How I Started Coaching Junior Golf

Alrighty, what's going on guys? So in this video, I'm going to be covering how I started coaching junior golfers. If you're new to the channel, this is a very reasonable question you might be asking, or if you've been following my stuff for a while and watching my other videos, this might be something you're wondering. Is it just how did Connor get into all this stuff? How did he learn these things? What's his background? What's he done in the past? Just how do you figure out all this stuff? So in that video, in this video, I'm going to be trying to kind of answer those questions. If you're new to the channel, obviously if you enjoy this, this makes sense to you, you like my other videos, go ahead and subscribe. And if you enjoy this specific video, I really appreciate if you leave a like. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. So my journey starts where, where most people's journeys start in golf. I played junior golf, um, started relatively late. I'll kind of walk you guys through that, but I started as a junior golfer, so I kind of know what that's like. Um, from there, stopped playing junior golf. I ran into some roadblocks. I'll kind of walk you guys through, but walked away from it. And, uh, after a little bit of time away from the game of golf, I started working again with a business called Course Kings, helping them kind of, uh, organize the way that they're presenting content. Um, and it was actually working with my former swing coach, now business partner. This business is still running. Um, Course Kings, I really got a lot of mentorship being able to work with other coaches as well and being able to understand the game of golf a lot better. Um, it kind of hit on stuff that I knew as a junior golfer really solidified kind of logically how to work through that stuff. Um, then got into a business called Course Kings All-American. So kind of a riff off of, uh, the initial Course Kings where we started working with junior golfers who, who wanted to play college golf. Kind of ran into some problems with that. Um, roadblocks as far as, you know, getting those kids to their ultimate goals. And so that kind of led to, uh, you know, searching for solutions, right? You have a problem, you wanna go ahead and figure that out. I'll kind of summarize for you guys what kind of the biggest takeaways were from that and kind of what I found there. After that though, it wasn't just as simple as like, okay, cool, let's, you know, let's go ahead and just deploy this stuff, right? Because just because you think something makes logical sense, just because something makes sense to you doesn't mean it's actually going to work, you know? So there's a period where I was applying that stuff to myself. I'll kind of share with you guys what that looked like. I started applying it to students and so that they could really understand to see like, okay, cool, does this stuff actually work if I apply it? If I give it to a student, does this actually help them improve? And from there, you know, we got some, some pretty substantial results just, just right away. And so that kind of validated that the premise, it was like, okay, cool, you know, this stuff works for me and it's also going to work for these kids. And then I got it, got into independent coaching. I'll kind of walk you guys through why that was. Um, but the biggest reason was this initial Course Kings All-American program was a full-service program. So, you know, we had students, we were working with them on every part of their game, you know, their full swing, um, you know, their strategy, tournaments, all that different stuff. They had to fly out to Memphis, Tennessee, um, and it was a $20,000 a year program. So, you know, very high-end thing, you know, definitely got great results for those kids. There's a lot of students who, you know, couldn't, you know, travel across the country, and there's also a lot of, you know, people who, you know, they really like their swing coach, they're happy with that, but they needed help with other stuff. They needed help with um, some of the things I'm going to be talking about in this presentation, but namely, you know, stat tracking, building practice plans, picking the right strategy on the golf course, and kind of managing their mindset. So those are all things that people needed help with, and I was just kind of in a unique position because that's kind of what I specialized in, um, within the business that we were running. And I just figured, you know, I can help all these kids out, and there's a lot of kids who need that help. So that's kind of what I do now. All right, so kind of let's, let's go ahead and jump into the junior golf career. So I started super late. Um, I would not recommend this path. Obviously it didn't work out not that great for me, and I, like I said, I would not recommend it. So I started playing golf at 16, um, worked super hard. Uh, I played golf pretty much every single day for about a year, a year and a half, and I was able to get myself to a scratch golfer in about 18 months. Now granted, I'm, I'm 6'2", I've got an athletic background, so I was swinging a driver probably 113-ish miles per hour, somewhere in that ballpark. So plenty of speed. And so for me, it was if I was able to, you know, find my golf ball, and I was gonna be able to shoot pretty good. At that point, college wasn't even on my radar. I was just doing it for fun. And so I got to the point where I started getting people telling me, hey, you're really good at this, you should try and play college golf. And of course, I didn't know anything about, you know, what that meant or anything really, or what that entailed. But I started working with a swing coach. Now I work with them as