How To Get Into AJGA Invitationals

All right, what's going on everyone? Um, so in this video I'm going to be covering how to get into AJGA Invitationals and how to navigate the Rolex rankings. Um, this is a video that I'm going to go deep dive into this. Um, it's probably not going to apply to a lot of you guys, but I think it'll be helpful for a few things. Number one, I think it'll be helpful for those of you who are in this situation, um, that this is relevant for you. And if you're not in this situation, then it'll at least help you understand where you need to go and what the steps are. And that'll help you kind of plan a little bit earlier. Cause a lot of the time, I think most players don't really understand how deep this rabbit hole goes and also really what the best players in the country are doing and how they got there. And so I'm going to be breaking that all down in this video. I'm going to be going through the website and be showing you guys on AJGA where they say all this stuff. And then helping you understand how to understand the Rolex rankings and how that impacts, you know, where you actually get recruited to play at. If you enjoy videos like this, go ahead and hit the like button and subscribe to the channel. Um, pretty new channel, so it really helps for every subscriber that we get, helps push it out to more people. So anyway, let's go ahead and jump right into this. So the first page I have pulled up here, uh, is actually kind of crazy. You can't even get this from the, the main, um, website, or at least I haven't been able to find a way to find it. But it is the Invitational criteria. So if you wanted to go into Google, what you'd want to do is you'd type in like AJGA Invitational criteria. It should be like the first tab that comes up. And what you'll see is all of the Invitational events that AJGA puts on and the criteria that they have for who they invite to the event. And so This is kind of a part 2 to some of the videos that I've done on AJGA in the past. For the most part, most people are concerned about how do I get into AJGA events at all. Maybe they are struggling to get through the qualifiers and that's kind of like the main problem, or you might have heard of like AJGA Stars or things along those lines. And that stuff is, you know, what a lot of people are going to struggle with at the beginning. But this is more of a problem, and the thing that we're going to be looking at here, this is really for players who already have exempt status. You have top 5 or you top 3 in an event and you're kind of like, okay, now what, right? And this, this is the now what. So if we went over to, you know, tournament schedule here, you can see that there's different types of events. There's Opens, um, there's Junior All-Star events, um, let's see, and then we've got Invitational events. Right. And so each one of these is a little bit different. And so we're going to be really focusing in on the invitationals because if you have exempt status, you've already top 5 in an AJGA Open or you've top 3 in an AJGA Open if you're a girl. So that's what that looks like. And it kind of leaves you with the position of like, okay, cool, what now? Like I did the AJGA thing. How is this helpful for me now? And here's kind of the way to look at that. So the first place we want to kind of go is, uh, Rolex rankings here. So, you know, just click rankings, it'll take you here, and you'll see this like accordion thing, which, um, is a little bit difficult to kind of navigate through. But you're going to see this idea of a point system. So you're going to see what tournaments are locked in at 225-point bubble, what tournaments have minimum point value, what points are earned, you know, each field, what are bonus points. That's, uh, really something you want to get more familiar with once you're in this position. So 225 events. So we've got Carlton Woods Invitational presented by Ping, Team TaylorMade. These are major events you might have heard of, you might not have heard of, but these are the biggest events in the country. And you can kind of tell that because the non-AJGA events that are put in the same category are, you know, the junior players The US Junior, Sage Valley, the Western Junior. And so that can kind of, you know, tell you it's like these are the best tournaments in the country. And so if you want to play college golf, it's reasonable to say that you're gonna have to play really good golf against the best players in the country. This is where the best players are. Now we want to ask, okay, how do we get there? How do we get into these events, right? Well, we want to look at the criteria. So let's take an example, Carlton Woods. Okay, so We need to be top 64 in boys based on Rolex rankings as of this date, and then we've got additional spots. So those additional spots are pretty much just going to go down the rankings, or anyone who has, you know, special privileges, you know, maybe they won the tournament or something along those lines. But this is the main thing that you want to focus on here