COMPLETE GUIDE: How To Get The Attention Of College Golf Coaches

All right, what's going on guys? So in this video, I'm going to be going over my 30,000-foot view of how junior golf recruiting, college recruiting works. Um, that's what I'm going to be digging into in this video. And this is really going to be a channel for anyone who's a junior golfer, the parent of a junior golfer who wants to develop to play college golf. Maybe you're on the younger side, maybe you're older, but you're just trying to figure out how does this stuff even work. That's what I'll be going over in this video. And also just the videos on my channel are going to be going through how to navigate that process and all the little details that, that go into that. So whether you've got an 8-year-old and you're like, I want to make sure we don't fall behind, I want to perform at a high level, or if you've got a 16, 17-year-old and you're like, crap, you know, we're running up against the edge here, what do we need to know, how do we figure that out? The reason I'm making these videos change that. Um, just to have a little bit of context on me and my background, spent the last 4 years working with junior golfers and helping them develop to play college golf. Uh, taken this process and made it pretty straightforward where we've been able to consistently get junior golfers, um, developing and recruited. Uh, big portion of that I did with a guy named Jeff Smith, Radar Golf Pro on Instagram, and TD Luton, who's the assistant coach at Duke for 4 and a half years. So I was able to learn from them and then take some of the stuff that they're doing and add on to that a little bit. I really focus in specifically on development of practice, performance optimization, tournament selection, which we'll kind of dig into in this video. But yeah, that's kind of my background. I also am a competitive scratch golfer, and so that's what we're going to be digging into today. And obviously this wouldn't be a YouTube video if I didn't say like, subscribe. If you enjoy stuff like this, if this video is helpful for you. And if it is, go ahead and leave a comment below, just commenting your biggest takeaway. I'd love to be able to go back and forth with you guys if you have some stuff that is benefiting you. So I got my notes over here. So the first thing I really want to go over is just how do you get recruited? How do college coaches find you? I think this is one of the things that every junior golfer wants to know. Every parent of junior golf wants to know, but there's not a lot of clarity out there. A lot of people think you need to go to camps or you need to get FaceTime with coaches. You need to send out a bunch of emails. You need to go sign up for NCSA. You need to go, um, get the FaceTime. You need to talk about how great your character is, um, how far you hit it, uh, social media, like all this different stuff. And honestly, like, a lot of that stuff is secondary at best, and at worst, it just doesn't do anything. You send out an email to a million coaches Sure, you might get some interest if you're a decent golfer, but again, that's more because you're a decent golfer than it is because you sent out all these emails. Like, you shoot 95, you're not going to go to a Division 1 program. That's pretty straightforward. And so how do you actually approach that? Well, it really comes down to rankings. And I wish someone had told me this when I was a junior golfer, but this is, this is really how it goes. You want to go to juniorgolfscoreboard.com. It's just the broadest ranking index for, for recruiting. And so what we're going to do is we're going to look at this and we're going to use it to reverse engineer where you want to be at different stages in this. A lot of times I see parents and coaches talk about this thing where there's like, oh well, I want you to be the best 17-year-old and not the best 7-year-old. And it's like, that sounds cool, um, like that's, that's, that's a good tagline, but it doesn't really speak to the reality of how this stuff actually works. And I think what most people would benefit by, most people want is to understand where should I be. So do I need to catch up or can I chill a little bit? Kind of like if you're in school, if you're always pushing, always pushing, always pushing, but you don't know where you're at, it's really tough to be like, I've got a 4.0, I can chill out, or I've got a 2.5, like we really need to pick up the effort here. And so that's where rankings are really, really helpful. It's not about comparing your junior golfer to other kids. That is a thing that happens, but it's much healthier to do it in a broad long-term scope rather than looking at tournament to tournament. You're like, my kid finished 7th. They're like, okay, so what does that mean for their overall development? So anyway, here's your golf scoreboard. And so what you're going to want to do is ranking honors and go to college signings. And then from this page, you're going to want to click on scoreboard class rankings and filter that out. So it'll be top to bottom, and this will show you all the junior golfers that got recruited to these different Division I programs. And so this is really going to be specific to Division I. There are Division III programs, Division II programs that report, but not nearly as many. But Division I is very, very well