How Harris Improved By 7 Shots In 12 Months As A Sophomore

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering a student that I worked with this past year that was able to make a substantial amount of progress. He was a sophomore, now he's a junior, and so I just wanted to look at what we did, what we really focused on, and use that to kind of help you guys understand, um, what your child might need to do in order to improve, and just how some of the relatively small things we did made a pretty substantial impact on his overall, you know, of progress and performance. So if you're new to the channel, that's all we talk about is helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. And if you're a returning subscriber, welcome back, always good to have you. If you guys enjoy this video, go ahead and leave it a like. It does help push it out to more people in the YouTube algorithm. Um, but anyway, let's go ahead and get into the video. I'm going to be relatively concise with these just because, you know, normally I'm kind of teaching on a subject, and I'll definitely teach on some of these things, but a lot of the stuff is going to be relatively straightforward. I think that, you know, it's important to preface what we're about to talk about with that, is a lot of the time where we get bogged down in our progress is we try to add complexity in order to get a better result, right? So if we say, hey, if I can be more sophisticated or more complex, then I'll be able to play better. I see this a lot, especially with swing mechanics, especially coaches who are better at swing mechanics. They'll kind of look at it as like, hey, I understand this extremely high-level information, therefore I should be able to get better results for the students. And to some degree, you know, that can be true sometimes, but a lot of times they'll be frustrated with other coaches where they'll feel like, hey, you know, they're presenting information that's relatively simple or might not even be 100% accurate, but they're able to get really good results with their students because the student's able to implement it, or at least implement what they think they're trying to do. And there's, there's just a lot more simplicity in that. So anyway, it's a very difficult balance to walk, and I do my best to do that when I'm coaching players. So anyway, um, this is the tool that I use called Draw More Circles. I'm just looking at the all-time data specifically on tournaments just because we can kind of see this nice little kind of trend down here. You'll also notice this kind of like drop off here on tournaments. Well, this player, you know, he's in the Midwest, and so obviously, um, in the winter things are pretty rough. Tournaments are not great. Um, so yeah, that kind of is what it is. We work together essentially from July to, you know, the end of August essentially is where it ended up working out. Um, and so, you know, this is kind of what the overall statistics looked like. But long story short, this is a little bit more accurate here. So when I'm working with a student, I map out everything that we're going to do in their practice, um, and I date it because the way that I look at the game is essentially like, hey, I've got a particular set of variables in front of me and I want to determine, okay, out of all the things I could do, what's going to have the biggest impact on this particular player, and then let's do that. So if I just gave them a novel bunch of information every single time I talk to them, and let's say I talk to them gave them a whole novel every single week, like some, you know, like some coaches are going to do from a swing mechanics perspective, it's going to be very difficult for that player to implement what we're talking about because it's just going to be difficult for them to understand and process that information, right? You can look this up, and I believe that if you read a book for the first time, you're going to retain about 10 to 30% of what you actually read. And so in order to counteract that, you need to read that multiple times. Maybe you need to read it and listen to it. You know, obviously there's different learning modes and That kind of is its own thing. But long story short, the fewer things that we are trying to do, the more probability we have we're going to be able to do it, and then we're going to be able to get the result that we want. We're also being able to limit the variables. So any of you guys remember science class where you had to do the scientific method and you had to be able to say, okay, cool, I've got this experiment, I want to get this particular outcome, or I'm going to make this adjustment, I think that this outcome is going to happen. You have to write a hypothesis, and then you do the experiment, you see if it worked, and then you create a new hypothesis. It's the same exact process in golf, um, just most people are not tracking the data consistently because they don't know what they're going to look at. And, you know, so they just don't end up doing any of it because doing the processing of this, it requires a lot of, of kind of time spent going at the statistics. That's why I do what I do, um, because that part is, is relatively difficult to just kind of get to that point where you're comfortable enough with the statistics. If that's something you guys want help