How Good Do You Need To Be To Play Division 1 Golf

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering how good you need to be to play Division 1 golf. And really, the, the kind of buried part of this doesn't go so well as far as the title for the video is why you don't really need to be as good as you think to play Division 1 golf. And on the flip side of that, why you're probably not as good as you think, and that's okay. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoy the video today. If you're new here, this is all we talk about is how to play Division 1 golf for junior golfers. That is what I do. That is my whole job is helping junior golfers accomplish that. So if you want to learn how to do that, then click the link or click the, the subscribe button below, um, to go ahead and subscribe to the channel and get videos like this every single week. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back, always happy to have you. Let's go ahead and dig into this one because this is something that I I see come up a lot. This was a gap that I had even as a coach and working with other coaches helping players to play Division 1 golf, is most players do not understand how good that they need to be to play Division 1 golf, right? They kind of have this idea of these things that they should be able to do or ways that it might happen, but they don't actually know exactly. And so this was kind of inspired by a recent call that I had with one of my students I'm not going to go through all of their details here, but essentially they expected themselves to be able to shoot pretty low scores, um, as kind of their average. And we were kind of having that conversation, a couple things came out as far as, you know, the golf courses they're playing were a little bit shorter and they were being very, very aggressive, and that allowed them to have this lower scoring average. And they're wondering about, you know, how come now I'm struggling, I'm not playing as well, um, you know, what's going on? They're kind of like trying to chase that prior um, kind of statistic there. And it, you know, it's very compelling, you know, it's very, it's very easy to say, hey, we're playing at this level, we should be able to play this level, let's go ahead and chase that. And this is kind of like where I wanted to share with you guys that you might be in similar positions where your child might shoot those scores. Either they've had a stretch in tournaments where they're shooting, you know, maybe in the low, um, not necessarily low, but you know, they're shooting in the 60s, you know, maybe they're shooting in the, you know, let's say high 60s on average. And now they're in a position where they're not playing as well and they're wondering why that is, right? And it's really important to understand that the average player on Junior Golf Scoreboard doesn't really, you know, I think across the board average by class somewhere between like 78 and 80, to be fair. But anyway, when we look at the best players on Junior Golf Scoreboard, what do they shoot on average? You guys might see here on my screen we've got scoring differential -9, um, you know, -8, somewhere in that range, right? And you might think to yourself, I mean, like, these players, these players must have a scoring average of like 66 or 67. Maybe 65. But if we actually look at them, let's look at Miles Russell, who's probably the best player in the country. It's— I don't think it's particularly close. Scoring average 70.4, really good. Yeah, we're playing really hard golf courses, and that produces the scoring differential of -9. You know, um, you know, let's look at the next player. 74.2 or 70.42. Let's look at the next player. 70.5. Let's look at the next player. Well, let's skip that one because that's international. 71.26. Let's go down a little bit. Let's go somewhere in the middle here. 71.97. Hopefully you guys are kind of seeing a pattern here. There's kind of an upper limit as far as scoring goes, at least among junior golf. It's right around 70, right? We're not going to get lower than that. So if you or your child are in a position where you're saying, hey, our scoring average is, you know, under that, there are a couple things that could be true. Number 1, you could be in a situation where you're playing really easy golf courses. That, that could very well be the case. Number 2, it could also be in a position where it's just a statistical variance, right? They just happen to have a very good stretch for a period of time. Number 3, they could be the best golfer in the entire country. That's probably not the case. It's probably not what it is. If they're not already ranked here, they're probably not the best player in their entire country and just like bucking all the trends. So the point of this video is to help you guys understand that you don't actually have to be as good as you think. If you're somewhere in the 72 to 74 range and you're doing that on real distance golf courses, for boys that's gonna be like 7,000 yards. And to be clear, for the most part, that's at sea level. So you guys might be