documented. And my recommendation is if you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf, aim to play Division I. They can always fall off that a little bit and underachieve, and fine, they play DIII, that's cool. But if they just say, I was going to play college there's a decent chance they don't even get to D3, and then they don't end up making it happen at all. So this is what that looks like. This is their class rank. That's really what you want to pay attention to for your junior golfers— where are they ranked in their class? Because that's going to kind of dictate what options and offers that they get. And then this is their scoring differential. The easiest way to understand scoring differential is this is an average score. It's the top 75% of your scores versus the course rating, right? So there's a few things that play in here, and I'm gonna dig into it a little bit in just a second here. But the basics is it just helps us understand what kind of scores you're shooting on how difficult a golf course. So for example, if you played a golf course that was 7,000 yards and you shot even par, that's a better score than maybe somebody who shot, you know, the same score but it was on a 6,000-yard golf course, right? Because the golf course is harder, so that's a better golfer. And that's really what the scoring differential shows. The scoring differential is the biggest— has the biggest impact on how your junior golfer is ranked. So all things being equal, if their scoring differential is better than everyone else, they'll be ranked better than everyone else for the most part. So that's how this stuff works. But I guarantee you, and this is why I bring this up, If your junior golfer is, you know, ranked reasonably well, let's say top 100, top 150, um, for girls and boys respectively, they're going to have tons of colleges reaching out to them organically, giving them offers. And so I think that that's important to understand. It's— you don't want to put all this energy into how do I get the attention of coaches when your kid's ranked 500 in their class. You're not going to get the attention of Division I programs because you're not a Division I candidate. It's kind of like going to Harvard and being like, well, why— how do I get into Harvard? It's like, you have a 3.2 GPA, like, that's not going to work for Harvard. I don't care what your backstory is, it's just like, that's not going to work. And even if you know one person who did it, it's such an edge case, you don't want to build your whole case around it. And so that's really, um, what you want to be looking at here is really focusing in on how do you help your junior golfer lower their scoring differential as much as possible so they can just show that they're a quality golfer and they will get opportunities. And then if you layer on something down the road, be like, maybe you need to send out a few emails, or maybe you do a social media account, then it's really going to hit really well. This is the meat and potatoes of it. That's really what I want to do for you guys, is show you the meat and potatoes of this stuff. So again, go over here and pull over the boys as well. So you can see here kind of the same stuff, and my target that I recommend is about 150. Yes, you can kind of see here that we're solidly Division 1. We've got a few D2, D3s in there, but solidly Division 1 for the most part. When I've worked with junior golfers, if they're in the 150s, like, they just get offers. Like, it's pretty straightforward. Top 100 is great, but that's kind of the way to think through this. So that's piece number 1. Your rankings are the thing that gets you the attention of college coaches. Specifically, I would recommend focusing on your ranking on Junior Golf Scoreboard. There are other ranking indexes like Rolex, um, or Golfweek. But Junior Golf Scoreboard is the broadest, it's the easiest to find tournaments for. So I'll probably do videos in the future on finding tournaments specifically for your case, but right now just understand you want to play in events that are ranked by Junior Golf Scoreboard. High level on that, it's going to be 36-hole tournaments, so no 18-holes are going to count for this, but that's what you want to be looking at this. So Now let's dig into how do we actually figure out the scoring differential stuff, because that is the real challenge. That's like, that's the, that's the variable that's going to move the needle for your junior golfer. And so we want to look at how do we optimize that. There's two major things that are going to impact that. That's your scoring average, and it's going to be the tournaments that they play in. So the reason for that, I'm going to start with the scoring average first. They can't intentionally say, I want to lower my top 75% of my scores. Like, that's not a thing. You can't just say like, oh well, once it's in the bottom 25%, I'm just going to give up. Like, it doesn't matter, it doesn't count. It's like, that's a dumb way to approach that. So they need to help in that. And so what I mean by that, well, if you have a junior golfer and let's say they have a scoring average of 74, like, that's, that's pretty good. Like, that, that's absolutely respectable. But if they're a boy and they're a junior and they're playing on golf courses that are like 6,100 yards, that's not going to be very competitive in