a business partner, Jeff Smith. We started working together, and I kind of ran into some major problems. So we got really focused in on the golf swing, and I would say my golf swing got, you know, substantially better, um, like way, way, way better. But if I were to look back on my junior golf career, and when I do look back on it, I didn't really have a lot of structure around how I practiced. I would just go out there and beat balls for hours, and then I felt like it, I would go play. And what it kind of led to was I kind of gave myself a false positive where anytime I go out there and play, like, I'd, you know, either been beating balls or I was feeling good. I go out there, shoot a score, you know, I shoot around par, I shoot under par. And then you go around, you get into a tournament, and you carry all that pressure with you because you're just like, oh, I should be able to shoot the score, or I should be able to shoot at this level because that's what I did, you know, here. And this didn't really work out that way. And at this point, I've kind of found that that's, that's the way it is for a lot of junior golfers. But, you know, that's how it was for me, whereas I would work really hard, get good results in my practice, then I get in the tournaments and it's just like, what happened? Like, what's going on here? And so that kind of screwed with my head. Um, I made it really, really difficult because, you know, I also felt like time crunched. Yeah, I was 16, you know, 17 years old, um, trying to play college golf. I had like a year in my mind. I was like, oh, I got to go out there and win a tournament to like impress coaches or whatever. Um, and just didn't really have a great, uh, strategy towards things. I didn't understand what the things I needed to be looking at were. I didn't even understand that rankings were a thing. No one was telling me, hey, you better get ranked, or hey, you know, this could be a helpful thing for you. Um, nothing like that at all. I didn't have any concept of, you know, which colleges I should go to or not to as a goal. I was like, I want to go to Division I program, I want to go to, you know, Oregon or UNLV. And those were just kind of poor, um, selection choices for me. If I could go back and consult myself, I would give myself different advice, which you guys kind of see throughout this. But that was kind of the main problems I ran into is that I didn't have a plan. I was going out there, I was working really hard, I'm a world-class swing coach, um, but it wasn't— you go into every tournament, you're like, I, I hope I win this, or I hope I do really well. And if you don't do well, you're like, oh, it must be my golf swing, let me go work on that again. And that's, you know, as you guys will see throughout this, that's not really what I recommend anymore. Um, so that kind of got me to a point where I transitioned out of junior golf and I was looking at it, I was like, okay, cool, I'm pretty decent at this. I got to a point where I was, you know, probably a +2, +3, something like that. Um, granted, that's overall, right? That's not necessarily in every single tournament. And so I was looking at that, and my ultimate goal is to play professional golf. I didn't want to just go play college golf and then go do whatever. I wanted to actually go on and play professional golf. And so looking at that, um, you know, being around Jeff, like, I had an opportunity to play with a lot of really great players, like players on the PGA Tour now. One of the guys, it was, uh, I always remember this story. One of the guys that, um, Jeff was working with at the time that I got to play with a few times, uh, this guy named Aaron Wise, and I think he got to like 50th in the world or something like that, won the PGA Tour Rookie of the Year in 2018. But anyway, I remember playing pretty good. Uh, we played like 9 holes together and I, I felt like really good about it. I shot like 35. It was at a TPC Summerlin. I think it was from the tips. Shot 35, 1-under, frontside. Well, Aaron goes out there and shoots like a 31. It was like a whole— he wasn't even paying attention. He's just like one-handing putts into the hole and, you know, beat the brakes off me. I was like, I can't compete with this. I mean, this guy's gonna beat me by 20 shots in a 4-day tournament. So I was like, okay, cool, this isn't gonna work out for me. And so my biggest takeaway there was just like, you know, I wasn't good enough. That was how I reconciled it to myself. Um, I wanted to do it, wasn't good enough, um, and that was kind of it. And so from there, took a little bit of a step away. A few years later, I started working with Jeff on, on this business called Course Kings. And so Course Kings essentially still exists today. Is a membership business where, you know, we had all these different lessons from different coaches, and it was a way for, for players to really kind of, um, understand the game better, how the swing worked, the pieces in the swing, kind of how to tie that together from kind of an information standpoint. And for me, it was really cool because I had to work with Jeff and really kind of study, like, okay, how does this stuff work? And also, how does this stuff all fit together, right? It's one thing to understand the golf swing. It's one thing to understand, like, oh, like, hand path depth or wrist angles or stuff like that. Um, maybe that's like You guys aren't super familiar with that necessarily, but those kinds of things. But it's another thing to know how that fits in the entire game. And that was kind of my job is to say like, how do we make this website really function and flow nicely? And so because of that, I had to consume a lot of content and really study this stuff and kind of apply