at a position where maybe you're at altitude. Those golf courses need to be longer in order to kind of, you know, still make sense there. And there's a bunch of different skills that you're gonna have to have to be able to perform on those golf courses. But that's neither here nor there. Point is, that's kind of the range you want to be at, 72 to 74. And you want to have those golf courses be about 7,000 yards. If you guys are playing AJGA Opens, it's going to check that box pretty, pretty nicely. A lot of those golf courses are going to be somewhere in that range. Playing Junior All-Stars, they're going to be appropriately long based on your age. So anyway, that's kind of the range to be shooting for. You don't need to shoot for more than that. Um, you know, maybe you shoot to the lower end. Maybe you're trying to go to a program like UCLA or Stanford. Uh, maybe you've seen some of my players that, you know, have done something like that. You say, okay, well, that's the goal. Maybe you want to have the goal of like 72, maybe push to 71. But the reality is you, you're going to have some very specific statistics that I'll show you guys in just a second that you're going to be just hammering on and really to the degree that you can get into the lower numbers or even play professional golf, if that's a goal of yours, is going to be determined by how well you can hammer on those numbers I'm about to show you guys. Um, I also want to make sure that I'm fair to all the girls watching this video. Um, I, I know some of you guys have, have girls, um, you're trying to help as well. So let's look at the women's statistics as well. All right, 68.9, essentially 69. This is the best player in the country. Right, let's look at the next one. 71.55. Let's look at the next one. 71.5. Let's look at the next one. 71.3. 71.6. Hopefully you guys can see a trend here. Let's look at this bottom. 72.5. Okay, cool. So we're back into like the universe of normal stuff. You got a player going to Stanford here, one of the best programs in the country. 73.6. Okay, these are long golf courses, to be fair. I mean, 6,400 yards, a long golf course for girls. So anyway, you can also kind of see the makeup here. And I talk about AJGA, some kind of the national majors and stuff like that. This is why, right? So in her case, she played in the qualifier for the Junior PGA, she played in the US Girls, she played in 3 Rolex events, or 3 AJGA events, um, that are a big deal. That's what her schedule looked like. And she even had an 82 in here. So any guys getting freaked out because you shot an 82, like, dumb. The best players in the country, that happens to them sometimes. And it kind of stems from not understanding the overall, like, just like the way that scores end up happening. Um, this is just a high-level thing. It's like, if you have goals, you go out there and you think you should shoot 63, and God forbid you actually do, and you turn around the next day and you shoot 71, you're pissed off about it. It's just like you're setting yourself up for failure, not because you're bad at golf, it's because you don't have reasonable expectations for what you should be able to do. And there's all sorts of reasons you can create to say, oh well, it should be— and again, it just comes back to those three things. Either you're playing easy golf courses, you've got statistical variance that worked in your favor, it's not actually who you are as a golfer but it's just happened to be randomness, or you're the best players in the entire country. Odds are you're not the third one, right? So it has to be one of those two things. And so once again, the big picture, big, big picture about this is do not get attached to what you shoot. It doesn't matter. Like, you do not want to have this idea in your head of, well, I shoot these scores, therefore I am this player. Because that— you can't go out and shoot a score because you tried really hard to shoot a score. That's not how this works. You're going to shoot a score because you're able to perform specific skills to a specific level, right? So when I say that, what do I mean? I mean that you're able to hit the ball on the green from, let's say, 100 to 125 yards reasonably well. If I go ahead and say, hey, every one of your approach shots is at 200 to 225 yards, and you just have the concept of I need to shoot low scores, then from 225 yards you're gonna be like, well, you know, I should be able to hit the green because all these other golf courses I was able to hit the green. It's like, no, it would be completely ridiculous. Everyone understands that. And you would be like, okay, cool, well maybe I don't even have that shot in the bag. Maybe I'm really good from 100 to 125 yards because I practice it, it's a little bit easier shot. Or it's a significantly easier shot. But now you give me 120 or 200 to 225 yards, I don't have that shot at all. Yeah, I'm gonna be lucky if all those— if those are all my approach shots, I'm gonna be lucky if I break 90. And, and having that expectation, if you're able to understand that, hey, I was at a skill set that I have and