How to Dominate Your First AJGA Event: Tips for Junior Golfers

What's going on guys, welcome to the video. We've got the Loom videos back and you've been here before. If you're new to the channel, uh, welcome in. This channel is all about helping your junior golfer develop to play Division 1 golf and all the things in between. So if that sounds like something that you're interested in, go ahead and hit the subscribe button to get videos like this every single week. In today's video specifically, I'm going to be going over how to help your junior golfer dominate their first AJGA event. So, you know, if you guys are kind of getting to that point in the year where we're looking at tournaments, trying to figure out what do we sign up for, and maybe you're in the spot where your child's finally old enough to play AJGA, or maybe you feel like their skill level is finally getting to the place where you feel comfortable, you know, picking out some AJGA tournaments to play in, this video is going to help you really understand, like, what should you guys be looking for, um, what mistakes you want— not want to make, um, what things you want to avoid, and also how do you come into these tournaments and give your child a high probability of success. I think that's one of the really, you know, most important things is there's a lot of tournaments out there that you can play in. There's a lot of like big tournaments that you can play in. And I think it's so important to just really understand like, how does this fit into the big picture for your child? Um, they've got goals. I'm sure, you know, you want to help them in that. And so you don't want to just like sign them up for a bunch of random stuff. You want to make sure that it's strategic. So that way you all kind of have a perspective of like, where are we going here? Um, what are we trying to accomplish? And then we can make, you know, decisions about what are the best steps. So in this video, I want to help you guys do that. So let's go ahead and jump right into it. So you guys see me on Junior Golf Scoreboard here. Well, what the heck does Junior Golf Scoreboard have anything to do with HGA? Well, Junior Golf Scoreboard's the broadest ranking index, and so we're going to be able to have the most perspective of kind of like, you know, where are players at. I've got the class of 2023 30 pulled up so we can kind of see the last year performance in some AJGA events because most of these elite players are going to be playing in those. Let's see if we can just pick a random one and see what, you know, if we played anything. Um, all right, cool. So we got one Junior All-Star here, we got another Junior All-Star here. And so, you know, right out the gate, um, you know, if you've got a child that's kind of, you know, 12, 13, 14 years old— if they're 14 right now, if they're 15 and they're— as long as they're 14 at the beginning of the year, they're still eligible for Junior All-Star events. Um, but that's kind of what you're going to see here, especially, you know, just getting into those AJGA events. And we can kind of see, you know, at least for this player, is one of the best players in the country. We can see what he shot, you know, for this AJGA event. He shot 80, 75, 78. Um, for this one over here, he shot 75, 73, 74. Okay, not bad. Um, this was about 6,700, 6,800 yards, and this was about 6,500 yards. So right off the gate, hopefully you guys can kind of see here what the expectations should be if you're going to go play in an AJGA Junior All-Star event. You want your child to be in a position where they're probably averaging— I would say at a minimum that you want them to be averaging about 77 or better in tournaments. That's kind of like the range where it like starts to make sense. Anything prior to that, it's not that they can't play in AJGA, it's just they're not going to get a lot out of it. And it would make a lot more sense for you guys strategically to say, how do we just invest in our local events and invest in improving our scoring average and just validating those events before we start worrying about AJGA and qualifying and all that stuff, because there's a few things you can benefit from AJGA if, you know, if you're strategic with this stuff. But that's just kind of like the big picture. You want to be able to score at about, you know, 6,300, you know, 6,400— or I'm sorry, not 6,300, 6,500 to 6,800 yards for Junior All-Star events. It's kind of like where you want to be. Um, and you want your child to be comfortable shooting, I'd say, on average about 77. Why is that? Well, because they're gonna go out there and it's like maybe they have a good tournament, they could conceivably shoot 73 or 74 or 75. You know, if they have, you know, they don't play their best or maybe they have a bad day, they could very easily shoot, you know, 81, 82, which isn't the best thing in the world, but it's also not the end of the world. You know, at 77, like you're gonna shoot your fair share of 81s. So anyway, the, the kind of starting principle, the starting foundation idea here is just having expectations that are realistic. Uh, and that's not just