those ideas and say like, okay, well, if I go out and apply this, like, how's this work for me? And you know, what's kind of missing from, from this membership? How do we improve it? Um, that was really kind of, you know, my role there. So eventually we ended up getting approached by, um, another group of guys who are like, oh, we should do this for junior golf. And Jeff and I were like, yeah, yeah, that sounds cool. Um, we're just gonna do it on our own. Um, and we've got kind of this approach to it, so we're just gonna go ahead and do that. And we ended up bringing another guy in, a guy named TD Luton, who's the assistant coach at Duke for 4 and a half years. And so that was a really cool experience for me, being able to learn from TD, because he was actually a coach, he was actually recruiting kids, and I was able to like pick his brain and figure out like what are the steps, because that was like my main role there. It wasn't so much like that I was some genius, you know, golf instructor, um, but I was good at putting pieces together. I'm a very analytical-minded person, and so I can kind of look at stuff and pull out like why does this thing work. And so that's what I did with TD and Jeff. It was kind of like, okay, we want to help these kids play college golf, like what are the steps that go into that? Um, and so there's a lot of talking to TD and Jeff and be like, all right, well, you know, where are the kids we've gotten, you know, recruited, and what What did you do for them? And so we started kind of like to design the program, and I kind of mentioned this earlier, you know, that became a comprehensive program because every kid that they've worked with, you know, they've done everything with them. And so that was just kind of how they understood it. It was just kind of like this full-time thing, and we're kind of trying to figure out like, how do we make this in a repeatable process, right? Because it's one thing to just say, hey, you know, kids who are successful, you know, they just come out with us all the time and they spend $100,000 a year on lessons. But that's not— number one, that's not realistic for the majority of people. And number two, it doesn't really distill down, like, what are the essentials here? What are the things that we really need to do? How does this thing work? And then how do we, you know, fill those variables? Um, so it's kind of like the main thing we were trying to figure out. But in the initial stages, that became a comprehensive program, which, like I said, ended up being a $20,000 a year program because it was, it was very intensive. It was online lessons, it was in-person lessons, it was traveling to Memphis, you know, it was all this stuff. But there are a few kind of problems that we ran into. Biggest thing was the kids' swings would improve, but their rankings wouldn't necessarily go up, right? So that we would work on their swing and be like, ah, swing's looking really good. This is, you know, this is what I had, you know, as a junior golfer. And I know this is what a lot of junior golfers experience. They go out there, they work with a coach and be like, ah, swing's looking great. You go into a tournament, either they don't play well and it's like, oh, why'd I shoot 85? Or they go into a tournament and they do play well. And the rankings don't move, or maybe even worse, the rankings get worse. It's kind of like, what's going on here? Um, another thing that would happen is their scores, or like their swings, would improve. Be like, ah, swing's looking good, but they wouldn't shoot better scores, right? Be like, oh, we're improving, but shooting the exact same scores. And be like, well, I guess we're not improving, right? So there's something missing there, and there's really no grounding in reality for the families on where they were at. And it's not the family's fault, it was, you know, to some degree our fault, and just kind of how things were. But, you know, because we weren't able to say like, okay, cool, our rankings are improving, or our scoring average is improving and that's contributing to our rankings, it just became this kind of like, well, I don't know where I'm at relative to where I'm trying to get to. So it just kind of creates this perpetual anxiety loop, which is really brutal. It was brutal for us as coaches because we're obviously trying to help these kids, we care about them. But when the only metric is like, hey, did your swing get better it's really difficult to know where you're at. And you can have a kid who swings, like, looks really good, but he's not shooting the scores that he needs to, or he's not in the position rankings-wise that he needs to be. And if we're not guiding them and consulting and saying, hey, here's where you need to be, and here's kind of like where we're off track, here's what we need to do to fix that, like, all you're left with is anxiety, right? Um, so those are kind of like the problems we ran into. So for me, I'm kind of looking at this and I'm just like, man, we need to make this a little bit more predictable and systematic. Otherwise we're just gonna have this anxiety all the time. That's just gonna be a rough business to run, um, because you want to be able to talk to people and, you know, somebody's interested, you want to be able to be like, yeah, we're gonna get you there. And if I— if we don't have like an exact process, we're gonna walk you through this, like, I can't say that. I feel really uncomfortable saying that. So here's kind of what we ended up doing, uh, went down this rabbit hole and be like, man, what are these coaches looking at? And more importantly, like, what was turning these coaches off? Because we got like a world-class coach, we can get in front of them. A lot of people think