with, I'm happy to do that. There's a link below where you can apply to work with me. Not for everyone, but it's for you if your child is in a position where, you know, they want to be able to play Division 1 golf and you want to maximize their potential. And also hopefully kind of resonate with the idea of we want to have a very methodical, data-based approach to things, which is actually going to allow them a little bit more freedom for some of those, um, kind of non-measurable stuff, right? They can be a little bit more of an athlete when they have simpler things that they're trying to accomplish, and we have more consistent progress and everything. Else, right? Otherwise everything's just chaos. Anyway, I digress. So this is kind of our first, you know, time we went over this together, and we didn't even touch on his actual practice plan. Normally I'm building out the whole, like, here's the drills that I want you to do and all that stuff, how many balls. First time we looked at this, we weren't even looking at that, um, you know, in part because we hadn't played any tournaments. Another thing that kind of jumped out at me is his par 5 greens regulation is only 62%. That's very common that I see amongst junior golfers, the par 5 greens regulation is lower than it should And so one of the easiest things we're able to do there is say, hey, if we laid up to like a full wedge, what's our on-green percentage from that distance? And if it's reasonably good, then it's like, okay, we're just going to lay up there and we get whatever the difference is, right? So if I move my ball from a spot where I'm going to hit the green, let's say after my tee shot, I move it from a spot where I'm going to hit the green 60% of the time to a spot where I'm going to hit the green 80% of the time, then obviously I'm picking up shots. So from a strokes gain, I'm sure you could do the analysis there. I like to think more in increase in percentage of greens hit, right? Because if we're able to go from, you know, maybe a simpler one would be from 50% to 75%, because there's 4 par 5s per round. So if we're able to hit one more green per round, that's going to be worth almost a shot per round, depending on how many putts your child has per hole, whether they have slightly more 3-putts or slightly more birdies, right? Hopefully that makes sense. The other thing kind of jumped out here is penalty rate off the tee was a little bit higher than I'd like to see. I like to see this below 5%. For him, it's a little bit above it, and in large part that was a challenge for him because he was trying to hit a draw. And hitting a draw with your driver is very difficult. Uh, hitting a draw with your driver requires you, for a right-handed player, to aim generally further to the right than it kind of feels visually comfortable to do, just to account for how much up you're hitting on your tee shot. Um, and so for him, it just made a lot more sense to say, hey, we're gonna hit fades off the tee and we're gonna hit draws on everything else. That worked really, really well. So anyway, at that time, we had a scoring differential of 4.7, scoring average 79.5, and that was at the end July. Um, jump over here to his Junior Golf Scoreboard. Um, let's go ahead and look at this here. So in July, give or take here, we're somewhere in this range. So I don't know why it was quite as low as it was because it doesn't seem like that's the record, but it is what it is. Um, and like I said, we followed this through all the way until August and got down to about 0.46. So all in all, improved somewhere between 4 and 7 shots depending on where you, you know, want to count this from, but somewhere in that range. That's one of the reasons why I'm kind of like— I talk about 4 shots per year. There's a, there's an estimation process there because it obviously dynamically changed, dynamically changes through different parts of the year. So sometimes we have new scores going on, we have old scores falling off, so it changes throughout the year. And so when I'm doing this, it's really from the perspective of what's reasonable, what's a reasonable rate of improvement that we can see. We can also see here that it slows down through this period of time. Why? Because we weren't playing in any new tournaments, so we don't have— and we also didn't have new tournaments to necessarily fall off, right? So anyway, You can kind of see here at a slight drop-off in performance. And again, you know, I'm not actively working with them at the moment, so I don't, I don't know what's going on. Um, obviously he's got a nice good 69, but you can kind of see, you know, the time we, you know, we're spending a little bit more actively together, you can see some of these really good scores. And that's part of why his scoring average is all the way down to negative 1.9, right? Um, so this is a dynamic thing throughout the entire year. But anyway, going back to this, this initial data set that we're looking at here, greens regulation is too low. Um, everything else, all in all, is like pretty decent, you know. It's like 7% higher than I would like to see it. And to be clear, this is the first time that we did this practice plan, so this would have been here. But anyway, um, penalty rate was manageable, you know, 2% is not, not terrible. Um, greens regulation is 46%. That ended up being the main spot that we