COMPLETE GUIDE: How To Navigate AJGA Tournaments

Alright, what's going on guys? So in this video, I'm going to do my absolute best to give you guys the complete guide to AJGA and all the events that they have, why you should or shouldn't play in the events, and most importantly, like, why these events are important at all, if they're important, and for what levels of golf if you want to play Division 1 golf, or if you have a junior golfer who wants to play Division 1 golf. Um, as always, if you guys enjoy videos like this, go ahead, leave a like, subscribe to the channel. Uh, obviously we're new here. It's a very niche subject. So really appreciate all of you guys who do subscribe. Really means a ton to me. And if you guys go through this and you're like, whoa, that's a lot. Um, is there any chance that we could get help navigating this or other questions you guys have about development, recruiting, all that stuff? Um, there'll be a link in the description, um, to go ahead and grab some time with me again, if you guys need help, but anyway, let's jump into the video here. So AJGA, you've probably heard of it before, but I'm assuming you've probably felt like, okay, it's a little bit out of reach or you don't quite understand it yet. Or you're just unsure of whether or not it's something that you guys need to be doing. It's something that, you know, is out there, but it's just like, there's so much stuff going on. It's kind of hard to understand, or you might be in a situation where you've been doing it for a while. And again, it still might be a little bit of a black box of kind of like, what all the events mean and how to get into all of them, all that type of stuff. So I'm gonna do my best to shed light on all of that in this video. So let's kind of start off with the first thing is just like, when, when should you be doing AJGA events at all? I think I'll start actually with when you shouldn't be doing AJGA events. You should not be playing in AJGA events if you have junior golfer, and they realistically have a scoring average that's over like 78 or 77. They need to at least be in that kind of high 70s range as an average. So I mean, sometimes we're shooting close to par, sometimes we're shooting, you know, in the 80s, but in general we're around 77 on average. I'll make other videos about tracking your average and all that stuff, but that's something that you really need to know. If you have a junior golfer and their scoring average is 85, then their main objective needs to be get the scores down. And they need to play in events that are gonna be easier to get into, more cost-effective. And, and their main problems are not the quality of the tournaments that they're playing in. Their main problems are really just that they don't have the skill quite yet, which is totally cool. Like everyone, you know, everyone's there at some point, but that's where you need to devote the, the energy, the resources into is getting their scores down, not traveling all over the country, do AJGA stuff. So that's, that's thing number one. Now, when they get to this, you know, 77 range, you know, it could be as early as, you know, they could be 12 years old and be ready to do that. That's cool. You know, they could be 16-year-olds and not be ready to do that. That's cool. It just depends on kind of where you're at. But 77-ish on average would be the range that I would recommend that's going to set them up for success playing in AJGA events. So that's thing number 1. Now, thing number 2, why should you even play in these events at all? You know, like, I know some people would be like, oh, AJGA is a racket. You know, they're just out there taking everybody's money. You can't even get into the events. And that's only true, to be honest, if you're not good enough to play in these events. And so that's why I say the first part first. So the reason to play in AJGA events is if we are playing in AJGA events, most likely your junior golfer has the goal of probably playing Division I golf. And so if we go over to like junior golf scoreboard, we can actually see the players who are getting recruited. And you can do this for girls as well. I'll say that girls, this matters less than it does for boys because boys are just a little bit more competitive than girls is, but still important for both. And we'll kind of notice this with both of them. If we look at all these top players and I'm not going to do like the tippy top, I'll do like top 50 here recently recruited. So this is a little bit local. US Junior Am, obviously massive. Got a bunch of events falling off. This dude's got a pretty low scoring average. So this is something you guys will see in general. I'll do more videos on this stuff, but like, you know, you can play in weaker fields, weaker tournaments. These are not particularly long golf courses for an elite level. And you have a really low scoring average. You can make that work out. But in general, it's easier to have a 72, 74 scoring average would be fine, but let me just pull up another one of these here. And you guys can see I did not look at these ahead of time. This is just like off the cuff here. So AJGA, AJGA, some local stuff, 71.54. Again, pretty low scoring average. This one's a little bit higher, more AJGA, right? So