that it's like time in front of a coach, right? You need to talk to, you know, coaches, you need to go to camps, you need to do stuff like that. And we kind of found this like, no, that, that wasn't the important thing. The important thing was if you're not ranked well enough, uh, specifically on Junior Golf Scoreboard, but just in general, Junior Golf Scoreboard is just the largest. Obviously, if you're ranked really, really well on like Rolex rankings, then that works too. But if you're ranked really well on Rolex rankings or just ranked in general on Rolex rankings, you're pretty much going to be ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard as well. So ranking heavily tied to recruiting. So grades in there, yes. Standardized test scores, yes. Um, attitude, sure. But the main thing is rankings, just realistically. Everything else has got secondary to that. So that was super important. And ranking specifically is tied to the course difficulty and the scoring average. That it boils down to, to what's called scoring differential, which is kind of the distance between those two. Um, just kind of an easy way to understand this is for the handicap system, for, for the GIN handicap system, it's looking at the top 20%, the average of the top 20% of your rounds in your scoring differential, right? So if I go and play golf course as a course rating of 74 and I shoot 71 that's a scoring differential of -3, right? So for Junior Golf Scoreboard specifically, the scoring differential is looking at the top 75% of your rounds. So still not all the rounds, but it's looking at the top 75% of your rounds. Okay, it's a lot more conservative than a handicap system, which is why I don't like handicap as a metric in general. Um, I think it's almost completely useless because I know players who are +2s who play Division 1 programs, and I know players who are +5s who don't score nearly as well in tournaments who who, you know, played Division 3 programs. So I don't really like that as a metric, but those two are really, really highly correlated. So if we want to just boil this down, if you know what your scoring average is, you're going to know your scoring differential is based on the difficulty of the golf courses you're playing. So those are just super connected. Those are kind of the main things that function— that factor into rankings. Now once we've got that, now we got to break down those two variables, right? So scoring average is made up of statistics. Right? So it's like, it's not just, hey, I shoot these scores, great, now I'm gonna go work on my swing and somehow that's gonna make my scores come down. There's gonna be different parts of the game, right? We should be able to measure those different parts of the game or different skills based on our statistics, and those statistics should be able to predict for us what we're going to shoot. If our statistics can't predict for us what we're going to shoot, they're kind of useless statistics. And then there's tournaments. You know, some tournaments are better than others, right? Some tournaments are on short Mickey Mouse golf courses and some tournaments are on real golf courses, right? That's kind of like the best way to put it. That's kind of like what, um, what this kind of like boiled down to. And so just kind of like to summarize for you guys here, scoring average for Division 1 program ended up being about 72 to 74. The tournament difficulty, roughly about 7,000 yards. Those are— if you kind of have those two variables here, if you— if we look at your junior golf scoreboard, all your tournaments you're playing, all 7,000 yards, you got a scoring average of like 73, you're gonna play Division 1 golf. Like, that's unless you're bad grades, bad SAT scores, um, you know, but if you got those characteristics, like, you're gonna do well. And the last thing that I kind of found, because I did a real deep dive in stats, is your stats kind of have to be in certain ranges in order to have a scoring average 72 to 74. So for example, you're not going to have a scoring average 72 to 74 if you hit 40% of your greens. It's just not enough. There is just too hard. Yeah, in theory you could be like, well, you know, I need to get— I need to get up and down more often. Um, but you're not going to be able to do that. It's just, you're not going to be able to do it at a high enough rate. You might be thinking yourself, oh, if I just made more birdies— like, no, you just don't hit enough greens because you're just not going to get up and down enough. You got all sorts of problems. Same thing is true, it's like you could hit a bunch of greens, you could have really good ball striking, you could have really good putting, you have all this stuff. If you're banging 2 balls out of bounds per round, good luck. It's just, it's too hard to recover from. And so you can kind of like boil down the stats, be like, okay, you if you want to have a scoring average 72 to 74 average, right? It's not just your good scores are sometimes 72 to 74. I'm sure we can shoot 72 on 40% greens every now and then, but the point is on average we're not going to be very successful with that. And so understanding that really gave me some concept to understand like, okay, cool, these players aren't shooting way, way, way under par and that's why they're getting recruited. It's— they have a really solid average performance, and they're able to play on a real golf course. Is that kind of— that's kind of what it boils down to. Now, at this point, I didn't want to just say, all right, here's gospel, right? Because I didn't know, you know, and, and I still had the kind of mentality of like, oh well, you know, I didn't make it in junior golf, so like, who am I to say this? Um, so what I ended up doing was