is, okay, we're looking at the top 64 players on Rolex rankings. So the next kind of piece here is we're going to want to go over to our, you know, handy-dandy rankings here. And so we can actually just look at this and say, okay, what is the criteria for top 64? Let's look right in the cut line here. So this player is ranked 64th, and it's, uh, on the overall Rolex ranking. So it's a little bit different from Junior Golf Scoreboard. This is looking at your overall for the entire ranking index versus Junior Golf Scoreboard. We're looking more at the class ranking, but we can kind of see here, you know, which events has this player played in. And you can see a lot of these events are, um, you know, obviously AJGA, you know, this is just an Open. But then you've got like the Junior Players, which is an Invitational. You've got the Invitational presented by Ping. Um, you have the, uh, let's see here, Team TaylorMade. Um, the Western Junior. So this player has played in a decent number of events, and so each one of these events has a particular point value. So in total, he's earned 256 points or 257 points, and so that's being divided by 14 events. He doesn't have any bonus points, so that gives us 18.39 events. So real high level here, if you want your junior golfer to be ranked as well as possible, they need to be playing in at least 5 AJGA events and one non-AJGA event, because this divisor— so it's points divided by the events played, but it's a divisor of a minimum of 6, right? So if you've only played in 4 events, what you'll actually find is that the number will seem lower than it should be because you haven't played in that many events, right? So again, especially when you get to the higher and higher levels of performance, you don't need to play in quite as many tournaments, but you need to play in higher quality tournaments. So a lot of players are used to playing 15, 20, 25 events per year, but they— when I say, hey, you need to play in 6 or 7, you know, AJGA or these big national events, that seems like a lot. Because again, we have to make the mental shift from saying, okay, I'm gonna play in everything, to I'm only gonna play in high-quality stuff. And that's going to impact your Junior Golf Scoreboard ranking as well. But it's just important for us to understand kind of like that's what the path looks like now. Here's kind of the next layer of, um, this is to say like, okay, well, how many points do I get? You know, it gets 18 points, 40 points, 15 points. How do we go about this? Well, we're going to go back to our accordion here, and you actually want to go into— let's see here— what points are earned at each finishing position, right? So there's this little spreadsheet they actually give you. It's kind of ridiculous, um, but this is the finished position. right? So, or this is like the value of the tournament, and then this is where you finished, right, on this left-hand column here. So I'll zoom in here a little bit for you guys. You guys can see that a little bit better. But you can see here, if you win the tournament, you get that many points. So if we go to like the 225s, if you win the 225 event, you get 225 points. If you, you know, let's say top 10, at the 225-point event, you get 31 points roughly. And so you can kind of see how this, you know, breaks down here. And so one of the things that I've seen players do, and this is one of the things that I was, yeah, inclined to do the first time I learned about this, so I was like, oh, you need to play in the highest point value events all the time. But I want to give you a little bit of a thought experiment here. If we take the US Junior, what do you think is harder to do to win an AJGA Open or to top 10 at the US Junior? I would say it's a lot easier to win an AJGA Open than it is to top 10 at the US Junior. And so, you know, if you win an AJGA Open, you get 40 points. If you top 10 at the US Junior, you get 31 points. So we can't really hack this system by trying to say, I want to play this tournament or that tournament or so on and so forth, because there's no real advantage either way, you know. If you have the option between I could play in an AJGA Open, maybe I win it, maybe I get 40 points, or I could play in the US Junior, I'm still going to tell you to play in the US Junior. Because number one, like, if you do do really well, like, that benefits you. And it's also— there's no guarantee that you win this, you know, AJGA. So I mean, like, if you only, you know, let's say top 5 Now you're only getting 12.5 points versus, you know, you'd have to finish all the way down, you know, top 21, um, the US Junior. So again, like, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison here, but this is just to help you understand, like, here's how you're earning these points. And so I generally don't like something like a Senior Showcase because Senior Showcases don't really have a ton of points, the fields aren't particularly great. It doesn't really help you in your rankings that much. It's kind of an opportunity. It's like, yeah, someone goes out there