we've got junior players, Jack Burke, um, junior PGA, which we'll touch on in a second. It's not AJGA, but it's adjacent. Um, yeah, you can see all these events here, Heather Farr. And so that, that's really what we see. And especially if we go, you know, to the tippy top here, I'm going to wager that a lot of these are AJGA or adjacent. So Western Junior Am, Dustin Johnson, Jones Cup Invitational. Okay, cool. Solid. All right, here. AJGA, Team TaylorMade Invitational, Junior PGA. All right, cool. So you're going to see a particular tier of AJGA events, this, you know, Ping Heather Farr, Team TaylorMade Invitational, stuff like that. And so those events require you to have a certain criteria in order to get into them. Specifically, let's just go to Team TaylorMade. Top 66 boys on AJGA Rolex rankings. And then additional spots are kind of filled based on their, their criteria. I think it's like top 100, um, Junior Golf Scoreboard, et cetera. But for the most part, the majority of kids who are ranked fairly highly on Junior Golf Scoreboard are also ranked fairly highly on Rolex rankings. And AJGA events are really the most straightforward way to get those Rolex Rankings points. And so that's going to get you into bigger fields. You'll be able to play against better players. And when you play against those better players and do well, you're going to be ranked better. It's going to be easier to get recruited to Division I programs that you've heard of. So that's just kind of like thing number one. We're going to touch more on Rolex Rankings in this, but that's just kind of the foundation of like, why do we play in these at all? If you look at the best players in the country, they're playing in these elite AJGA events. And the way that you get into these elite AJGA events is through Rolex rankings, and the easiest way to get those Rolex rankings is by playing in AJGA events. So that is the, uh, the value of it. Every one of these events has Rolex points. So anyway, that's thing number one. So now we establish why do we even do these. They tend to be pretty high-quality events, you know, for the most part. There are events outside of AJGA that are, you know, decent fields, um, Toyota Cup is amazing in California, right? Not everyone has the benefit of living in California. And so it's really a national company, obviously. And that, that's really what it's meant for is cultivating that elite talent, but across the country versus other tours that are still good, but like not— AJGA would be like a hurricane tour. Lots of opportunities to compete and really amazing, especially for junior golfers not quite there yet. But it's not the same level of events. So if you just only played Hurricane Tour, you'd have to have a really, really solid scoring average, like 71, 70, 69. And you're probably still looking at a state school. If you go to a Division I program, it's probably going to be like from your state rather than like Stanford or something like that. So like, let's just even pull this one up here. Let's see Stanford. Yeah. Boom. AJGA. Just run the gauntlet. Right. So anyway, that's, that's that. So now let's go into the types of AJGA events. So your tournament schedule, because I think this is the next place that people get really hung up on is they see all these different events and they're just kind of confused on exactly like, what is all this stuff? And so the best way to understand it, they have a great video on their website that goes over this, but essentially you start off with previews. Right? And so that's, let's say these little green boxes here, those events are set up to allow you to get in if you've never played in an AJGA event before. So if you have a junior golfer, they kind of meet the criteria already listed out for you. And you're like, hey, we want to try going to an AJGA event. Well, then a preview might be a good place for, for you guys to start. That, that would be guaranteeing them that they're going to get the opportunity to go out there and play. That's what essentially a preview is. It's opportunity for them to earn stars, which is another component to this. Stars are a way that they get into tournaments, which I'll cover in just a second, but it's just a starting point, right? So when you guys say, I can't get into AJGA events, you can't get into the AJGA events that you want to get into, right? We have to start somewhere. So again, previews start that off. You start earning stars, gets easier to get into other events. The next kind of tier of that, if you will, is the Junior All-Star events. So you see a little blue box here with a little J in it. Those are Junior All-Star events. Those are meant for junior golfers that are between the ages of 12 and 15. There's some technicality on like when 15 counts. I want to say as of this right now, it's January— they have to be 14 as of January 2nd, I think. So if they turn 15 on the 1st, then I think there's a little bit of an issue. They can't play in it. They have to go play in the Opens. But that's kind of the next layer of this is like playing our Junior All-Star events. Again, those are mostly for the players to get comfortable, to play well. They can still earn Rolex points. They're not the best place to earn Rolex points, but