now it's a skill set that I don't have, well then that shifts the perspective of, hey, either this golf course was ridiculous, which, you know, in that case probably is, Or it's a situation of I need to develop the skill, which is a much healthier place to be in. When let's say you're going from, you know, you've got 10-year-old, 11, 12, 13, 14, golf courses get progressively longer. You're going to have stretches where you were playing at a high level and now you're not. But the thing is, the thing to really keep in mind here is you didn't actually get worse. You just had a different part of your game that was exposed. And understanding it like that helps you keep the frame of, hey, I might have gone from shooting 74 or 72, now I'm shooting 76 or 77. And that initially emotionally could be frustrating, especially if you're tied to scores. But what it allows you to do is say, hmm, what in my game is keeping me from scoring? In this case, most often— more often than not, it's going to be I don't hit as many greens in regulation as I did prior. Because I'm hitting, you know, I've got longer holes, so I can hit the same exact tee shot, I can putt at the exact same level, my short game can be the exact same level, but the approach shots that are being judged that really produce a lot of what I'm going to shoot, they're harder. And so as a result of that, I score worse. If you have that frame to say, okay, cool, either I need to be able to hit the ball further now, or I need to develop the shot a little bit better, or ideally both, then you're gonna have a health— if you're able to do that, you're gonna have a healthier approach. You're gonna be able to improve faster. So anyway, let's go ahead and jump into the statistics that you guys should be looking at. So this is a spreadsheet that I give all of my students here, and we've got 5 main statistical categories. These are categories that I like to see at a high level. A lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk to you guys about on this channel are going to be relatively high-level things, not because I'm trying to jip you guys or not going little details and all that stuff. But because if you don't understand the big picture stuff, the little granular minute stuff doesn't even matter. Like, I could start talking to you guys about like, you know, what's our swing direction on TrackMan, or, you know, how's the D-plane working, or all these like terms you've probably never even heard of before. Even if you have, you might kind of know what they mean but not really. Um, I could talk to you about all those things, or I could just say like, here's what I want you to do, like high level. And just having the clear target of like, I'm trying to do this thing, goes a really long way. Because if we've got the right target, there's a lot of intuitive stuff in golf that's going to help us figure out a lot of these kind of in-between things. If we need to get more specific, we can get more specific, but it starts with having the right high-level target, right? Okay, cool. So back into this penalty right off the tee, huge. Ever hitting balls out of bounds? That's a problem. It's going to be a huge problem because it has, it has ripple effects. Number one, it's hard to give away more shots than that, right? Because you hit a ball out of bounds, 2 shots off the tee right there. Um, you know, and it also hurts the greens regulation because now we can't get the— oh, we can't hit the green regulation. It's not possible. Okay, so again, penalty rate's huge. So let's just say with a good player, no penalty shots. PGA Tour player, we're not gonna have penalty shots. Greens regulation is the next one. Typically, this is kind of like my target for better players— 70%. 70% is about where we want to be. For lower than that, that's fine. There's a lot of ways we can get that up. Excuse me. There's a lot of ways we can get that up. We can focus on par 5s. Maybe par 5s are not hitting as often as we should. Maybe we're laying up to the wrong numbers. Those are all possibilities. Par 4s— maybe our par 4 approach play is not as good as we thought it was. Maybe our par 3s are hurting us, right? There's all sorts of different reasons for that. But again, that's the next statistic we want to see— scrambling. Where should scrambling be? In my opinion, scrambling has a lot more to do— and in my experience, to be fair, has a lot more to do with a player's ability to hit the ball to the correct spots when they miss the green than it has to do with their— how good their short game is. And, you know, to the degree that it even has anything to do with their short game, mostly it's their putting. And mostly it's their putting from about 5 to 10 feet, um, because a good chip shot typically, you know, from a reasonably challenging lie, it's gonna be like 6 feet on average. It's gonna be pretty good. Whether or not you make a 6-foot putt, it's more your putting than it is like your— 6-foot putt is not a guaranteed make. So even if we can get the average 1 to 6 feet, you know, again, you know, what's our make rate going to be from 6 feet? You