the overall scheme of things because there's other boys that are doing that on 6,500, 6,700 yards, 7,000, 7,200-yard golf courses. And so even though they have the scoring part of the equation down. They don't have the tournament part of, of this down. And so the reason I see a lot of kids get stalled out on this— and I'll go and, like I said, I'll go into more detail on this in the future— but they get into this headspace, I need to play lots of tournaments, or the parents are just saying, I just need to find tournaments for them playing to get seen. And not to rag on Hurricane Tour, but let's say they just start playing at a bunch of Hurricane Tour stuff, which is by their own admission really designed to help kids get the opportunity to compete but not necessarily the highest tier level of competition. So we're gonna see a lot of golf courses that are like 6,500 yards. It's respectable, but it's, it's not really gonna put you in a position where you can be a serious candidate for some of the top programs in the country. That's, that's really how to understand that. And so that, that's kind of where you have to have these two things merged together. Uh, you have to have the kind of the right equation here. So let me just go ahead and show you guys that. So I'm gonna go ahead and pull up— let's see, 2024 is a little late right now, so 2025, going into their junior summer here. And I'm gonna go pull up top 100. If you're top 100 going into your junior summer, like, you can feel reasonably good about yourself depending on what your goals are. Obviously, if you want to go to Stanford, then don't feel good about your goal. You need to do better than that. But that's what that first page is for, to really help you guys understand, like, where you should be targeting. But let's just take her for example. All right, cool. So this kid has a scoring average of 71.8, so I would say this is on the lower end. And if we look at the distance of the tournaments that he's playing, you can see these golf courses aren't terribly long. And we'll see some of these other ones, but it's like 6,600 yards-ish. We've got some 6,900 and we've got some like 6,300, right? So we've got some lower scores But that's where he's at. Let's continue to look at these. All right, same thing, a little bit shorter golf courses, a little bit higher score, but they're better ranked. Why? Because the golf courses are a little bit more difficult. If you look at the types of golf courses or tournaments that they're playing in, we're seeing more AJGA stuff as compared to— we've got some AJGA here as well, but we've also got some more, um local stuff as well. So he's in Kansas, he's playing some Kansas stuff. These AJGAs are kind of on the shorter end here. And so this is something that's really important. It's more about the difficulty of the golf course than it is the, the tour that it's on in general. And I'll talk about this more in the future, but I'm a big fan of AJGA-type events because they have a lot of positive benefits when we look at some of the Rolex stuff and rankings and getting into the more elite level events. But it— just because the tournament is an AJGA event doesn't mean it's better than everything else ever. It's just fairly reliable that you're going to get a decent look at the tournaments that you're playing. You're going to have decent quality fields. So that's kind of like the way to look at this here. And another way you can see this as well is like we've got this Nota Begay tournament, which I wouldn't say Nota Begay is anything amazing, but it's decent. 7,000-yard golf course, almost 7,100 yards, 88 people in the field. It's a pretty good tournament as compared to a tournament with 50 people in the field, um, and a little bit shorter golf course. And that's just kind of how it goes. I could do a video that just goes on and on about tournament stuff, but I just want you guys to understand like how the interaction between, uh, scoring average and tournaments interact here. Because we've got this kid who's got worse scores, so to speak, but because he's playing in more difficult tournaments or longer golf courses, he's ranked better than these other players. And so in this case, these guys are ranked a little bit worse also because the quality of the tournaments they're playing in on average just aren't quite as good. That's another thing to kind of bring up to you guys. You can see here that we're playing in about somewhere between 7, 6, and maybe 15, 20 on the high end, but we don't need to play in tons and tons of tournaments in order to be ranked reasonably well. And so I think that's just something to kind of highlight here. Let's continue to kind of work up this list. 73.35, again, what do we see? We see longer golf courses are playing. Bubba Conley, really solid event. There's different tiers of HAGA events as well, which again, I'll kind of make videos about that in the future. You can kind of see here, it's just a more difficult schedule. And that's really the thing to understand here is We're looking for a scoring average realistically that's somewhere between 72 and 74, and we're looking to play reasonably longer golf courses, especially by the time we get into our junior year, we're looking at golf courses that are about 7,000-ish yards. And so that's really what you guys need to know there. So a couple things that I'll bring