I said, okay, cool, these ideas are interesting, especially the statistics. Let me apply this for myself. It was around that time I kind of gone out of the college, you know, phase and, and was making enough that I could say, okay, cool, let me go ahead and get a country club here and let me start working on this stuff. Let me have enough time to do that. Now, complications in family life made it so that I could really only go out about 2 or 3 times a week, which might sound like a lot for some of you guys, but, you know, if you're playing junior golf, I bet you're at least doing 2 to 3 days a week. So that's kind of what it looked like for me. And my, my approach to that was like, I want to validate the stuff that we're teaching these kids. So I want to take stuff we're teaching and be like, all right, cool, if I do it, does it work? Because if I can't do it exactly right, our kids aren't going to be able to do it. And so I said, okay, cool, I need to be able to do this stuff exactly right. All right, great. And other variable, I don't have a lot of time. Um, I don't have a lot of time to actually go out here and practice. And so I was like, okay, cool, I need to improve as much as possible with the time that I have. And so I tested different approaches. I tested out and be like, what if I practiced for longer, right? So if I did like a 4-hour practice session versus a 2-hour practice session or a 1-hour practice session, what if I practiced for more days in between rounds of golf? So I played around golf and I like practiced like 3 days in a row, um, versus like, what if I just practiced 1 day? What if I didn't practice at all? And from that, I was kind of able to discern out like what really worked the best because I was actually like tracking my numbers and I was like, well, what if I did this? What if I did this? What if I did this? And so I kind of found that the, the best way that I found to improve is I would play at least one round of golf per practice session. So the way I kind of conceptualized that, it was like every practice session had a clear agenda. Be like, oh, you missed, you know, you're not hitting a high enough quantity of shots from 100 yards on the green. Be like, okay, cool. When you're in practice, you're gonna hit 100-yard shots onto that green for this specific amount of balls, and you're gonna grade yourself on how well you did compared to how you did on the golf course, right? So it's not just, hey, I want to do good. It's tethered to what's already realistic on the golf course, right? And so that was how I built my practice. It's just every particular thing that I was struggling with, and my stats were telling me I said, okay, cool, we're gonna have a practice session or practice station that's gonna work on that specific thing. So as a result of that, I ended up dropping about 9 shots— or not 9, 5.9 shots off my scoring average about 2 and a half months. Now I think that that was fairly extreme, but I was able to be very, very consistent. And so that's what happened for me. So at that point, I was kind of like, okay, this stuff works. Um, you know, I kind of got to the point where I was even saying to to Jeff and Tia, I was looking at, I was like, man, I don't play golf. I play golf like 2 days a week, 3 days a week. I've shot under 66 twice in 2 and a half months, and I barely play golf. There's no reason these kids who play golf every single day should be struggling to break 85 or 80 or 78 or, you know, shoot, you know, even in the 60s, right? I was kind of like, okay, we're on to something here. Now, my biggest takeaways were Stat tracking is super important. If you're not tracking your stats, you're basically wasting time. If you take one thing away from this video, if you see one thing from my stuff, track your stats, track your numbers, because if you're not measuring, what are you doing? Would you ever consider running a business where you didn't look at your bank account? You didn't look at any of your metrics. You didn't look at who's coming into your, your business. There's no way to get better at something without measuring. So step number one is measure. And just for all the people who are going to ask, yes, measure practice and tournaments. If you're using a good app, you're going to be able to segregate those two out. So Draw More Circles is my recommendation for that. That's what I have all my students use. I give them promo codes, so it's a lot cheaper because it can get a little bit expensive. But anyway, that's thing number one. Thing number two is what I call a one-to-one practice method. A lot of coaches out there they just— I think they just come up with drills because it sounds like it's hard. Be like, what we're going to do is putting drill. And, you know, to be fair, like, there's a lot of coaches out there that are really great coaches, but I'm just— I'm not a huge fan of the way that a lot of drills are structured. It's just kind of like, let's just make a drill that's hard. And, you know, it's in kind of the same category of whatever you're struggling with. I don't like that perspective. I don't like it for a few reasons. Number one, I look at the game as a bunch of puzzle pieces, right? Because if we have our stats, we can actually break it down into like— there's specific skills we need to be able to have, and then there's everything else, just like random stuff you can do. So for example, one of the ones that's really popular right now, um, is spinning the ball a lot around the greens, you know, getting the real like nipper, like sliced chip shots. In my opinion, trying to get really good at that, or like, let's see, varying trajectories, like high one, medium, low one, high one, you know, medium one, spinny one, not spinning one. It's