How To Consistently Improve For Division 1 Golf

What's going on guys, welcome in. Today I'm going to be talking about how to help your junior golfer consistently improve and reach their goal of playing Division 1 golf. If you're new to the channel, this is all we talk about is how to help your child play Division 1 golf. And if you're a returning subscriber, welcome back in, it's going to be a really good one. So I wanted to talk about this subject because a lot of the time people have goals, right? You're probably watching this video and you have the goal of helping your child play Division 1 golf. But a lot of the time, most people don't have a plan. They don't know what specifically they need to do in order to accomplish what they want to achieve. And if you're in that situation and you're going out there and you're looking around for, you know, what are you going to need to do, you know, this channel is a fantastic resource for you. It's got an unlimited, a truly massive amount of information that you probably won't find anywhere else on the internet. At least I haven't found it. And so the first thing you really need to have is a plan. You need to have clarity of like, okay, cool, I want to have this goal playing Division 1 golf. Where do I start? And for me, with every player I ever work with, I start on this page. Um, this is Junior Golf Scoreboard. This is rankings, uh, under rankings and honors, college signings. And it shows us every player who's recruited back in 2017, and it shows us what their scoring differential was, where they're ranked in their class, which program recruited them. All that stuff. So it allows us to be able to very clearly say, okay, I don't just want to play Division 1 golf, I want to get to a specific spot. In our case, that's a specific scoring differential, right? And that's a specific scoring differential for either level of golf or a particular program that the student might be interested in, right? That, that's literal foundation number one, right? And once we've got that, the next piece of this is getting ranked. And you may— your child might be ranked right now, they might be not. Um, very easy way to do that is just go to tournaments and results. Search for tournaments and look for tournaments in your area that are ranked. You need to play at least 4 of those in order to be ranked. You'd be shocked at the number of people who want to play Division 1 golf who aren't even ranked. They aren't even aware that this is a thing. And just by simply going out there and getting ranked, I was going to give you a massive leg up on literally everybody else. So there you go. Um, just to kind of kick you guys off here, that's— if you guys are watching this video and you do nothing else, go get ranked. Like, please, please, please go get ranked. So, so crucial because what you'll be able to see, just to kind of pull up an example, one of the students that I work with here, uh, you'll be able to see their current scoring differential and that'll be super, super valuable because you'll be able to see, okay, cool, we're trying to get here and we are currently here today, right? Being able to understand that is a massive leg up on literally like everyone that you're competing against. Because you are able to take a step away from, hey, what did I shoot in this tournament, to where am I at right now, where am I trying to get to. And you can like reverse engineer how big is the gap, right? How much per year does your child need to improve? And here's the next level: you can track this. So if you're, you know, someone after my own heart, you might have a spreadsheet to be able to track where your child is at month over month as far as their scoring difference. And that's a really basic way but a really impactful way to understand, okay, here's where my child's at, here's how much they're improving month over month. And you can model that out to say, okay, well, how much are they going to improve year over year? And does that put us on pace to accomplish our goals? That's a massive step forward that you can do by just doing some simple math and getting ranked. So hopefully you guys can go ahead and do that if you're tech savvy and, you know, you can use an Excel spreadsheet, which I'd assume you guys are. You guys watching this channel are probably pretty aren't. So I'd anticipate you guys are going to be able to do something like that. If not, that's obviously something that I do for my students and map all this stuff out very clearly. And so, you know, if at any point you guys want my direct help with this stuff— so you guys don't have to think you just got to go out there and do the work, or more specifically, your child needs to go out there and do the work— there's a link below in the description where you can apply for coaching. So if that's something you're interested in, go ahead and check that out. There's also a pacing calculator below as well if you wanted to kind of model this out for where your child's at, whether they're ranked or if they're not ranked. I even built it out for you guys so you can just put in what the average scores that they're shooting are, the distance of the golf courses, and you can model out for