segment out tournaments and practice. So again, if we have a gap between these— so it's like, hey, we play really good in practice but I struggle in tournaments— it's like, why? What broke? We need to know that information. Because if you just say, hey, you know, play really good in practice, I don't really hit any balls out of bounds, but I get to tournaments, I get nervous and I struggle off the tee, it's like, okay, cool. Well, me getting your swing better and you performing better in practice off the tee tells me absolutely nothing about how we're going to do in tournaments. I need to be able to solve that problem in tournaments. And that gives me a lot of perspective as a coach to be like, okay, cool, here's where I need to focus. These are the questions that I need to ask. I'm not going to go through every single question here because, you know, this is a YouTube video and it has to be specific to the player. That's the type of thing that you guys would get if you're working with me, you know, directly one-on-one. Again, application below. But anyway, let's, let's go ahead and continue on. What we're able to see here, you can see he's, he's getting the feel back, um, you know, within tournaments. Pretty sick. Um, there's a few statistics we want to pull, and I'll show you guys right here. This is a spreadsheet that I give to all my students, but we're tracking penalty rate, greens regulation, scrambling, 3-putt, birdie conversion rate, and something I call compound errors. Those are the 6 statistics that I like to look at. Penalty rate, already talked about. Greens regulation tells you a ton. Um, mostly tells you about how often you have birdie putts and how likely you are to make bogey, essentially, because you hit more greens. I don't care how bad your 3-putting is, better to hit the green than not. Um, it's almost never better to miss the green. Um, anyone who tells you, he's like, oh well, you know, in this case it's okay to miss it, don't listen to them. Um, they don't know what they're talking about. Scrambling, um, it's just what happens when we do miss the green. Now, often should we essentially be making bogey? Because we can measure and be like, okay, well, if we're making worse than that, then we know we're compounding our error, which is where the compound errors comes from. Um, 3-putts, just how often are we making bogey from the green? And then birdie conversion rate, when we do hit the green, how often we make make birdie. Pretty simple. And then from there, what we can do is we can play around with these variables, say, hey, well, what if I brought this down? How much am I going to improve by? And then use that to kind of essentially diagnose, be like, hey, if we do any of these things, what's gonna have the biggest impact? And then we can also consider, you know, is that realistic? You know, it's like greens regulation of 100% would be fantastic, but nobody can do that. Um, there's probably a limit or an asymptote, if you will, right around 70, uh, 75% greens regulation. So if you get to that point, it's kind of like, okay, cool, we don't have any meat on that bone. Obviously you can't have less than zero penalties off the tee, so you don't have any meat on that bone, um, once you're at that point. And it's just a way to strategically go through this and say, hey, you know, where do I need to put most focus? Where do I need to potentially blow things up? Um, because this just isn't working for me. Once we've got that, then we want to build out our practice plan. So this is the first practice plan I do with Moses here. Um, as you guys can see, scoring average 77.3. 3. I'm scoring differential 8.15. And so we just strategically said, hey, you know, what makes the most sense? You know, what are the drills we want to be doing? Obviously, you know, this is pretty rudimentary here, but I kind of go through him, you know, go through which drills I want him working on and how to do these specific drills. Again, that's something I'm gonna walk through with my students, not necessarily on a video like this. But then we're gonna be able to see how we improve over time. So we had a 76.63 and 6. 4.6, we get 76.5, 5.44, and as you guys just saw, now we're at 5.33. So again, it's not leaps and bounds, it's this incremental progress that we want to be seeing. And you know, if Moses stays on this track, you know, he is a class of 2029, so he's essentially got 3, 4 years ahead of him before he's getting recruited. You know, on this track, he's going to be, you know, more than likely a Division I player at minimum, but realistically, you know, a very, very high-level Division I player. We even talked about scholarship. There's going to be a tremendous amount of just, you know, resource out there for them to be able to select and also, you know, position themselves. So if you're watching this video specifically, I want to talk to you if you're— if your child is like kind of in the, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15 range. Like, this is the time to like really double down on this stuff. A lot of times families try and push this out to the future and just creates a lot of stress, you know, it creates a lot of anxiety. And, you know, it's just something you don't, you don't want to do. You know, if you've got a 10-year-old or 11-year-old, you're in a really great position, especially if they're very driven, um, because then they're in a position where they can really set themselves up for the future and they don't have to put hardly any pressure on themselves in order to do that. Um, that's really the biggest thing that I can advocate for. So again, if you're looking for help in this, you want to go deeper than this process, which again, I've shown you guys play the tournaments, um, you know, play the ranked events, track your stats, lower the scoring average, be strategic about your practice, focus on the right things, model that out with data, not just, you know, I think that this sounds like a good idea. And again, if you're a parent watching this, you don't have a background in golf, you don't know how to do any of this stuff, maybe you can kind of forward this video to your golf coach, but you're kind of confused, um, again, fill out the application. And you know, if it sounds like something you guys are interested in, again, we'll talk it over, make sure that it's a good fit for your child, because I don't take students that I'm not confident that can make this happen with. You know, if your child is like, hey, I'm a junior, I have a scoring differential of 10, you're like, I can't help you. Like, I genuinely can't. But if they're in a position where it's like, hey, we got a scoring differential of like 8 or 9 and the other 12, it's like, like, I feel fantastic about that because I know based on math that they just have a high probability of accomplishing their goals. That's really, you know, that's why I'm here. Um, that's my biggest thing on YouTube is trying to get more of you guys, especially, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14, to really start thinking about this ahead of time, um, preparing yourselves, um, you know, to be in that position. And yeah, eventually everyone will come along, um, and then the advantage will, you know, dissipate a little bit. But you guys are watching this video first, big advantage to you. And so take this stuff. If you want help, go ahead and fill out the application. I'll see you guys in the next one.