just like kind of a waste of time in my opinion, at least for a player who is not already shooting kind of in that 72 to 74 range. If we're trying to shoot in the 60s, okay, fine. If we want to have a scoring average in the 60s, then sure, we can talk about how do we hook a little chip shot, right? Um, because I won't say that, you know, a guy like Justin Thomas isn't doing that, or Rory. Um, but for the most part, it's just not really a necessary skill as compared to being able to get one consistent ball flight off the tee with your driver. Like, you are trying to work your driver both ways, good luck. Um, you're gonna hit too many balls out of bounds. Just your numbers are gonna bear that out. And yeah, that's just kind of how it's gonna be. So anyway, when we're practicing, we want to make sure that it's a one-to-one relationship. So if I can't hit— I don't have a high enough greens regulation percentage because I have too many shots from 100 yards that I don't hit the green with, then my practice should be, you guessed it, hitting 100-yard shots onto the green. And I'm gonna have How often do I hit it on the green in tournaments? Or how often do I hit it on the green in practice? You better believe that that's the metric that I'm going to evaluate myself on when I'm in practice, to be like, okay, well, I need to do a little bit better than this, right? That's going to strain me enough, it's going to make me focus and say, okay, cool, let's try and get better at this. And then from that, we can say, oh well, my golf swing's not good enough because, you know, I'm trying to do this, I'm putting all my focus in it I just hit too many balls fat, or I don't have enough control over my, my shot shape, and so it's too difficult to get more than whatever my standard is. You know, if I'm on the driving range, and that's fine, but that's the time to really start looking at— let's, let's screw with your golf swing rather than saying, first premise, let's look at your golf swing, hit me a few balls, I don't like this, let's change it, now it looks better. That's what I don't— I don't approach coaching like that at all. I'm looking at like, what are your stats telling us? How do we design your practice around what those numbers are? That's the fundamentals here. Now, in addition to that, I also started looking at stats and, and strategy, right? So understanding for my numbers, maybe what are the best numbers for me to lay up to? And yes, I know if you push it up around the greens that that's going to be ideal, but not every kid is able to hit a 40-yard pitch shot with spin. Like, yeah, would you like to get there? Maybe that's a problem to solve, sure. But sometimes we're in tournaments, we have reality to deal with. And so sometimes it's helpful to know, be like, hey, well, if I just drop this at 100 yards, I'm gonna hit the green 80% of the time. Right now I'm hitting, you know, par 5 greens 50% of the time. So if I just laid up on every single par 5, I hit 80% of my greens instead of 50% of my greens. Well, I just gained a green per round just by making better decisions, right? So that's what I kind of mean when I say like using your stats to inform your strategies, just to take dumb mistakes out of play. It's like, how do we make golf easy? Right? Yeah, sure, we'd like to be able to hit all the shots, but what if we don't have all the shots? Can we still shoot in the 60s? Good players can. Yeah, for sure. So that's something that was huge that I kind of learned there. And the last one is stats and mindset, because if you're tracking numbers long enough, you'll come to understand that you don't shoot the same score over and over and over again. You shoot different scores, and there's kind of a variance on those scores. A fancy kind of math term for it would be like standard deviation. right? Um, now in general, what I've found is junior golf standard deviation tends to be around 4, so give or take 4. So if we've got a scoring average of, let's say, 80, we're about 70% of the time we're going to shoot a score somewhere between 76 and 84. So rather than worrying about what we're going to shoot, um, in the particular round, because you go out there and shoot 83, 77, and be the exact same golfer, nothing about you changed. A lot of players will read into that and be like, oh well, I was 6 shots better the second day. Because I did this thing and this thing and this thing. It's just like, play 10 rounds and you'll find out and be like, oh, I'm pretty much the same golfer. And so really focusing on the main things that cause those scores to happen, I find to be much more valuable. So if you look at your numbers and say, okay, cool, well, the main thing that's holding me back is greens regulation. And in order to lower those greens, or in order to improve that greens regulation, specifically this distance, and I haven't been hitting one-shot shape now, so now I'm gonna start hitting one-shot shape then that becomes my focus for the tournament, not what I want to shoot. And I just say, okay, cool, if I can just do this thing, if I can just be like, all right, one ball flight all day and just really focus on like, how do I prioritize hitting as many greens as possible? And then I do that, the probability that I shoot lower scores on average is very high. And so that, that's like huge from a mindset perspective, because instead of going and be like, I want to play good in this tournament, screw that, that's— you don't know if that's going to happen. But you can say, hey, if I just improve this one thing, or if I just focus on this one thing and execute this at a high level, then everything else is going to take care of itself. And best part, if that falls short, that's exactly what you talk to your coach about and