know, let's say we're a tour player, we make like 70% of them, we're still missing it 30% of the time. So that's kind of an upper ceiling of, you know, about 70% up and down rate. And then you guys can see right away, it's like your average from, you know, 20, 30 yards out of the rough might not even be 6 feet, might be even further than that. So again, we kind of see limits there versus if you miss the ball and you're just on the fringe, how many times you just two-putted that, you barely even counted that as an up and down because it felt like you were two-putting. Still counts as an up and down, right? So again, that's kind of like the, the prism to kind of see this through. I see good players somewhere in the 50 to 60 percentile range. Or percent range, you know. But if you're at 35%, it doesn't have that big of an impact. And for the most part, bumping up your greens regulation is going to bring up your scrambling. Let's go on to 3-putting. 3-putting has two major, major components here. We've got our lag putts and we've got our short putts, right? So we've got— if we're hitting a lot of greens, we're gonna have a lot of 20, 30, and 40-footers. It's just gonna happen, right? I don't care if you're hitting pitching wedge, lob wedge, 7-iron, you're gonna have a lot of 20, 30, and 40-footers. You gotta be really good at that. And then if you have a lot of 20, 30, and 40-footers, you're gonna have a lot of 2-foot putts, 3-foot putts, 4-foot putts, 5-foot putts. It's gonna be pretty normal. You need to be good at all those putts. You need to be good at lag putting, and you need to be able to make your short ones. I like 3% is kind of a target for able— for under 3%, there's not a lot of meat on that bone. Can't improve a lot. The last piece here you guys are going to see is birdie conversion rate. This is where I see the best players in the world really separate themselves out, because you can have all these other statistics here. Let's just say we didn't convert any of our birdies, right? And, and this is where I would say you can't ball strike your way into the 60s, right? Got greens regulation 70%, scrambling 50%, 3 putts 3%, hardly ever, no penalties, we don't make any birdies, we should have a scoring average about 75. And I've seen players where these essentially their statistics, whereas like we barely ever make birdies, maybe more realistic would probably be like 10%, but you know, that's where we end up being. And so for a player who's going to be, you know, if you want to say, hey, I want to play on the PGA Tour, I want to have that really low scoring average, this is going to get up to like 35%, maybe 37%. And you guys can see right away, how do we get to that 70.5 scoring average that you see the best players in the, in the world doing, or at least the best junior golfers in the country doing? I'd wager an enormous amount of money that their statistics look something like this. And a lot of whether or not we're making birdies, some of it's how close we hit it. A lot of that kind of works itself out just based on skill level. If we're trying to hit greens You know, I know that the example is like, hey, you can't aim for the middle of the green because what do you do with 18th hole at St. Andrews? That's not the normal green, you know, that we're hitting at. A lot of greens are actually smaller than they might even appear, right? Because we have kind of odd shapes. And so from a player perspective, you're just thinking, it's like, how do I guarantee I hit myself on the green? It requires a certain level of skill to be able to do that at all, right? But your proximity is probably going to be okay. And if you need to be a little bit aggressive, you, you get to this point, you're like, I can't get my birdie conversion rate up above 20%. Okay, fine. You maybe get to a place where you need to be more aggressive. You look at your proximity numbers, maybe it is not quite as good as we, you know, ought to be. Okay, fine. Odds are though, 70% greens regulation is not going to hurt you. The only players that I typically see where they have high greens regulation but they do not have high, um, what would be, uh, strokes gained, typically what I end up seeing is that penalties on their approach shot. So obviously, hopefully it goes without saying, don't, don't have penalties on your approaches. But anyway, a lot of this birdie conversion rate has to do with kind of like your make rate from 10 to 15-foot putts and how intelligent you are on your par 5s, how good a job you're doing at managing those two things. Um, you know, if you're in a position where you're making about 30-35% of your birdie, you know, your 10 to 15-foot putts, you're probably going to have a pretty good birdie conversion rate, especially if you're taking advantage of the par 5s. Let's say you're getting 2 of those. Again, you know, let's just consider how many birdies we realistically need to make here. So we've got you know, 18 holes. We're going to multiply that by 0.7, and so we've got 12.6 holes. And if we're going to get 37%, we need to make 4.5, 4.6 birdies per round. Let's