paid attention to. Scrambling is kind of within range of what's normal for most junior golfers. About 1 in 3 is, is pretty standard. I think scrambling is by far one of the most overrated categories, um, that people think that they're going to gain strokes. It just doesn't happen because the better you get at golf, the more greens you're going to hit. And as a result of that, we're just not going to need to get up and down quite as much. That has a smaller and smaller impact over time as you get more and more greens. Comparatively to something like 3-putting has a huge impact. And I can't tell you how many people don't even know how many times they 3-putt per round, or how many coaches don't measure how many times they 3-putt or their student 3-putts. A lot of coaches don't even want to do putting. I was like, you know, it needs to be all swing mechanics, right? Because putting's boring. Um, but it can have a really big impact on the player scores, assuming, you know, there's gaps. In this case, he didn't really need it. He was kind of okay. Birdie conversion rate, yeah. Not, not really much of anything. You know, 8% is kind of like, is what it is. And the reason I use those is because we can project where the player should shoot on average, and he was pretty much shooting what he should be shooting, right? So we said, out of all these things, what's going to have the biggest impact? Screens regulation, very, very clearly here. And so what ended up happening, and what we, we ended up talking about specifically, was his strategy on his approach shots. Um, this is kind of the one of the most overlooked things that I see when I'm working with junior golfers, um, is we— most coaches do not spend enough time talking to their students about how to aim, um, which sounds relatively, um, relatively simple and mundane. But let me just go ahead and pull up a video and, um, just so you guys can kind of see what I'm talking about here. So let's just say for the sake of this, this player is hitting a draw. So the question here is let's say the target, we're trying to bring it down right here. Where are we trying to align ourselves, right? Like, do we align to the right side? Do we align at the middle, at the flag? Do we align gently right? Like, what should that look like? And it's really important to understand that the first thing here is we have a shot pattern. Scott Fawcett has done a great job talking about shot patterns, and so, you know, he's got a lot of good stuff with Decade. Anyway, we got the shot pattern here. If we're trying to hit at this target and assume we can actually center our shot pattern over this target, which is a big assumption on its own, but just assuming that we can, we're gonna have a shot pattern looks something like this. And the secondary kind of principle that I have when I'm working with students, I want to see this golf ball curve in one direction. So if we're trying to hit a draw, it needs to be curving to the left, assuming you're a right-handed player. Um, that way we don't ever have a scenario where it's coming to the right. If I said I'm gonna start this ball just gently right of this target, then two things could actually happen. Number one, I just shifted this pattern further to the left. If that ball never goes to the right, then I just shifted that pattern for the left. Or what I did is sometimes that ball is going right on me and sometimes it's going left on me. And so that's where most players play when they're trying to hit a draw. They're either aiming at the target or they're aiming gently right at the target, and they play pretty good when the ball goes straight-ish and they play pretty bad when they don't know which direction the ball is curving, which is really what shoots you in the foot. And so rather than doing that, I'm a big advocate with the students I work with that we're starting the ball generally at the right side of the green and seeing the ball draw some amount across the entire green, knowing that their shot pattern is going to be roughly 20 yards wide. And so because of that, sometimes it's not going to draw very much at all. We're going to hit the right side of the green, it's not going to be very good. Other times it's going to draw a bit too much, going to be toward the left side of the green. A bunch of the time it's going to be drawing some amount, and sometimes it's going to be right next to the pin on one side, sometimes it's going to be right next to the pin on the other side. And we also have to account for the pin could theoretically be in different spots, right? Like it could be on the left side of the green, it could be on the right side of the green, but none of that really changes the shot pattern, assuming the shot pattern is generally centered over the, the middle of the green. Now I like to approach targeting like this rather than the way I know Scott does with, with Decade is because I find that it's very difficult to explain to a junior golfer the difference between, you know, 8 from the left versus 6 from the left as a target, right? I'm not saying that it can't be done. I'm just saying I at least haven't found a good way to be able to explain that to a junior golfer. Most of the times when I've been around junior golfers who know that information, they still don't have a clear concept of, okay, where am I trying to start this ball, how