yourself how much your child probably needs to improve without even having to get ranked. So, you know, once again, just trying to give you guys some value here. So anyway, continuing on, this is like foundation number one. We want to know where we're at, you know, I don't know where we're going. Once we have those data points, if If we could take a magic pill that made us improve, you know, by a certain amount every single year to accomplish our goals, then that would be ideal, right? But we don't have that. That doesn't exist. And so we have the next best thing, right? We want to think about it in, in really two ways. We have our outputs, which are our scores, right? And we have our inputs, which are all the things that we do to produce those scores, right? And so one of the most obvious ones is how we practice and how often we play, right? Those are kind of fairly obvious inputs you'd put in to say, if I play more, I will shoot better scores, or if I practice more, I will shoot better scores. Now, a lot of people, um, they just kind of say those things in kind of a vague way. They're just like, oh, you need to work really hard. I see some people, they say, oh, you need to work like 20 hours a week on your game, which I think is absurd, um, just as far as like all the data and all the students that I've ever looked at. I'm happy to see somebody, you know, come point at me and say, you know, hey, here's some data to back up that, you know, 20 is ideal. Like, at that point, I will, you know, I will submit to it, right? But I just haven't seen that, and I track a lot of data. So, um, one of the things that I want to kind of start off for you guys, another little free piece of value, is I track all my students' performance, and I track how much they're improving on an annualized basis, right? And so we got an outlier here at 16. We also got an outlier over here close to about shots worse. So, you know, granted they've only actually gotten worse by about 0.9 shots, but again, you know, I like to annualize just how I was talking about. But another thing that I like to do is I like to track the number of rounds that they've measured over the last 3 months so I can kind of get a pace or a kind of a measurement of how engaged is this player. And as a result, I can measure my own coaching, right? So, you know, I talk about the average player improves by about 3.6 shots per year. Now I've signed up a number of students over the last couple months. And to some degree, that's dropped off a little bit, which I'm not super thrilled about. You know, 2.9, um, is just kind of short of my goals. And God forbid the 1.9 as far as median. I hate seeing that. And so it makes me ask myself as a coach, what do I need to do in order to help these players improve? And so one of the things that I've seen very consistently is the students that I work with really fall into two different categories. They're the students who are adherent to the things that I ask them to which, to be clear, are not crazy things. And then there are students who, who do not, and that's just kind of like the way that it is. You know, I wish that I could, you know, make a world where every student does exactly what I ask them to do, but that's just not how the world works. And so if you're watching this video and you're considering, hey, you know, maybe I want to work with this guy, if you're worried about how your child is, you know, able to follow instructions, um, you know, if that's something that they're kind of like shaky on and you have to convince them on stuff like that, then, you know, this probably isn't something you guys want to do. But, you know, that's going to be universally true for them. Unless you can actually get somebody out there just like be a drill sergeant for them to force them to do stuff. Odds are you're going to have, you know, you're gonna have a pretty good sense of, you know, is your child going to do things they're asked to do or not. Um, so anyway, I'm not showing any of the students' names just out of like, you know, obviously respect for, you know, I'm not trying to embarrass anyone, but I also want to be able to educate you guys. So one of the things that I ask for my students to do is I want one practice session per week and I want one round of golf of 18 holes per week. And so if you guys looked at that over a 3-month basis, that's 13 rounds of golf over 3 months because there are 13 weeks in a quarter, right? And so that allows us to be able to update their practice effectively and make sure that they're, you know, consistently up to date and we're getting enough reps out there, right? Um, and you might look at me and be like, oh, Connor, like one round per week, that doesn't seem like that's enough, right? And you know, you could potentially make that case, but that's, that's my minimum. right? And so just showing these statistics in front of you guys here, we can see the improvement or the annualized improvement for the student and the number of rounds that, you know, they've logged in the last 3 months. This one I will say is a little bit of an outlier. You see the 21.5, which is a lot, and all this improvement has actually come in like the last 2 months. So