up as well, And I'll kind of illustrate here, uh, in just a second. But as you shoot lower and lower scores in your local stuff, you're going to go play more difficult stuff, and then your scoring average is going to bump up a little bit because you're playing harder golf courses. But as long as you can get through the qualifiers and you can play reasonably well, then that's going to be okay. And so what you want to do for your junior golfer is kind of work your way through those at the appropriate times. If they have a scoring average of 85, you don't want to go throw them in a bunch of AJGA qualifiers because AJGA sounds good. And at the same time, if you have a junior golfer who's shooting 70 all the time, well then you don't want to have them just playing local stuff and never playing any national events because they're good enough to, and it's just, it's hurting them. It's just kind of wasting money on local events. What I will say is there's educations for all of this stuff. There's cases where you have a kid who's scoring average 75 and they're ranked really, really well because they play really hard tournaments. You could have the flip side of that where their scoring average is like 70 or 69 or something ridiculous and they play really short golf courses and they're ranked really simply as well. So there's no one-size-fits-all for this. I'm just giving you guys kind of the, the most common, easiest way to approach this. And then let me just go ahead and bump back a few years. So let's go into like incoming freshman here. Now one thing that's important to know is— and by the way, these numbers are pretty similar for girls. Girls are about 73-75 rather than 72-75. As you go further back in classes, since there are fewer people in the class, it's not quite as competitive, so the ranking can be a little bit unclear. So you might have a junior golfer who they're ranked 100 when they're in 8th grade, but then their ranking gets slowly worse. They might not actually be getting worse relative to everyone, there just might be more kids in the field, and that, that would be what's causing that rather than anything else. Cool. So let's go ahead here and just pull up some of these. So I'm going to go a little bit more wrestling in the class just because relative to the class, uh, it's going to be a little worse. So you can see even if we go all the way back here, the scoring doesn't change that much. Like the elite players are still shooting in this kind of 74-ish range, uh, we're still playing in solid tournaments. They're just a little bit shorter. So again, I'll take a few swings at this. Again, 72. 5. Again, they're shorter golf courses. And so this is really important for you guys to understand. You want to really get into that 72-74 range as soon as possible. And the easiest way to kind of show and articulate this is if you look at the best 7, 8, 9, 10-year-olds, they're shooting even par for 9 holes. What ends up happening is when you go to 10 and 11, where you start to play 18-hole tournaments and 36-hole tournaments Then the challenge becomes, okay, well, we need to string these two 9 holes together, right? And so that's where kids struggle a little bit because it's easier to play well for 9 holes than it is to play well for 18 holes. Then you see again, as the golf courses get longer and we play 36-hole and 54-hole tournaments, again, that's where the, the gap comes from. But if you're in a position where you have a junior golfer where their scoring average is, let's say, 81, you need to get that sorted out like now. Like, it doesn't really matter like where you're at in time. And I see a lot of people always just like, oh, it doesn't matter, you know, I just need to focus on development or whatever. And, and I'm all for development, I really am. I want players to improve in that way. But it's important to understand, it's like fixing your golf swing— you don't just roll out of bed and go from shooting 81 to 72. You just don't. Like, you don't just magically start shooting 65 all the time. Like, It comes from actual work and looking at your numbers. I don't know a single elite junior golfer that isn't routinely tracking their numbers. I'll do more videos on tracking your numbers, but that's absolutely essential. You have to track your numbers. You have to have optimized practice around what you do so that you can say, okay, cool, the reason I shoot 81 is because I don't hit enough greens, and the reason I don't hit enough greens is because I hit too many balls out of bounds, so I need to focus my practice around that. Kind of getting off topic here, but it's just to highlight for you guys The most important thing is the scores. Get those down as soon as possible, and then once you have those down, it'll be very easy to work through this kind of like tournament hierarchy, which again I'll do more videos on in the future. So that's that. That kind of brings me to the next point that I really wanted to address with you guys, is because of all this, the earlier your junior golfer starts, the better, right? So like Obviously they have to love the game, but I don't want you guys to be in a headspace where it's like, oh, I need to wait until they're 13, 14, 15, 16 in order to take this stuff seriously, because the tournaments are going to build on themselves. And so I think the easiest way to show you guys that is