say we get 2 of them from par 5s, right? Now we only need to get 2 more. All right, cool. So we got 12.6 minus, let's say, 2. So now we're only in a position where we need to make birdie essentially on 20% of the remaining 10.6 holes, right, that we actually hit the green on. And so, you know, that's how you end up doing it, right? So for, you know, hitting it to, you know, 10 to 15 feet, you know, a good percent of the time, like, that's just gonna happen. Um, so anyway, this is actually, you know, what a good player's statistics look like on the PGA Tour. This would actually be closer to 69.5 just because they're playing golf course— this is based on, you know, +72. So, you know, they're going to be playing golf courses that are going to be somewhere between 70 and par 72. So again, it's probably going to average about 71, so you're going to see a 69.5 scoring average instead of what I'm showing you right here. Anyway, hopefully you guys are kind of seeing that if you see a statistic like, oh well, I was, I was having a scoring average of let's say 68, like let's just understand what these numbers have to even look like. Like if I had a scoring average of 68, like we're talking about something like that, you know, it's like you're making birdie 40% of the time or something. It's like, these are not reasonable statistics to continue at a high level. Like, that golf course is too easy, just at some level or another. We do not see the best players in the world north of 75%. We do not see them north of 40%. We do not— like, these are all like the most you can do, and all this gets you really is like, you know, apex Tiger. which is, you know, the premium. But that's why I started this video off saying like, yeah, maybe you're the best player in the country, but like, odds are you're probably not. And so hopefully this helps you guys understand like the main things you want to be good at. Just to kind of recap this, off the tee, we want to be really good at one shape, and we want to be able to hit that as far as we can within reason. If we're hitting it behind a tree, it's kind of useless. We want to be able to hit it one shape in play with a line at the green would be maybe a better— yeah, we want to get it as close as we can with a line in the green. That'd be kind of the best way to put it. Greens regulation, like, we want to be able to hit the ball on the green often. Like, we want to be able to do that really, really well. So that involves, again, one shot shape almost exclusively. You don't need to be able to work the ball both ways to get to different pins. You just need to hit the damn green at all. Um, because again, consider like there's gonna be just as many left pins as right pins and long pins as short pins, right? So again, if you just try to hit the green, like, which pins are easy for you to go for or not it's gonna kind of work itself out. You don't need to be able to get to every pin. You're not gonna be able to get to every pin. Um, you make sure your lag putting is good, your short putting is good, putting is good. If you can do that, that's great. And then, I mean, when you miss the green, you need to be able to have decent contact around the greens. That's about it. Um, and so when we kind of think about it like that, golf shouldn't really feel that difficult for you. Um, so hopefully this makes sense. Hopefully this is helpful for you guys. If it is and you want more exact help about like, hey, you know, what club should I be hitting, um, as far as my practice goes or my child's practice and we have these all these different scenarios, um, you know, what should we be doing specifically in practice, or what statistics we need to look at that are kind of like, you know, deep dive beyond these just kind of like high-level ones. That's the type of stuff that I go over in my coaching program. If that's something you're interested in, there'll be a link below this video where you can apply. And if it's a good fit, you know, if I kind of look at your situation and say, hey, we've got a high probability of being able to play Division 1 golf, I'll kind of walk you guys through, you know, what that process looks like. And, um, if that's something you guys want to do, you can move forward with that. The average player that I work with improves by about 3.6 shots per year, give or take. I think the, the mean average is like 3.9 shots. I think the median's like 3.3. And you know, that, that's kind of been trending up over the last year or so. About a year ago it was about 2.7. So anyway, I always do my best to try and improve the program. But if your child's in a position where we look at that, we do the math and we say, hey, this is a high probability happening, then that's when we'll end up working together. If you're not, then we probably won't. Um, but at least you'll have that perspective as well. So again, if you're interested in that, click the link below and apply for that program. Otherwise, hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you're new here, subscribe, uh, like it if you enjoyed it, and I'll see you guys in the next one.