How Does My Coaching Stack Up Vs Tiger?

What's going on everyone? In today's video, I'm going to be walking you guys through my entire player development process and how I help junior golfers get results and ultimately develop to play college golf. If you're new to the channel, I make videos like this every single week, so please go ahead and subscribe. Still pretty new here, so every subscriber helps. And if you enjoyed this video today, please go ahead and leave a like. Really helps push the video out to more people who are interested in this topic. So let's go ahead and jump into it. This is going to be a lot of fun here. But the biggest thing I want to help you guys understand is how player development works, how to think it through. And if you're the parent of a junior golfer, you can kind of look at this situation and say, okay, cool, how many of these things are we actually doing? And are we following something that's disorganized, or is there something to be desired? So I wanted to kind of start things off with kind of a benchmark. I think one of the things that's really difficult for, um, parents of junior golfers, uh, really anyone in kind of the golf space, or saying, hey, I want to get better. It's really difficult to quantify what better means and how fast it should happen, um, and kind of like what to expect, you know, what's good, what's not good, um, so on and so forth. And, and so what I mean by that is, um, if, if you go out there and you start working with a new coach and you feel like you're hitting the ball a little bit better, it's like Is that better? Like, are you shooting lower scores? You know, if you hit the ball better but you don't shoot better scores, does that mean the coach wasn't good? Those are kind of like open-ended questions, right? And so I wanted to kind of take a very well-known junior golfer, uh, and kind of help you guys understand a little bit better. So I've got Charlie Woods pulled up here. So if you guys don't know, this is Tiger Woods's son. Um, he's had some pretty decent PR as far as you know, his golfing career and development of his swing and kind of all that stuff. And you can see here on Junior Golf Scoreboard, you know, these are all the tournaments that he's played in over the last year. Um, his scoring average is just under 74, scoring differential is -1.89, he's ranked 70th in his class. So all in all, pretty good, um, pretty good player. He's definitely on track to play Division I golf. But then I want to show you guys his, his, um Trend Report here. So what this is, is it shows you— it shows you where the player is at in their game. So where their scoring differential is, which is a function of the difficulty of the golf courses that they're playing and their scoring average. So, you know, if they're playing really easy golf courses and low scoring average, it wouldn't be as good as if they're playing hard golf courses, which that should be fairly obvious here. Um, but this could kind of help you understand, like, what is the progression, uh, of a player who has access to literally everything? And that's why I'm using Charlie as an example, is because you can imagine here Charlie's got access to every golf course in the world, he's got access to every type of technology you could possibly want, he's got Tiger Woods for his dad. So it's like no financial limitations, no location limitations, no resource limitations whatsoever, and you have quite arguably the, the greatest player of all time coaching you and telling you what you need to work on. So that'd be the ultimate case. You know, if you guys are in this situation, you want to help a junior golfer develop, if you can get access to Tiger Woods, um, do it. Like, please do. Um, so this is just kind of like what his training report looks like. So we go back to last September here, he's about 4 shots worse. You go to the September before that, he was about 6 shots worse. And if we go— can't get September, but we can get August— and he was about 4-ish shots worse. So if we average this out, ends up improving by about— it's like 4.8 shots per year. And that's with all the resources in the world, and that's with the GOAT coaching him. So if you guys, you know, have access to that, definitely do that. When I work with my players I'm not there yet. I'm not on the GOAT level. I just recently measured this again because that's how I evaluate myself as a coach, and right now my median average— so not counting the outliers— my median average is 3.15 shots per year. Last time I measured this was in March and it was a 2.71 shot, so a decent bit of improvement. I do have one decent outlier in there right now, and I'm going to walk you guys through through those numbers right now, if I allow the outlier to stay in those numbers, the annual improvement's about 4 shots. But I always kind of like to say, you know, I'd rather know kind of like what my most likely to expect is. So when I'm working with a player and I look at their numbers and we're talking about, you know, if we're going to work together, I can actually say, okay, well, you're here, you want to get here, is it reasonable for us to accomplish this based on the, the performance that I typically see. So that's what I'm going to kind of jump into next. So, um, this is another player that I recently started working with, uh, back in July here. He's got a scoring average of 77, uh, scoring differential of 2.77. He's ranked, uh, 488th in his class. And these are the events that he's played in. And then here is his trend report here. So we can see that he's improved since, you know, beginning of September here. Like I said, we started working together in, in July, so already a pretty decent improvement. Um, I wouldn't expect this pace to, um, to keep up, but you know, um, is what it is. But I want to help you guys understand kind of how to— how I think this stuff through. So when we started working together, and I've got this, uh, documented here, he had a scoring average of 79.5 and a scoring differential looks like at the time of 4.7. So again, it's a little bit of wiggle room here on exactly, um, you know, when we want to tag that. But regardless, it's, um, it's pretty decent in there. But I think the question you guys should be asking is, what do we do with this information? If we— if you just know this information, that goes a long way, because a lot of times you might think to yourself, oh, I've got a scoring average of 75, and you actually have a scoring average of 79. Not helpful. You might also have a situation where you say, oh, I play in lots of tournaments, I play well, but none of those tournaments are ranked. And so that's going to be a problem as well. So it's important that you just get the fundamentals here. I've