like, you know, some fluff about, oh, well, you know, you don't wanna like load your kid up with too much stress. It's just like, be realistically, like, what's our scoring average? And if you don't know that, like, okay, cool. But like, you need to start tracking. You need to have an idea of what that number is so that you can go into an event with certainty and be like, okay, cool. Like, this makes sense. And even if you go, you know, your child shoots 81, 82, well, you can understand statistically it's like, it wasn't really that far off in their average. And maybe we just need to improve our average a little bit in order to be successful, you know, in AJGA tournaments. So that's kind of like the foundational thing. It's just like knowing before you go into this event, like, can we score, you know, at this distance? And, you know, do we have a high probability of being able to score at this distance? That's really what this comes down to. So I kind of want to like start off with that, um, just so you guys are clear. The way that I like to track that for all my students is like, yes, I can look at my students and say, okay, cool, you know, what's our scoring average on Junior Golf Scoreboard? Yeah, here's another example. We got a bunch of AJGA, we've got 4 AJGA Junior All-Stars, and again, kind of same, same regardages, similar scores. And this player's got that 77 scoring average. So again, like I'm not just making this stuff up. Like I've actually like looked at, I've looked at a lot of students, worked with a lot of students. So I kind of have a sense of like, all right, cool. This is kind of like where we should be. And also to be clear, this player played a lot of other stuff too. You know, they played in their local events. You know, we're in Texas here. So they've got their, you know, their South Texas PGA. They got their other events here. They got some other stuff. But point being, you know, AJJ is not the end-all be-all, but Again, this just kind of gives you guys some perspective on the yardages that you want to be comfortable, you know, playing in and the scoring average that your child probably wants to have. But the meat and potatoes of this though is like, what's the scoring average? Like, how do we keep track of that? How do we also measure that over time and know what to focus on? So my personal preference, I like a tool called Circles. I'm showing you guys one of my students I work with who's around this age, and, you know, scoring average right now is, you know, just under about 76 in kind of our most recent tracked tournaments. And, you know, he's definitely going to be playing AJGA Junior All-Stars over this next year. So I figured it'd be a good kind of like comp for you guys. Anyway, uh, the main things you guys are going to focus on— greens regulation is huge. A lot of times we look at like longer golf courses, the real difference, um, for a player, it's like if you play a longer golf course, you shouldn't change your 3-putt rate. I guess like you're playing— it doesn't matter how long the golf course is, greens are always pretty much the same size. Um, it really shouldn't impact your penalty rate. You know, it's not like we're all of a sudden gonna start hitting balls out of bounds. If anything, it's actually gonna be easier because typically longer golf courses are going to have a little bit more room just to account for, you know, we're trying to hit longer tee shots. Short game shouldn't change. If we're close to the green, we're close to the green. Um, so really the only big change is greens regulation. That's something you want to have a real close track on. So like, you know, for example, let's say your child's playing at like 6,100 yards, right? Well, if you were actually able to track their stuff, you know, if you're using a tool like Circles, which I do recommend, um, then you can actually see the greens regulation rate at whatever it is right now. And let's say they have a scoring average of 77, but you're just like, you know, we don't play long enough golf courses. Well, you can actually dig into this and say, okay, cool, like what's our average approach distance? And, you know, if we played holes that were longer, you know, let's say went up to 65, 6600 yards, like what is our average approach number going to change to, you know, based on that? And how often are we going to hit the green from those particular distances? So, you know, in this case for this player, you know, 100 to 125 yards, 74%, 125 to 150 yards, 55%, right? So there's a little bit of a drop off there. So if you went for— we start playing longer golf courses, we go from hitting 70% of our greens to hitting 55% of our greens, he actually didn't become a worse golfer. He actually was just challenging himself a little bit more because he's playing, you know, he needs to get better at that skill. And so this is how you guys want to actually look at that and help your child prepare, you know, for these events. It's actually like have some perspective on like, okay, well, our approach numbers are going to change. And so if we're going to practice, we're going to allocate that time toward