be like, hey, I'm trying to do this in tournaments, this is where my focus is going, and for some reason I'm getting stuck on this, right? And then you go back to your practice as well and be like, I really need to double down on this practice. If you're doing that practice for long enough and you're not improving, you're measuring your stats and you're just like, not just like I feel like I'm not improving, it's like objectively that, that greens regulation number is not moving Well, then I know my practice or what I'm trying to do is ineffective, and so I can adjust. So those are the biggest takeaways. I know I spent a little bit more time on that, but that's just super important from like a mind-blowing lesson for me because I didn't do any of the stuff as a junior golfer. Now, sort of applying this for students, right? That was kind of like the next step. I was like, all right, cool, this stuff works. Uh, I started applying, insisting the students track their stats. Because my perspective is like, if you're not tracking your stats, how am I supposed to know where you are as a golfer? I watched you play 6 holes. This drives me crazy too when people talk about me like, oh Connor, well you're not in person, how is that— are you supposed to help these kids? And I'm just like, look, I've given enough in-person lessons and been on the golf course enough times. Watching you hit balls in person tells me almost nothing because I can look at that and say, well, what if you hit it bad in front of me because you're nervous? What if you hit it good in front of me but you're comfortable and it's not the same in tournaments? It's just— what if you just played 6 good holes randomly? I'm like, oh yeah, you're ready. It tells me nothing. Whereas if I can look at like 10 rounds of data, 10 rounds, 18 holes, I know a lot about your game because I'm gonna be able to see me like, oh, we hit 63% of our greens. Oh, we 3-putt 7% of the time. Oh, we get up and down 43% of the time. Oh, we had a ball out of bounds 3% of the time. You know, we make birdie 10% of the time when we hit the greens. That tells me a lot. That tells me a lot about where we need to put our focus. And so that kind of became a priority because we could really drill down and be like, okay, well, this player's struggling to score. What do we need to do specifically to help them improve? Now, once we had that one-to-one practice, that was, that's huge. So one example, I'm not gonna use the kid's name, but there's a player who Every single— every round he played, he hit like 72% of his greens, 75% of his greens. Just a complete ball striker. And he shoots 76, and it was just like, what is going on? And, you know, at the time, um, you know, it was— it wasn't really focusing. It was kind of, you know, the standard thing, be like, ah, golf swing needs to improve. I was kind of like sitting from the sidelines, I was like, man, I don't think the golf swing needs to improve. We're in 75% of our greens, right? It's like, maybe it like breaks down, but like, let's solve that problem if it happens. But I started looking at his numbers and I was like, his putting inside 5 feet, he was making like 60% of his putts, which is not good. We want to be like 90% make great inside 5 feet. Um, that's not like as a cumulative average, right? 95%. Um, so that was kind of like the thing. I was just like, okay. And we can break down and be like, all right, well, that has everything to do with being able to start the ball online. And I was like, that's where the focus needs to go. It's we need to start the ball online and then we made it to make sure on the breaking putts we're having good reads and written with a good speed. We're not trying to jam the ball into the hole. Um, but that was like the biggest thing. And so for him, in his case, you know, his rounds improved because, you know, that got cleaned up. All of a sudden he starts shooting rounds in the 60s. All of a sudden he starts running or, um, winning tournaments because all the other puzzle pieces— that's what I mean when I say puzzles— all the other puzzle pieces were there. He doesn't hit balls out of bounds, hits a ton of greens, gets them down a decent amount of time. His lag putting was solid, but just because he was missing too many short putts, now he started making the short putts, now we shot— start shooting the 69, 68. 67 instead of shooting 76 because we're not 3-putting and we're making some birdies. That's, that's really how that shifted. I also started guiding the students on their stats, so I kind of already touched on that. I'm just making strategic decisions about where you want to be on the golf course. And even you can take this to the extreme and say like, what am I going to shoot on this golf course? Give yourself some expectations. Um, so that's kind of the other part of the coin that I haven't really touched on much, but like how far you hit it off the tee is really going to matter because it's going to matter where we're hitting our approach shots from. And, you know, if you're hitting 4-iron, it's like, yeah, maybe we can get better hitting 4-irons, but some degree it's like, let's just try and hit it further. Um, let's see what we need to do there. But I started guiding them on that. And then the same thing with like longer players, they might give themselves 75 yards and they might not be good at that shot, but they might be really good at 100 yards and be like, all right, well, let's back it up off the tee. Yes, it's not technically optimal, but it's like, for a tournament, be like, okay, cool, you can hit 2-iron and play every hole. And you're gonna hit on the green 70% of the time because that's what your numbers say. We're gonna shoot a good score instead of doing something dumb, hit 