In this instructional video, Connor Stirling Peterson walks families and junior golfers through a systematic process for determining whether a junior golfer is on track to earn a college golf scholarship, especially at the Division I level. He begins by emphasizing the need for clear goals—identifying target schools, the scoring standards those schools recruit, and the timeline until recruitment. The core tool is the Junior Golf Scoreboard, whose three main pages (College Signees, Rankings, and the individual player profile) provide data on program recruiting benchmarks and a player’s scoring differential, a metric that compares a golfer’s average score to the difficulty of the courses they play. Peterson explains how to locate a junior golfer on the Scoreboard, the requirement to compete in at least four ranked tournaments to generate a ranking, and how to interpret the scoring differential. He then shows how to calculate the performance gap between the golfer’s current differential and the benchmark for a desired program, divide that gap by the remaining years before recruitment, and use the resulting figure to monitor year‑to‑year improvement. Throughout, he stresses the importance of playing the right ranked events, focusing on consistent improvement rather than winning every tournament, and avoiding unnecessary marketing or social‑media hype. The video concludes with a call to action to subscribe for more guidance.
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All right, what's going on everyone? So in this video, I'm going to cover how to figure out exactly what your junior golfer needs to do to accomplish their goals of playing college golf, how to figure out where are they trying to get to, what scores they need to shoot by what time, where are they at right now, and how fast do they need to improve on a year-to-year basis. That way you can actually pace yourself and have really realistic expectations. This is something that I talk to I talk to families all the time about where they're just kind of in the dark. You know, they're spending money on, you know, maybe weekly lessons with a coach, maybe monthly lessons, they're getting golf clubs, they're getting launch monitors, all this crazy stuff. And they don't even really know where they're trying to get to. And they don't really know where they're at at that moment. And so they don't really know how much they have to improve. And that creates a lot of anxiety for the junior golfer. It creates a lot of anxiety for the family. And so in this video, I want to make that extremely clear. Clearer for you guys. So that said, if you guys have been watching some of my other videos, you'll see the background's a little bit different and I don't have my mic that I normally have. Just moved across the country and so still waiting on some of the furniture to come in, but I want to make sure that I was continuing to help you guys out. So let's go ahead and jump into it. Now, the foundation of this is going to be your friend, is Junior Golf Scoreboard. You're going to see me talk to you guys a lot about this. Um, but this is just the broadest ranking index that the college coaches are going to look at. It's got a lot of really effective and valuable data for you guys to understand what your junior golfer needs to do to play college golf, especially for Division I golf. So there's 3 main pages you want to get really familiar with here. And so I'm on the first one of these, which is the college signees page, and all that means is it's going to show you where players have gone to, like college programs they've gone to, and what they shot in order to get to that program. So if you say, hey, my junior golfer wants to play at OSU, well, you can actually look up, like, well, what caliber of player does OSU recruit? That way they don't have to be in the dark about it. They can actually see like, oh, this is the caliber of player. So that's the first page you guys wanna get familiar with. Second page you wanna get familiar with is the rankings page. So this is for boys and for girls. And specifically what you wanna get comfortable with is the scoring differential number, because that's what all these players are gonna be ranked on based on their scoring differential. And I'll do a video in the future kind of going a little bit into exactly what scoring differential is, but just for the sake of this video, it's the relationship between the difficulty of the golf course or the course rating versus what your junior golfer is shooting on average, give or take a little bit. So they're going to throw out the worst 25% of their rounds, but that's still a decent portion of the rounds as compared to like a handicap where it's, you know, only the top 20% of their rounds on average. Scoring differential is going to be the top 75% of their rounds on average. So if they shoot a million and they never do that, that'll get thrown out. But really want to pay attention to whatever their scoring average is. But long story short, that is what the scoring differential is gonna represent for your child. So if they're shooting really good scores, but they're on kind of easy golf courses, then their scoring differential won't be as good as if they played on harder golf courses and shot those same scores. So it's not just based on their scoring average, right? So anyway, what you wanna do is if you go to this page here, and you can either sort by the rank, the players recruited, that. So if you're like, hey, you know, what are the— where are the best players in the program or in the country