if I annualize this player, um, for the entire year over the last 2 months of actually being really dialed in, it took 10 months to really get dialed in and get focused. And, you know, sometimes that happens. And again, you know, that's a risk that, you know, you gotta be willing to take to some degree in any type of investment in coaching. And I just wanna be upfront with you guys about that. You know, not every kid comes in just completely dialed in, but again, you know, that's why we adapt and overcome. We continue at this process because we're making that commitment to a long-term goal. We're talking about a multi-year goal. And so sometimes it takes a while for a player to have to look in the mirror enough times to be like, why am I not doing the thing? And they try and do everything else before they actually just do the thing. And that's just part of the development process. I want you guys to think that, you know, in order to, um, to improve consistently, we have to be perfect. Perfect is not what we aim for. We just want to get better, right? We want to consistently improve. Every player's got different hurdles. Some players, they don't hit it far enough. Some players struggle to follow directions, right? There's all sorts of different challenges that we all face, but nonetheless, you can kind of see this relationship here now. So if we segment down and say, okay, well, what's the average of the players who do the minimum that I ask them to do? They're improving by about 4.37 shots per year, which just for context here is about the relatively close to the amount that Charlie Woods has improved over the last 4 years. So, you know, he's got his dad as the GOAT who, you know, in theory could actually be a drill sergeant, like take him out to the golf course. I don't know what their relationship looks like, but Charlie's improved by about 4.5 shots per year. I'd say that's about as good as you're going to do. You know, if you could have your dad be the GOAT and, you know, tell you everything you need to know, that's pretty fantastic. Or you could be in a program like mine and just play literally 1 round of golf per week. And just track those statistics, right? That's what that looks like. So players who have at least 13 rounds, they're improving by an average of 4.37 shots, which is why for me as a coach, when I look at this top number, I'm just like, I don't like that. And the only thing that I can take away from this is I need to be more militant about getting the students to do the things that I've asked them to do. And, you know, a big— to the big degree is just like increasingly getting them more sold on the fact that it works really well and showing them data like this, which I have. And, you know, hopefully that improves throughout the summer, but Nonetheless, you can see that these statistics are pretty, you know, comp— or, uh, constant, I should say. We got the average here, we got the median here. They're pretty dang close. So if the player is doing the minimum amount of work, they're going to see a pretty significant result. Um, average number of rounds played is about 19.5, median closer about 18. So 18, 19 rounds of golf, a little bit more than once per week. It's about 1.5 rounds a week. And you know, that, that lines up fairly nicely. Let's look at the players who've done less than 1 round of logged golf per week. And when I say logged, I mean like track their statistics. They're barely improving at all. They like hardly improve whatsoever. Average is about 6 total rounds, which is about a third. So it was around every, every 3 weeks or something like that. Like not good. Um, median is 10, so it's a little bit up. Um, and you think, you know, it's like, that's not that big of a difference, but you look at the difference between Essentially playing about 13 rounds of golf, um, it's pretty substantial as far as, you know, improving and not improving at all. And hopefully this makes sense to you guys because, you know, let's think about this here. If I go and work on stuff, either we're in a situation here where we don't play golf, right, or we're not— you know, we're— let's just say for the sake of this, we're not playing golf. It's gonna be very difficult to improve at golf if we don't even play once a week. This just like— you're gonna have a very hard time just even getting down to like— even if you're skilled, even if your golf swing looks good, um, you're gonna have a very hard time just because you don't get the frequency of the shots that you need to hit. You don't get enough reps out there to be able to understand just like, where are my misses? How far do I hit the ball? What are the conditions? How do I play these different shots, right? Like, those are all things you just don't get. You need to play at least one round of golf, and I think that, that, you know, this data kind of proves that out. If we kind of go, you know, beyond that and we look at this a little bit, you know, from another perspective, this also highlights the importance of being able to get that data-driven feedback. Because you can make the argument— I doubt, you know, in this player's case, he's got a scoring differential of, you know, 0.4. I doubt that