to just go to AJGA. And so kind of illustrate this in two pieces here. So first things first, these are all the best players that are going into college now. You can see, you know, they're going all the schools that you guys probably, you know, would like to go to. I'm just going to pick a random one here, different one. All right, so you got Ping An, Jack Burke Invitational, AJGA players. Like, we're playing in some really solid stuff. Toyota Cup's pretty good if you guys are West Coast. And Heather Farr. So here's some layers of this. I promise you guys a deep dive, so that's why we're going into the weeds here. So what we want to do is go over to rankings, and then we're going to look at minimum point value events. And so we're the ones at 225. So long story short, these are the best events that are ranked by Rolex ranking. So if you look at the best players, they're gonna play in these events. We just saw junior players, Jack Burke Invitational, etc., stuff like that. You have to work your way up there, earn your way up to that. The way that you would check on these is you could say— type this in, go to criteria, and then it will tell you what you need to do in order to get invited to that event. So top 65 boys on Rolex rankings— I can do a whole video on Rolex rankings, but we'll save that off for the future. Let me know in the comments if you guys actually want me to do that. Um, and then it's going to work through all these other criteria here. So in order to be ranked well you have to work your way through these other smaller events. So just for the record here, you guys might be more familiar with like AJGA Open. Well, those AJGA Opens are only worth 40 points. So we've got all these higher point value events that we'd want to play in as an alternative to those AJGA Opens that are better events, so to speak, uh, in order to work our way into these, you know, elite level events. And so all this stuff really builds on itself. And so when we start thinking about that, if I say, hey, well, you don't want to just be in, you know, AJJ Opens, like, you want to get to the point where you have exempt status so you can get into all these events. Because if you try to apply for these events, I guarantee you the majority of stuff you're going to see is, you know, this is a fully exempt field. And so it's like, well, how does that even happen? It's like, well, because you have kids that are 14 that get AJGA exempt status, and then they get into these other events and it just compounds, you know. And you guys know this, the rich get richer. And so by being able to capitalize on this stuff earlier, it comes with a few things. Now, first of all, rankings don't technically build on each other. So like, if you have exempt status, you don't keep it forever. You have to re-earn it every single year to second tour card. But the reason that I, I advocate starting early is because if you are, let's say, 12 and you know that you've got 3 years of AJGA before you're even in the Opens as like your default thing, you can screw up for a year and it's like you don't even care. Like, you're just like focusing on developing your game, you're putting yourself in that situation, you're getting used to being nervous, and it's like, it's cool, like it's no big deal. And then, you know, the next year you're a little bit more competitive, the next year is a little bit more competitive. And you just kind of stumble yourself into a top 5. Now you got your exempt status. Now you can kind of go out there and coast. You're— the whole time it allows you to be freed up and just focus on your game rather than which tournament did I get into, because you just have a really long time horizon. First, if you're a junior golfer who's 15 or 16, it's like, oh well, don't think about college golf until you're 15 or 16. How are they going to do this? Like, how are they going to go into an AJGA event top 5 right away when they've never felt that type pressure before and then go through all these other events and do well. Like, it's just, it's not going to happen. And like, if their goal is to play D3, cool. Yeah, wait until you're 16 or 17. If you're, you know, plus 1, like, you're probably going to make it. But if you want to play Division 1 golf, which is really what I'm going to try and tailor my content on, it's like, you need to start early. Like, the earlier you start, the better. And that's not to say force your kid into it, but that is to say, if they have the desire, get them the early, get them to coaching early, optimize on the scores early, get help going through these tournaments. That's really what you, you want to do is just to capitalize on them. So again, I could go in depth on this in the future. Let me know if you guys want me to do that. So the last piece here that I really want to highlight for you guys is the cost associated with junior golf and development and how to understand that. So when we look at these players— let's see if I can find a good one— but we really want to think about things in terms of— that's pretty short— we want to think about things in terms of the money that's being spent is what are we getting for that money. And so we're gonna have to do things like clubs, we're gonna have things like tournaments, of travel. We're gonna have stuff like instruction, training aids. Every parent wants to ask me if they should get a