going? You can see that. Or you could sort by a particular school. If you're like, hey, I want to go to, let's say, Stanford, scroll all the way down, say, okay, cool, that's probably when Stanford is like third in the class and had a scoring differential of -7.5. Okay, cool, now you know. And you can see this for all these different programs here. For the most part, it's going to be Division I, Division 3 doesn't have quite as many resources and doesn't report back quite as much. So this is really going to be their ground. You can do this for boys and girls, and you can look back up to 4 years on this. You can really see like what is the caliber of player that this program's recruiting, what direction are they kind of trending in. And then the next piece here is you want to find your junior golfer on Junior Golf Scoreboard, right? A lot of the times parents don't really understand that their child needs to be ranked, and it's not necessarily because it matters like how they do versus all the other kids in their tournament. That actually doesn't really matter that much at all. But it's really important for, for you guys to be able to see like, where are we at? Because it's all well and good to have the coach be like, well, you know, I want you to be the best 17-year-old, not the best 10-year-old or 12-year-old or whatever. That sounds good, but how are you supposed to pace yourself? Or how are you supposed to say we're on track, or we're ahead of pace, or we're behind pace? Every tournament you go out there and say, well, I'm just going to try and win this, Well, number one, that's probably not the best mindset because we're not going to win every single tournament. And it also doesn't really help us build on anything. So if we can say, hey, we consistently are improving and we're improving at the rate that we need to, well then we'd say, okay, cool, just keep on keeping on, keep on doing the same thing. And we don't have to panic, we don't have to freak out. And if we're behind, then it's like, okay, either we can change our expectations or we play around with what we're doing to try and get better results. So that's how you guys really wanna be doing this, is understand like, where are you trying to get to? Where's your junior golfer at right now? What's the distance? And then divide that by the number of years that they have until they're gonna get recruited. So that'd be about their junior year. So if they're in 8th grade, you've got about 4 years. So just take whatever that difference is and then, you know, and so you might be asking yourself, hey Connor, you know, this is all well and good. How do I actually, you know, get ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard? Do I have to pay for it or whatever? It's pretty straightforward. All you have to do is— and I'm not even logged in here just so you guys can see this— uh, just go to tournaments and results, search for tournaments right here, and then just pick out your state. So, um, let's say you're in North Carolina. Check. I'm not gonna lie. Cool. So let's say you're in North Carolina. These are all the tournaments that are in North Carolina that are ranked by Junior Golf Scoreboard. So you don't even have to guess about this stuff. You don't have to go to the website and be like, oh well, you know, it says it's ranked, then it wasn't ranked, or whatever. Like, this is what you guys should be doing. So you've got a junior golfer who's 10 or older, I really recommend that you go through this process. Just, they don't already have a ranking, go here, pick out some tournaments. They need to play at least 4 to be officially ranked. But then figure out, like, you know, look up, you know, go here, let's say, you know, their name's James, and, you know, find them over here. Okay, cool, here's what your scoring differential is. Find the program that they want to go to, or the set of programs, you know, if they're just like generic Division I and my recommendation is look at about where they need to be to be ranked about 150 in their class, maybe 100 in their class, or get some good offers in that kind of range, get scholarships in that range. Um, or if they have a specific program that they want to go to, look at, you know, what's the scoring differential for that program, figure out what their scoring differential is, do the math, how, how big is the gap, and then divide those out, and that's your number. And then you can really track that number going If you use statistics in their practice or statistics in their performance, you can really say, like, are we improving at the rate that we need to in order to accomplish their goals? So I hope this video is helpful for you guys. If you're a junior golfer and you're just kind of like, I don't know what we need to do in order to get there, this is the process that you should go through. And there's, there's really nothing else to it, you know. Like, you can actually go out there and say, like, here's our scores, you know, we're playing the right events, all that stuff. Then your junior golfer is going to be able to be successful. They don't need to have all this crazy stuff on Instagram or marketing or, you know, emails and all that. They just need to play good golf. And so playing the right events and it'll help them consistently improve— that this is really the process you guys want to be going through. So hopefully this, uh, video is helpful for you. If it was, go ahead and subscribe to the channel for more videos like this and leave a like, uh, if you enjoyed this as well. So I'll talk to you guys soon.