they're an opportunity to play against other players their age. Now, one thing I want to just like note here is caveat. I talked to a lot of parents and they say, oh, well, my child can't play in AJGA events because they're 12 and all the other kids are 14 and they hit it so far. Well, I'm just going to say this straight up. If your junior golfer is good at golf, they will always compete against players who hit further than them. Because what's going to happen is they're going to be 14 or 15 and they're going to be competing in the Opens. And then they're going to be competing against 17 and 18-year-olds and they've got to be able to beat those 17 and 18-year-olds if they're going to be one of the best players in the country. That's just the reality of it. And so getting fixated on that is not the right thought process here. The right thought process is just like, get the scoring average where it needs to be, play in the events, rinse and repeat. So next tier of this, Junior All-Star, those are great. Another opportunity to earn stars, earn Rolex points, get comfortable with the whole EJGA setup stuff. So that's that. Now, once they have stars, what does that get them? Well, it makes it easier to get into other Junior All-Star events and it makes it easier to get into the Open events. Now, in general, for Junior All-Star, two ways to get into them. You can qualify, which is usually one round. Usually you're gonna have to shoot 75-ish, give or take a little bit. Um, but that's what you'll have to shoot depending on how many spots there are. And then same thing for AJGA Opens in general. So there's qualifiers and then sometimes you can get in on stars. Now you have to have a ton of stars to get into these Opens, like 40, 50, 60 stars. So getting into Opens, if you're in a situation where you're just like, hey, Previews aren't available to me, Junior All-Star events aren't available to me, I wish I could have earned all these stars from like PBE stuff, which is another topic for another time. It doesn't really matter that much because you should be able to play in several open qualifiers and shoot relatively decent scores and qualify for 1 or 2 of them. Like it's just, again, if you have the criteria that I mentioned at the beginning, if we can at least shoot like 77 on average, 76 on average, like the probability that you go out there and shoot 74 in a qualifier, it's probably 40%. So if you play in 2 or 3 of them, the probability you don't make it into at least 1 is low. So that's kind of the way to think about that here. But you'll also find AJGA Opens that you can't get into even if you have a bunch of stars, because it's just the whole field is exempt. And that's kind of like the next tier of AJGA, right? So top 5 finish gives you fully exempt status for, for boys. For girls, I think it's top 3 status, or top 3 finish gives you fully exempt. Exempt status. And that kind of separates out the AJGA Opens. So there's like the, the Opens that you can get into, and then there's the Opens you need to have exempt status realistically to get into. And so for progressing through these events, once you have exempt status, then you move on to the kind of next tier here, which is some of these higher level events. And I'll kind of dig into that in just a second. And then once you've done well enough in those events, your ranking ends up being good enough on the Rolex rankings, that's when you end up being able to, you know, go to these events. You get invited to these events, top 66 on Rolex rankings. And so that is kind of what that looks like. So again, junior all-star events here, I think that's what I see it as here, you know, still no, no slouch. You know, like these are not short tournaments. I'll get to that one in a second. Yeah, so this is AJGA Junior, semi-St. George's. Let's see here. Okay, cool. So this is, this is an open, right? We're playing at 7,000 yards. So like, that's, that's a real golf course. Like, that's a decent, decent length. Boys, you know, course rating is 75.3. You go out there and fire a 74, like that's a really solid, um, really solid score. So that's where you see, you know, when we look at the rankings and these players, they don't have, you know, 70 scoring averages because they're playing these longer, harder golf courses. Now, if you have the advantage for your junior golfer where they hit it far, well, this is like an absolute no-brainer because it's probably not too brutal off the tee. It's just hard because it's long. And, and that, that's totally fine. So next one, we have junior all-stars, shorter. Course rating is not as good, but the players are playing a shorter golf course because they don't hit as far because they're 13. No big deal. Then we've got previews. So this is just an all-age preview, 6,800 yards. So not too bad. This is a 12 to 15 preview. Again, shorter golf course, kids are younger, pretty straightforward. And then we've got Tim Taylor Made Invitational, again, longer golf course. And then we have to actually be invited to get into this type of an event. And again, course rating 74-ish. So again, the thing to fixate on here is we want longer, harder golf courses. And in general, we're going to get the longest, hardest golf courses when we're competing against