it's not like that. It's not a situation where he doesn't, um, play golf. Like, I know for a fact that the student is playing golf. But I also know for a fact that this student doesn't necessarily buy in as much as he needs to, that data is what is important. Right. And so all I can do here is just present this information and say, hey, we're struggling here. And, um, you know, like if we look at all these other data points, it seems like you're not doing the thing that gives you the highest probability of success. And so long story short, this video is about the importance of tracking and really understanding what this process needs to look like and tracking things, right? And so if I tell you, hey, the players who are playing 20 rounds of golf over a, over a 3-month period, which is really like, you know, around 9 holes, and we sandwiched a couple of, you know, let's say do a practice session, 9 holes, another practice session, 18 holes, but that's not that much golf. You know, when I talk about practice session, I mean like 2 hours. And, you know, to be clear, when I'm working with students, I have very dialed-in, you know, practice plans. Like, they're very specific about what they need to go out and do. But anyway, you've got those 2 practice sessions that are about 2 hours, and you've got a 9-hole round of golf, it's gonna be about like 2 hours, and you got an 18-hole round, which is, you know, maybe 5 hours or 4 hours depending on how you choose to go ahead and do that. So we're not talking about a massive time commitment, especially if we talk about trying to play Division 1 golf. There's only 1.6% of junior golfers that'll play Division 1 golf. And you know, what's the sacrifice that you have to, you know, offer up? It's like, well, I got a couple practice sessions, I got a couple rounds of golf. It's not that crazy. And, you know, those players are improving by about, you know, 3.3 or 4.3 shots, right? And so, you know, that's just like first, first and foremost up front here, um, just the impact of tracking and playing enough golf. Long way to make my point, but nonetheless, that's, that's that step. Now, once we are tracking, like, what does that look like? I'll take an example of one of the students here. And so I like Draw More Circles. I think they're a really great tool, and we're able to segment out practice into practice and tournaments. I also want to be clear, for all these rounds, this is both— this is tournaments and practice, right? So it's just the big picture here is like, we need to track our rounds. That has a massive impact on the— our ability to improve. And, um, so anyway, continuing on here, we want to be able to track the statistics that, you know, are impacting our scores, right? And for the most part, when we look at statistics, most of these are completely useless. I mean, it's just like pars per round, like I couldn't care less. Right? Um, you know, birdies per round, like, okay, whatever. Um, to be fair, like, they're, they're important in their own right. Like, putts per hole, like, there just aren't statistics that really help us a lot as far as predicting what we're going to shoot. Um, putts per round is another one that people really like that I just don't care about. I don't think it's that impactful. Um, the statistics that I care about are greens regulation, birdie conversion rate, scrambling, 3-putts, and then penalties off the tee, which is under, um, off the tee section And so what I like to do is I like to model those statistics out just based on what a player should shoot if you modeled out all those statistics. I'm not going to go through all the math behind how to do this. If you guys can watch this and just, you know, think to yourselves about how to do it, fantastic, good job. Um, you know, now you can see how you can model this out. Um, but if you're not, again, this is something I give all my students, like literally every single one of them. You can have this, you can play around with the spreadsheet and switch out the numbers and see like, okay, well, you You know, how do my statistics change if I, you know, change my penalty rate and my greens and regulations? Again, that's something you're interested in. You want my help, application below for coaching. Um, you can go ahead and check that out. If you're a good fit, we'll get on a call, make sure all this stuff makes sense to you guys, and then, you know, go over the onboarding process and get you guys rolling. Uh, this is not for everyone though, so there's no guarantee that you're gonna do that. Or even if we get on a call, you know, it might be in a situation where it's just like, hey, I actually can't help you. Reach whatever your goals are, and we just won't do the deal. So long story short, you know, it's not for everyone, but if that's something you're interested in, you want stuff like this, you don't have to think, you just want to be able to go out there and do, help your child just go out there and do and execute, then again, link in the description. So anyway, back into this, what we want to look at is these key statistics, and you want to have a tool like this so you can actually see like, okay, well, if I were to change one of these