got other videos to go over that stuff. Um, but for Harris, I just want to show you guys, okay, cool, scoring average 77. The question is why, right? Because a couple months ago our scoring average was 79.5, a couple shots worse. Well, what we do is we need to track our stuff. We need to say, okay, cool, where are we at in our game? And actually know, okay, here are the scores that we're shooting and here are the stats that make up those scores. So I want to pay special attention to this number: greens in regulation, 61, almost 62% now. Now when we started working together, I've got the spreadsheet here that I work on with all my students. These are the main stats that I like to look at because they kind of predict what you're going to shoot pretty dang well. If you know what these numbers are, assuming we're not doing anything too crazy around the golf course, um, which is like 2 chipping around the greens, 4 putts, 5 putts, stuff like that, for the most part, this is going to predict what you're going to shoot. And so if we look at Harris's numbers here, what actually happens is these were his initial numbers. So your scoring average is 79. You know, 5. Slightly different numbers here, but his expected score is 79.43, which is pretty dang close to what he was shooting. And this was his greens and regulation number, 46%. And these were his other, you know, numbers here. But based on these numbers, we identified his greens and regulation is the most important thing for him. If he gets his greens and regulation up, he's gonna score better. And so we kind of wanted to follow this kind of track here. So we wanted to increase at about 5% per focus cycle, if you will, which is just a way to define, okay, how long are we going to focus on this thing? How much improvement do we want to see before we can shift focus somewhere else? So this is really where the brainpower goes into where I'm trying to solve this specific problem. How long do I need to stay focused on that? And so in his case, we want to get this all the way up to somewhere in the 70s here, because then what we can do is improve the other parts of his game, which in this case is either going to be his putting or his, uh, conver— or his birdie conversion right here. So let's go ahead and just kind of look at this. Well, if we got it to 61%, we should have a scoring average about 77.5. And what do we have right now? A little bit better than 77.5. So if I go back and check all these numbers, you guys can see we actually improved the 3-putting a little bit, and greens and regulation has gone up substantially. Our scrambling is pretty much the same. Our birdie conversion rate has actually jumped up, so our putting overall has improved. Um, we've been implementing a few things there as far as, you know, green reading strategies and whatnot. And then we can take a look at off the tee here, see how that's doing. Penalty rates improved. And so that's why we can actually see here that I would expect his scores continue to drop Because the scoring average over these last 10 rounds in tournaments is actually even better than it's, it's showing up. So it's showing up on Junior Golf Scoreboard at like 5.1 over, but it's actually 4.0 or 3.8 over in our stats. Which is just to say, as we kind of have our poorer rounds fall off and our newer rounds come in, we should expect to see this trend continue to, to lower and lower and lower. But how do we do this? Like, how do we actually go through the process? Well, it It really is this process of saying, okay, we need to track all of our rounds, we need to track everything that we're doing, whether it's, you know, tournaments or practice, so we can understand what's going on. And then we need to identify, okay, cool, of these major stat categories, like, what is going to cause us to improve our scores the fastest? We have to wait to have a way to quantify that. And then we want to build out a plan around, like, what are we going to do specifically in order to actually improve? Like, where, where are we going to organize our practice? What drills are we going to do? How much time are we going to spend doing on it? And then we can actually evaluate over time to say, all right, these are the things we said we were going to do. Did we do them? And then did we get the result? And if we can do that consistently over a long period of time, we're going to see consistent results. So I wanted to make this video to show you guys not just what's possible in the form of, you know, if you've got the, you know, most elite of the elite of the elite stuff in, in the form of Charlie and Tiger, and also kind of show you guys what I do and my approach to things, which, you know, admittedly not as good as, you know, working with Tiger full-time and, you know, having all those resources. Um, but for someone who does all this stuff virtually and works with students and tells them what to do, I'm not too unhappy with the current progress. And it also just should help you guys understand, like, this is really good as far as the rate of progress, you know, for those different, you know, examples here. The average, just so you guys have frame of reference, about 1.18 shots per year. And so that, that's kind of determined by actually going down through every one of these players and pulling up their trend reports and looking at that and saying, okay, cool, what's, um, what's about average here? So just so you guys can actually see that, digging through this stuff and saying, okay, like, what's normal? So another example here, you guys can see I just pulled this one out randomly. September, he's at 5.6. Last September, he was at 4.8. So less than a shot here. Elite player, but less than a shot of progress. Let's go a year prior to that. Improved by about 2.8 shots. A year before that, he improved by about 1.5 shots. So again, here, average going through this process I've seen is about 1.18 shots per year. Um, but that's kind of what to expect as far as development is. How good is your process is really going to determine what kind of results you can get, how good your measurement is, and whether or not you, you have a system you actually make sense of all the numbers and say, okay, we're moving in the right direction, are we not? So I hope this video is helpful for you guys and just understanding that process. And if you guys want more help with this, um, there'll be links below this video where, uh, if you want to talk to me about your junior golfer and figure out, you know, if we can apply this stuff for them, um, you can book a call to talk to me. And there'll also be a link to the top of my newsletter if you want to hear, um, more emails and more videos like this. So I'll, uh, I'll see you guys in the next one.