TrackMan or a GC Quad or whatever. And here's a way to really think through that. There's two main things that you're paying for. You could be paying for the tournaments that they actually like play in, so like go hotel, all that stuff, um, travel across the country, whatever. Or you could be paying for instruction. And the way to understand paying for instruction should be that this is going to lower their scores, and you should be measuring that. If you guys aren't measuring that, then it's just— you go into the lesson, it's just like, oh, we're kind of doing the same lesson we did last time. Oh, they just need to get this, and once they get it, then, you know, then they're gonna pop off. And it's like, that's not reality. Like, that's, that's just not how it works. So you want to make sure that you're measuring stuff. Now, in general, when I've done my research on this, I see the average player on this ranking improve by about 1.18 shots per year. That's normal. I think Golf.com or something says the average junior golfer spends about $10,000 a year on instruction. Usually I see that as like probably weekly lessons, bi-weekly lessons, something like that. So the average cost per shot shot, which is really the way you guys should understand this, is probably in the range of about $8,000, $9,000 per shot. And so I've got some tools that actually help you guys calculate based on wherever they're at, assuming that they're ranked, to where that they would need to get to and how many shots the gap is and how much that's probably going to cost. Let me know in the comments if you guys want me to, to drop the link to that. But that is the way to really look at the investment as far as on the coaching side. On the tournament side, the way you guys should understand this is the first thing you want to figure out is the scores, because I've already been over this, but scores are really what's going to help them capitalize on the tournament. We can play— pay for all these AJGA and crazy events and travel to them and spend a bunch of money, but if they're not going to be competitive because their scoring average is 85 good luck, you know, like that's, that's just a waste of money, right? Better to play in their backyard, get them used to tournament pressure, figure out those problems, and then once they're ready, then selectively start branching out from there. So that's the way that I would approach it, you know. If you're a parent, I would invest heavily and early into instruction, specifically around scoring, improving their scoring so that they can be competitive at an earlier age. And, and scoring is going to be very diverse. It's not just swing mechanics. It might be the other mindset. It might be their practice, how they practice, might be implementing statistics into their stuff. Like, all that stuff would be falling into the category of, of scoring. And then hold off on the big tournament investments until later, unless you just want to go spend a bunch of money, you want to go travel, and you just want to do it because you want to do it. Cool. But that's how I would optimize your spend. And that way, for junior golfers, just— there's not being competitive Okay, cool. You don't have to sink tons and tons of money into it. Or if you are going to sink a bunch of money into it, you're sinking it into the right things that are going to move the needle. And you can also look at a coach and be like, hmm, we've been working with this coach for the last 2 years and we spent however much money and it's like we've only improved by a shot or a shot and a half. And it's just like, it's just not that good. And so we're going to make other strategic decisions. We're going to upgrade the coaching. Maybe the coaching costs more, but we actually improved way faster. So, or maybe the coach has a better track record for improving talent, and so we improve faster. Those are the types of things you want to look at. And there's going to be plenty of coaches that have a crazy track record of all these kids that take place, whatever. Doesn't mean they're a good coach. They might have just gotten blue chips, right? That's kind of coaches speak for you got a kid who's going to be talented. That's fine. Um, but that, that's the way that you want to approach that problem, is, is maybe you see them less often but maybe you pay them more and maybe they get better results because they're more effective with the time that they have rather than just the weekly lesson. I'd be very skeptical of the weekly lesson really getting a lot accomplished. So anyway, hopefully this video is, is helpful for you guys to really understand. Just kind of in summary, rankings is how you're going to get the attention of college coaches. Rankings is really built up of scoring average and the quality of tournaments you play in. Figure out the scores first, as early as possible, then figure out the tournaments. Start as early as possible, just can't stress that enough. You guys are able to start earlier, do it. And then last but not least, as far as managing how much you're spending on this, really focusing first on getting the scores down, investing there, measure on a cost-per-shot basis, and then pay for tournaments down the road. So hopefully this was helpful for you guys. Again, if you enjoyed this video like, subscribe, uh, do all that stuff, and I'll see you guys soon.