the best players. You know, if we're just playing against anybody, they're not going to take the average field and say, here's a 7,200-yard golf course, go play it. Like, that's just not a thing because everyone's going to shoot, you know, 88. Um, so they're only going to do that for the best players. So again, that's part of the reason to play in these AJGA events. So now we've got that, let's go over here. So this over here on Rolex Rankings, uh, page, and in order to really understand kind of how to think about all these events, you have to kind of understand this concept of minimum point values. So You see here open tournaments just went over, those are worth 40 points. I'll get to kind of like how that works in a second. Senior events, 20 points. The junior all-star stuff, 20 points. Non-AJGA tournaments, 20 points. That's not super relevant. Previews, 15 points. And gold 15-year-old previews, 10 points. Then here are all the events that are not— they're worth more than that, right? So when I said that there are events that tend to be— you're able to get into with stars, it tends to be all the events that are roughly, you know, 40 points. They're your normal opens. You probably are going to have a hard time getting into the KJ Choi Invitational, um, just on starts. Like, it's just not really going to happen. Innsbruck here, let's actually see if we find that. So Innsbruck, we're actually already into the event. Let's see if we can find one coming up then that fits this criteria here. So where Where am I at? See, bring state 24. All right, let's just go back here. All right, cool. So yeah, 120 points. So all that means is that this tournament is, is worth more. Now it's not necessarily a game of, hey, let me go play in the tournament that's worth a whole bunch of points. Um, because you know, that tournament's worth more than the regular AJGA Open because the tournament is worth more points because the fields are better. And so it only really works out for you if you're the best player in the best field. If you're just gonna play the same, then it doesn't really matter. But imagine like if you were, let's say you're the best player in the country. Well then if you just go beat up and you know, a standard AJGA field and earn your 40 points, That's not as good as if you could go beat up a real AJGA field and get your 120 points. So it only really works for you if you're at the elite level, which again, this is why you guys kind of want to work through this as, as a hierarchy, right? You want to start off with the easy stuff. You want to start off with your, you know, just getting your basics. Like, can you score? Then you play in some previews, you play in some junior all-stars, you earn your points, gets a little bit easier to get into the Opens. You play in the Opens enough time, you get your exempt status. You get your exempt status, you play in these bigger events, you play in the bigger events enough and you do well enough, you get into the invitationals, you get recruited by a top program. That's the tournament side of this equation. All right. So these are all the events, but one of the things you'll see here is that there are events that are non-AJGA events that get Rolex points. And so some of these top players that you guys saw when I was going through the rankings, they didn't play in an AJGA event. Any AJGA events, but they still had a pretty good ranking. And, and that's in part because they're playing in these non-AJGA events. So like Dustin Johnson World Junior, great event to play in if you can get into it. Um, IMG Junior Worlds, great event to play in if you can get into it, right? You can still be ranked reasonably well without playing the AJGAs. It's just like, there's a lot more AJGAs that, that have that, that value there. So that's that, that's, that's kind of like the tiers here. Now let's kind of go into the, the high-level events. So all these events are worth 225 points. It's the most that an event can be worth. So you guys saw Junior PGA a few times when I was going through that. So if you're playing in the Junior PGA, that's worth 225 points, right? So, you know, when we look at, you know, the best players in the country, these are the events that they're playing in. Right? So some of those are non-AJGA, some of them are AJGA. Again, the reason I'm not just saying, hey, AJGA is the only way, but I'm saying it's a, it's a decent way is cuz there's just so many more opportunities to play in AJGA events than all these other ones. If I told you the only opportunities you have were like playing the US Junior or playing the Junior PGA, that's kind of hard to do, right? Versus, you know, if we look at, hey, there's, you know, 5 or 6 AJGA events you can play in. And then maybe we also get into the US Junior and we also maybe get into IMG and we also maybe get into the Junior PGA. Or PGA, are we playing 4 of them? Well, we're still ranked, and we're ranked probably pretty decently. And that kind of works out. And for some of you guys who are maybe watching this and maybe a little bit more sophisticated, maybe you're in a situation where you're like, hey, you were ranked pretty well, but we just played in that one tournament, you won it, and your ranking got worse. Why? It's probably