things, what's going to have the biggest impact? Right. You know, if I really focus on me like, hey, I've got penalties. I don't like penalties. Let me just— you guys are clear. Yeah. That's what this looks like over here. I've got penalties. I don't, I don't want my penalties to be that high. It's like, all right, cool. Like, how does that impact our improvement? Well, we only improve by— that's not right. So if I just change that one variable, right, we're only going to improve by 0.26 shots. Right? People talk about how important short game is. Let's improve that by 5%. We're going to only get improved by 0.4 shots. So we want to be able to be data-driven with where do we put our attention, right? So we need to be able to track this stuff and say, okay, cool, I'm here, I need to have a plan, like what am I going to do and where are the levers that I need to pull? That's why we need to track our statistics and then say, okay, cool, these are the statistics that need to change in order to score, uh, the fastest or improve our scores the fastest, right? Some of these are going to have a big impact, some of these are not going to have a big impact. You know, if I talked to this player and said, hey, we 3-putt too much at 4%, it's like, are we going to get that down to 1%? Like, probably not. So it's like, there's not a lot of like meat on that bone here, so to speak. It doesn't make sense to put a lot of time, attention, and brainpower into and trying to improve this statistic, right? We just might want to maintain it. We might want to leave it as is and work on some other statistics, right? But we need to be able to say, okay, this is the area that needs to improve. By the way, this informs all the lessons that you get, right? A lot of time, you know, kids just get weekly lessons because like that seems like a good idea, um, and they just get the same lesson over and over again, or they start working on random stuff that, you know, seems like a good idea at the time, but it's not backed by any measurement, right? So we can't look back and say, hey, this is working or this is not working. It just becomes an emotional thing. We have a bad tournament result and it's like, oh, you know, the sky is falling, right? We rather than saying, okay, here's where we're at and here's what we're trying to improve statistically. And instead of going to the tournament saying, hey, you know, did I, you know, win the tournament, or like, how did I finish? It's like, well, we were trying to improve greens regulation. Like, did we do that? And if we didn't, like, what, what were the shots that we didn't have? And how are we, you know, is that, you know, being accounted for in our practice and we just need to practice a little bit longer? Do we have a large enough sample size to look back and say, hey, is this number actually being moved? That's why it's like so, so crucial to be able to track these different points, because if you can say that, then you can know with confidence, like, is the thing working and are we on track? If yes, continue doing it. You don't have to worry about it. You don't have to have the stress of like, well, you know, played in this tournament and, you know, I feel like I played really bad. It's like, all right, well, did it affect your junior golf scoreboard? Well, not really that much. Or maybe it did. I don't know. You know, is— did you already know that that was a problem, or is that a new problem? Is your practice already accounting for it? Like, those are all things that you need to know if you want to have consistent, stable progress. And, you know, most players, they just don't do that. They don't have any of those things. Uh, the last thing here that I'll throw out to you guys is, you know, if you say, hey, you might want to practice in a particular way to improve a particular area, you know, yeah, you could go out there and say, I want to try harder, you know, from, uh, you know, try and hit more greens regulation. I'm just gonna have the attention. And to be fair, like, there is an amount of progress that you can make just by sheer willpower. But eventually you want to get to a place where your practice is actually based off of your real data. And not every area of your game is going to be weak, right? There's going to be some areas of your game that are really good, and there are going to be some areas of your game that are more impactful than other areas, right? But we want to be able to say, hey, I want to improve my greens regulation. Where am I going to improve my greens regulation from? You know, in this case, I noted for this player, we need to get his par 5 greens regulation up because it's kind of like free shots, you know, for him. If he can get to a specific number then he's going to hit the green at a much higher clip than he would otherwise. You know, in the same way, he's also got some approach shots that are a little bit underwater as far as just where I'd like to see his, you know, on-green percentage. So we're going to strategically attack those shots rather than just have him go hit a bunch of shots and be like, try to get better. I don't know, like, we want to get good at that shot. I'm sure everyone watching this