those numbers that we're going to have more frequently. And then we're going to want to track that in the actual tournament. Um, that's really the perspective you guys want to have from a scoring, um, perspective. Um, the other thing I'll kind of throw out there is you also want to have a sense of like, what's our tournament performance and what's our practice performance? Because those, those very likely could be different. But you want to have a pulse on that because if you understand, you know, where, where is my child performing in practice and how does that change in tournaments, well, you can strategically say, okay, cool, well, you know, this isn't a problem in practice, but it is a problem in tournaments. So we really want to double down on the skill, even if it's like, hey, it seems like it's fine in practice. It's like, we know that that skill breaks down in tournaments. We have to have a higher standard that we expect ourselves in practice to accommodate for that. Now hopefully that makes sense. It's just a concept, um, because it would be silly to be like, oh well, I never 3-putt in practice, but I 3-putt all the time in tournaments. It's like, well, we better grind on whatever we screw up in tournaments. And we also really got to think about like, okay, what happens here? Like, if we're missing— if we go from never missing short putts, missing short putts, like, are we just giving ourselves putts in practice? Are we not taking those putts seriously? Is our process very different? Like, we can really dig into the mindset stuff around that. Um, and also, just to be clear, you know, if you guys are kind of going through this, you're like, whoa, this is a lot, It's a lot of data. There's a lot of specific things that we might need to do. This is something I obviously help people with. So if you want my personal help, there's an application below this video where you can just apply. And if it makes sense and it's something that'll help you guys, you guys will be able to book a call and we can talk it over and I can potentially help your child. But again, that's not really the point of this video. The point is just to kind of help you guys understand, like, here are the steps that you want to go through. Anyway, going on to kind of like the last piece of this. Uh, tournaments, you know, let's just look at the 2025 tournaments. Uh, AJGA is pretty straightforward with that, uh, keeps things pretty easy. You know, if your child is younger, then you're going to pay attention to two different types of tournaments. You're going to pay attention to Junior All-Star events, and you're going to pay attention to previews. Um, so you don't really need to worry about Opens yet. Um, you can if you want to challenge your child. These little I-1s, these invitationals, you're probably not getting it, especially if you're just getting started. You're not going to be in those. Don't need to worry about that. Qualifiers are going to be how your child's going to get into a lot of these events. So they're going to have to be able to qualify, they have to be able to play well enough for a day or two in order to qualify into these, these bigger events, which is again part of why you want to have that kind of expectation of like, okay, our scoring average is here, we're probable to shoot scores give or take, you know, a certain amount. For all you math people out there, I'd say the standard deviation on most players' scoring average is about 4, plus or minus 4 is going to be about what you're typically going to see. So if your child has a scoring average of 77, then they can shoot as low as 73 or high as 81, probably about 70% of the time. And so you can roll that dice enough times to say like, hey, I'm not just gonna go play in one AJGA event, I'm gonna play in as many as we possibly can to give my child the highest probability of having one round or two rounds where they qualify to get into the event. It's just a higher, you know, higher chance of being successful. Um, anyway, also, if you're just getting started, one of the things I would really encourage you guys to look at is the previews. Um, just in general, because previews will give your child an automatic exemption, such like they've never played AJGA before. Then previews can be really, really useful. And again, the turn— the, the fields for previews aren't really that difficult, um, because most of the time, you know, these players have never played AJGA before. That's the whole point of it. Um, let me go ahead and like bring up— yeah, okay, total yardage. You guys will see very, very similar to what you would expect in a Junior All-Star event, right? Um, there might be some older players, but if you got a younger player, it's like A lot of time the older players are going to be just as good. Sometimes it'll be worse. It's not really the biggest deal in the world, but it's kind of an opportunity for your child to, to earn some stars. As you guys can kind of see here, you know, it's a pretty good star payout, you know, if your child does well. And it's not really that hard to do well. It's not that challenging. Again, if you have that 77 