because you guys need to be taking tournament selection a little bit more seriously. And so that's really the way to understand this stuff is like each one of these builds on itself. Like, is there a way to, to run the gauntlet? If you have a, let's say a junior in high school that never played AJGA before, and you, you kind of bought into the whole thing of like, oh, well, you wanna be the best 17-year-old, right? You don't wanna be the best 7-year-old, which is like, I think kind of unhelpful. But let's just say, yeah, you could play in your first AJGA event. You qualify for the event cuz you shoot, I don't know, like 68 or something. And then you win the event or you finish top 5. And then it's like, okay, cool. Now I've got exempt status. Now you go into all these other events and let's say you win those. And now, you know, like you're into some of these and you also qualify for the US Junior and you make it to the final 4 and you get into the Junior PGA because you qualified at sectionals and you get into that. Like, yeah. Like, is that a possibility? Sure. Is it a probability? I've never heard of a, of a 17-year-old who can go from, I don't play in high-level events to I crushed everybody. Like that just doesn't seem reasonable to me. Um, it would seem very odd if you had, let's say a basketball player and they never really did any like AAU anything. And then they go in and run the gauntlet and beat every team out there. That'd be really bizarre. And so this is where I think that understanding timelines is so important as, as a parent or as a junior golfer to understand, it's like the sooner you start working through this, the more time you have. Like, you start looking at this stuff or just like, okay, cool. Well, you know, we've got a 10-year-old, we need to start prepping, make sure their scores come down. Like, because right now we've got a scoring average like 85, and you know, we've got a couple years here, but then we want to be in a spot where maybe they have a scoring average of 75 in a couple years. And that, you know, that's pretty aggressive improvement annually. But let's say you have a scoring average of 75, you come in, you're 12 years old. Well, now you got a little bit of room to kind of go through the previews, playing, you know, still playing your local stuff, keep improving that. You get it down to like 74, 73, 72. Well, now you're cruising through all your events. You're playing pretty well, pretty low stress. Now you start getting in a spot where it's like you're 14, you're 15, you start playing, you know, some of the open events, maybe you top 5. Now maybe you've got your local, you know, state school looking at you pretty much being like, hey, we're ready to make an offer as soon as, you know, sophomore year comes around. It just kind of puts you in a position of power, right? It puts you in a very comfortable position versus if you're just like, oh, you know, recruiting doesn't matter. Tournaments don't matter. I'm just gonna do whatever. Play high school golf, then you get into that position where you're 15, 16 years old, no one's interested in you because why would they be? You haven't put yourself out there. And so hopefully this is a helpful video just to understand kind of like how all of this works together, right? It's, you know, we're starting off at 12-ish, we're playing in the previews, we're getting some stars, we're playing in Junior All-Stars, a little bit of stars, we're earning some more stars from those. Again, we're starting with all the foundation of scoring, and then we're playing in some of the Opens. Eventually we get top, you know, top 5 status, which in general you probably got to shoot even par for about 3 rounds. So, you know, gotta have a pretty solid day or tournament there. But you get into that position, now you're playing in some of the bigger events, you play well in those bigger events, you get into the Invitationals, you get into the Invitationals, and you end up being like these kids. You know, you go to, you go to Stanford, right? Like 72 scoring average. These are the events, right? We've got Junior PGA, US Junior, everything else is the AJGA Invitationals. And that, that's really how this thing works. So again, hopefully this was helpful for you guys, especially if you're new to any of this stuff and you're just kind of like wondering like, how do I even navigate AJGA? Hopefully this is been helpful, but it all comes down to like having the right base of scoring and then understanding how you're going to progress through them based on where you guys are at. And just giving yourself enough time, giving your junior golfer enough time to work through this stuff, because don't expect them to go into their first AJGA event and crush it. Like that's, that's not going to be successful for anyone. Um, but like I said, hopefully this video is helpful. Um, go ahead, leave any questions you guys have down below in the comments and I'll do my best to get back to them. But again, if you guys enjoyed this, Leave me a like or go ahead and subscribe to the channel for more content like this because we're gonna be going into everything from, from tournaments, but we'll also be going on through development, recruiting, all that stuff. So talk to you guys soon.