3 balls out of bounds. So again, or blading it over the green where we're trying to hit a distant flighted wedge. Let's solve that problem another day. Um, guiding them on mindset as well. So a lot of kids go into tournaments and they think, oh, I need to shoot these scores because that's why I shoot in practice. But if we actually look at their scores in tournaments, maybe it's a scoring average of 77. They go out there and shoot 80 and they think it's they play bad because in practice they shoot 74. And it's like, your scoring average in tournaments is 77. Let's try and shoot 76. Yeah, let's just focus on that main thing. Really helped kind of tighten up the mindset and really give them reasonable expectations and just know it's like every now and then you're going to shoot a bad round, that's okay. And every now and then you're gonna shoot a good round, that's not who you are as a golfer. Now we need to stay focused on that average and focus on the main things that are going to drive that average. And then last thing we kind of talked about really focused in on is which tournaments they need to be playing in. Because some kids, they just play what is convenient. And so we really got detailed about like, you need to play in these tournaments because they're going to improve your ranking. They're going to be on quality golf courses. And that's what's going to allow you to be successful and ultimately get recruited. So those are kind of the application things. Now, a couple of immediate results. Uh, Matt Carpenter, Matt Costello were a couple of players that we were working with at the time. Um, they got recruited right after I started applying this and started talking to them about it. Um, because that was probably beginning of 2022, really started applying these things. Um, end of 2021, um, it's kind of where I was, you know, validating this stuff. But 2022, started applying this stuff, and that's, you know, when they ended up getting recruited there. Or maybe it was '23. Oh, I'm doing this long enough that I kind of lost track there. But anyway, um, both of them got recruited. Here's kind of like their, their Circles numbers. So as you guys can see, like, we're tracking a lot of rounds of golf. Um, and that, that was kind of, you know, the big aha. I was like, okay, cool, this stuff works. And then I got into kind of independent coaching. And like I said, this is really, uh, driven by— there were lots of people that I was talking to who were interested in the program, but they're like, you know, we like our swim coach, we, you know, we're happy with that. We're just missing on the stats, we're missing on the practice, we just go out there and do random stuff. We understand the value of that, you know, having focus. Um, we're struggling with like our mindset, you know, we've gotten to a sports psychologist and they're just like, oh, just care less. And that hasn't really, you know, worked well for us. Um, and we understand this idea of being able to use stats and expectation management to shoot better scores. We want to work with you on that, but just that thing. And so that's how I ended up doing what I do now, um, with the targeted golf program, which is what I call it because it's specific around like, here's what we're going to get really dialed in about. Like, here's where we're trying to go, here's where we're at right now, Here's the gap, and here's specifically what we need to do along that path in order to get you there. And then drill specifically down into like, okay, these are the drills you're going to do. This is how we're going to know if those drills are working because we're going to evaluate it in, in periodic cycles here. And we're going to make sure you focus every single week on the thing that matters the most. And so I'm kind of able to guide students on, you know, tracking the right stuff, practicing the right stuff, using that stuff in their strategy, keeping them focused on the right things, using that to kind of guide their mindset. So understand, be like, all right, here's what I should expect of myself. Here's kind of what I did. And so we kind of start to relax and kind of understand, we're like, okay, here are the main things I just need to focus on. If I just keep doing this, I'm moving in the right direction. We start to feel confident. And so other players have gotten recruited since then, um, obviously, but that's kind of my backstory. Uh, that's kind of how I got into this. Um, and so if that's interesting to you and if you'd like to talk to me about your junior golfer or potentially get a little bit of help with this, um, I'm gonna link below, uh, where you can learn a little bit more about my process specifically now. Um, and also have an opportunity for you to be able book a call and talk to me with your junior golfer and just kind of look at their specific situation. Or if you enjoyed this video and you just kind of like want to learn more stuff for free, then obviously YouTube channel, you know, subscribe, like the stuff, go ahead and consume that. I come out with a video per week. And then last but not least, if you're kind of on the fence, you're just like, yeah, I want to talk to this guy yet, but you still want some free stuff and You want to get a little bit more contact than once a week from the YouTube video, I'll also have a link below this video for my newsletter. Come out with 3 emails per week, be a YouTube video, a lesson, and a case study every week. So if you're interested in that, go ahead there. Otherwise, that's it. Hopefully you learned something here, and looking forward to getting you— to know you guys a little bit better as you hang out in the comment sections or book calls or jump on the newsletter. So I'll see you guys in the next one.