video, if you play any level of golf, you can understand where it's like, you know, sometimes you just can't hit your gap wedge very well. But you can hit your 8-iron really, really well. And that's just, you know, that's how it is, you know, when you don't play as much golf, you're not as experienced as, you know, PGA Tour player. Um, you're gonna have different kind of idiosyncrasies in your game, and you wanna make sure practice is tailored to those things. And part of the reason I'm able to get the results with students who actually do what I tell them to do is because I've proven this stuff out. I know these drills work. I know that the way that I present them to a player, they're like, okay, cool, I understand. I go out there and execute and I get better. Because I've been able to see so much of that data. And I know, okay, if I plug this in, I'm going to get this result. And if I don't see this result moving, I know exactly where I need to go with this player and what they're going to need to improve. Versus if you don't track any of this stuff, how are you supposed to know? Be like, hey, we're working hard on our putting, it's not working, I guess we need to get a new coach, right? And like, to some degree that's true, you might need somebody who's a little bit more analytical. But to some degree, it's like you're not tracking. It's like you're just making those decisions based off of emotion. If you've had any level of success in your life, you know that that's not how things work. We've got to be based on some objective metrics. We can't be jumping around based on how we feel on a day-to-day basis. We need to be able to sit back, look at the numbers, and say like, what is this telling us? And what are the inputs that we've been putting in? And, you know, what adjustments can we make to those inputs to get better outputs? And then go ahead and execute on that and then reevaluate in the future. And so, you know, this player is a great example of that. Yeah, we still need to update this for, for this quarter here, but you guys can even see here, you know, he was at a scoring differential of 5.44. Now he's at a scoring differential of 3.81, you know, and it's like there's nothing too crazy here I'm showing you guys. I understand this is a little bit dry as well, you know, but the reality is there is such an impact of knowing where we're trying to get to, where we're at right now, how big that gap is, how fast we need to improve, and then strategically saying, okay, I'm going to take these specific actions, I'm going to play this much, I'm going to do these drills, and I'm going to adjust those drills over time as the needs that I have in my game are adjusting. And so long story short, hopefully this heavily sells you guys on the importance of just starting to track some of these things. You don't have to track all of them all at once. You know, obviously you're going to improve faster if you're able to track them all at once. But, you know, once again, just, just the value of being able to say, okay, here's what we're going to go do and execute and like evaluate, like, is it working or not? Is massive as far as the overall improvement potential. Potential. So once again, this is something you want help with for your child, and you want me to do all of this work for them, show them exactly where they need to, you know, where they need to practice, what drills they need to do, how— what adjustments they need to their mindset or their strategy on the golf course and everything. And you know that they can play at least one round of golf per week and track it, then I'd highly encourage you to check out the application, go through that process. Once again, you won't be able to sign up if I don't see that your child has a high probability of playing Division 1 golf. So, um, or we have a conversation where it was just like, hey, you know, we just want to achieve our highest level of success. That's the case. You know, not everyone has to play Division 1 golf, but for the most part, um, you know, this is something that is very, very serious. And, you know, at some level, the aspiration should be to play Division 1 golf. It's definitely not for beginners. If your child's just getting started, this is not for them. But if they're in that position where they're stuck, they're putting in the work, you know that they're putting in that minimum level of work, and if they just had a little bit more guidance then they would really be able to crush it, then once again, highly encourage you guys to check out that application, book a call, and we can talk about where your child's at and what they'll need to do to be successful. And again, if you're not sure and you want to start checking stuff out, um, highly encourage you guys to download the pacing calculator to kind of just kind of see where your child's at and, you know, see what's possible. And, you know, then you can kind of make decisions from there. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this one. If you're new here, go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you enjoy it and leave a like. It does help push it out to more people in the algorithm. So hope you guys enjoyed. Talk soon.