much is ball going to curve on average, and then how does that tie into my feels? Because That's kind of the other side of this coin. It's like once we have this kind of setup here where we know it's like, hey, the ball should be starting in this range, it should be drawing this amount, it also sets up for us how— like, how do I diagnose what's going on in my golf swing, right? Because if I'm trying to diagnose this, there's 3 main things I need to be able to do. You could argue it's 4, but there's 3 main things: contact, start line, and shot shape, right? Or is it curving in the right direction, right? Um, The other fourth one that's kind of just like an honorable mention is distance control, right? So you need to be able to hit the ball the correct distance, so pick the right clubs. It's a little bit more of a decision-based thing rather than the technical thing, but it's still worth mentioning. But we have contact, start line, shot shape. If we do not get the outcome that we wanted, it's one of those things, right? So we could do everything perfectly and have the wrong distance, we miss the green. If we hit the ball fat or thin, we probably miss the green. If we start the ball, you know, we hit the ball solid, it's right distance, we start the ball in the window that we want but it doesn't curve the right direction, we're going to miss the green, right? If we hit the ball solid, it curves the direction we want but doesn't start in the area that we want, we could potentially miss the green, right? So in priority order, what I would say is, you know, obviously we need to do our best with like hitting the right distance, and we get better at that over time. We want to make sure we're hitting the ball solid. That's a non-negotiable for every skill level. We need to be able to hit the ball solid. If you're not able to do that, guess what? That's where a lot of the focus should go on your ball striking. Once you've got that, we need to have consistent shot shape. I don't really care too much about your start line if you cannot control the curve of the golf ball consistently, right? So I'm hitting the ball solid, it always draws, but it draws too much or draws too little or it fades. That's kind of our next cue. Say, okay, cool, it's starting the right window but it doesn't draw the right way. Then we can say, okay, what do we need to focus on my swing to create a little bit more of a consistent buffer of, you know, face being closed relative to the path so that I can swing further out to the right, have the ball start where I wanted to, and have it curve the amount that I want to see. Hopefully that makes sense to you guys. Anyway, long story short, we had that conversation, and for the most part, that was the majority of why he saw as much progress as he did, is his greens regulation just went through the roof. His penalty rate was kind of okay, um, you know, got down just a little bit as he really kind of hit that heater, uh, you guys saw. Scrambling kind of stayed about the same, and we didn't do a lot there. Um, putting definitely improved. Um, overall, his birdie conversion rate definitely jumped up, and his putting overall improved pretty substantially. But it's really just a combination of those two things. We got the greens regulation up and we improved the putting. Um, and so hopefully this makes sense to you guys as far as like what this process looks like, you know. Um, as you can see, we just updated the practice over time here, and then, you know, we were able to reap the results of consistent improvement. And you can kind of see this body of work here. We got some really, really good scores in this. Um, honorable mention as well, we did lengthen out the golf courses a little bit. Um, yeah, that was a general process. And, you know, in his case, he was a sophomore and he was able to go from wherever you want to peg this at, you know, 7.4 or 5.1, all the way to, you know, now he's a junior at -2. Like, he's almost certainly— uh, again, I'm not involved here right now, um, he's almost certainly going to get some level of Division 1 offers. And again, a lot of that came from, from an individual year. Um, now obviously I'd say this is better than average. Average player I work with improves by about 4 shots per year. Um, and so this is exceptional, and that's why I'm using it as a teaching opportunity to kind of say like, hey, here's a player who did this really, really well. Um, so hopefully this help was helpful for you guys, kind of seeing my process. And if this is something that you want for your child, you want this kind of data-driven help where we're really looking at the end result, not just, you know, the little minutia or, you know, some weekly, you know, coaching, you know, whatever visit. You really just want to say like, hey, we just want to make sure that we're getting the results, we're on the right track, we want to have clarity over that stuff. I want to encourage you, fill out the application below. We'll talk about what it would like to work— be like to work together, and if it makes sense to, to do something, then we'll be able to move forward on that, be able to help your child. So that's something you're interested, link below. Otherwise, hopefully you just learned from this video. If you did and you enjoyed it, go ahead and leave a thumbs up, and I'll see you guys in the next video.