scoring average, there's a decent probability they walk out of that tournament with a few stars. And then it gets easier to get into some of the junior all-star events. They don't have to qualify for them as often. But again, going into these Junior All-Star events, we can kind of see what— you know, let's look at the distance on the golf course. That's TBD. All right, cool. Um, so you guys will also kind of see, you know, we're early in the year right now. There's a lot of events that are going to be coming up, and it's going to speed up as we go throughout the year. Um, but the other thing you really want to do is you want to kind of note down, like, what are all the events that we could play in that actually, like, makes sense? Like like isolate, like, in your state, how many junior all-star events are there? In adjacent states, like states touching your state, how many junior all-star events or previews are there? Then go ahead and like kind of map out those, because those are going to be the least flexible tournaments, and they're going to be really worthwhile playing in, especially if your child has a scoring average. Now, if they don't, again, then the focus just becomes like, let's bring the scores down, which is generally what the focus is going to be regardless of where they're at. You know, I work with players who are ranked, you know, top 100 in their class most of our conversation revolves around how do we bring the scores down, because it's like, all right, well, instead of playing in the local stuff that we don't have to think too hard about, we play in the AJGA stuff and the better events that we don't have to think too hard about. And then, you know, instead of the focus being like, let's bring the scoring average down, it's like, let's bring the scoring average down and get exempt status because we brought the scoring average down and we played enough events. We had a high probability of top 5ing. So hopefully that makes it— or top, top 3 for all the girls. Um, But that's really the, the perspective that I want to give you guys in this video is if you're going and you're playing your first AJGA event, your child's playing their first AJGA event, number one, just have expectations. Like, sort it out. Like, what's our actual scoring average? Like, tracked all of our rounds? Like, what is that number? Um, what do we need to focus on in order to be successful? Um, if we're not there, or if we are there and we just want to be, you know, more successful, as Kobe Bryant said, uh, you want to use a tool like circles. or something like that to be able to track your stats. Um, for all you people who love Decade, I love Scott Fawcett too. I think his stuff is great. One of the things that I really, I'm, I know I'm nitpicking here. I love having custom date ranges because it allows me to say like when I build out a tournament schedule or, um, more specifically a practice plan for a player, I can see, hey, here's when we did the practice plan and here's been the results since then. So it's a lot easier to evaluate what's working, what's not based on, hey, I got a new putter. Okay. How have the performance been since we got the new putter versus just like last 10 rounds or last 4 rounds or something like that? I can get really granular about it. It. And that's just kind of like me being nitpicky. But I love Circles. I think, I think they're, you know, it's a great platform. You need to use something like it and just pick out the tournaments that, you know, make sense. If you guys are in that position, you pick out a few tournaments. Don't just play in one and then not do well or not get in and be like, oh, AJGA is a scam. Um, that's not true at all. Uh, all the, the best players for the most part are going to play AJGA, especially if they don't live in like California, um, you know, North Carolina, Virginia, Florida, Texas, you know, some of those you can kind of get away with it because it's just very competitive states. But especially if you're in a state that isn't one of those, like, definitely want to be looking at HHGA. It is well worth the money. You just got to go in with right expectations and have the right understanding. So I hope this video is helpful for you guys. Again, if you guys want help with any of this stuff, you want guidance on that, I have an application below where you can learn more about potentially working together, what that would look like. And again, if that makes sense, we'll be able to set up a call, talk it over. And go over next steps for that. If you enjoyed this video, please go ahead and leave a like. It does help it push it out to more people and help more people. Don't be one of those people who are like, no, this is my own, you know, special secret sauce or whatever. I'm trying to help you guys as much as possible, and I hope these videos are helpful and give you guys clear perspective. You guys have something else you want me to cover, then please go ahead, leave a comment below. I read all of them, I respond to all of them. So if you got something you want me to cover, then I'll do my best to cover it if it makes sense. So talk to you guys soon.