and shoots 63, cool, but it doesn't really do that much for you. And it's not something I would build a plan out of. And so once you're in this position where you can say, okay, I can get into any AJGA event, then you want to start saying, okay, cool, what's the best AJGA event that I can get into, right? Because we've already put— we've already proven ourselves that we can pretty much shoot even par for you know, 3 rounds of golf or something like that. And so now we want to say, all right, what's the best event that I can get into that has a decent number of points, and how can I do as well as possible in that? So again, I'm always going to come back to the principle of there's 2 things we need to do. We need to play against the best players we can, and we need to play it as good a golf as we can, right? And so, you know, if we're at that level, we're already kind of in that, you know, probably 74, 73, 72 scoring average. We're still trying to improve on that. We're still trying to get longer. We're still trying to get better around the greens. We're still trying to get better approach shots. We'll be trying to become a better putter. But now we've got the option to play in a higher level of event, right? And so that's kind of how this ends up looking. An AJGA Open has 40 points. A Junior All-Star, uh, I want to say has 20 points. A preview let me— before I'm just like spaghetti, so I'm not just making this stuff up here. So AJJ Open, 40 points. Senior event, like I said, 20 points. Um, let's see, uh, preview, 15 points. We should have, uh, yeah, Junior All-Star, 20 points. All right, so, and then we've got all these ones in between. Right? So we can kind of see like a hierarchy here, you know. If you want to say, all right, well, which events should I play in? Well, if you had the option between like, I don't know, some nothing event, or you could get into, I don't know, um, you know, Innisbrook— well, I would play in Innisbrook. But if you can't, then it makes sense to be like, okay, well, what's the next highest value? What's that next highest value from there? And this isn't— it's not like you're way better off if you go to the two you know, 120-point event as opposed to the 70-point event, because you have to factor in there like the strength of the field, the difficulty of it. There's really no gaming. It's a win-win situation. And this is just to look at for you, um, as a parent of a junior golfer, or if you're a junior golfer and you're watching this, to understand, okay, cool, here's kind of the hierarchy of why you're going to pick the tournaments that you're going to pick. Um, here's how to be thinking through that rather than just saying I'm just going to go pick whatever like my local thing is. You're not really putting yourself in a position where like, let's say you go out, you play well, you win the tournament. Well, you're kind of giving yourself a false positive because it probably wasn't that strong, as strong of a field as it could have been. It doesn't necessarily help your ranking. And it's just kind of like, it doesn't really move the needle in any particular direction. You know, it'd be like if a PGA Tour player decided to play in like a, the Fresno State Open. It was just like, well, why? Like if the other option was like go qualify for the US Open. It's obviously a better choice to go and qualify for the US Open. And so that, that's the same kind of principle here that we would want to apply, is kind of work through these events and to the point where we're playing our 5 plus our 1 non-AJGA or more. So if you want to play more, if you want to play in, you know, more higher-level events, by all means do that. Um, and so it was kind of like a quick quick glance at this is you can actually, uh, you can see that here. Um, let's see if I can find this real quick. But you know, if you think about like the, uh, yeah, Dustin Johnson World Junior, that's a non-AJGA event, it has a qualifier, it's 100 points. Jones Cup Invitational, that has a qualifier, it's non-AJGA, it's worth 100 points. Uh, Bobby Chapman Um, IMG Junior Worlds— like, these are all non-AJGA events. Uh, Scott Robertson. So these are all non-AJGA events that give you Rolex points. So if you're trying to build out a schedule and you're saying, okay, well, I should have some AJGA in there if I'm playing at a reasonably high level— um, and when I say reasonably high level, I mean kind of a scoring average of 77 or better. But let's say, you know, you're watching this video because you've already, you know, you're exempt. You should be trying to play in every one of these events that, that makes sense. Or a decent number of them. You should be looking at and saying, okay, well, I should play some AJGA and I should play in some non-AJGA. I should try and qualify for the US Junior. I should qualify— try and qualify for the Junior PGA. I should try and qualify for Junior Worlds if it's reasonable to get there. I should look at the Dustin Johnson World Junior if I'm on the East Coast. I should be looking at Scott Robertson if I'm on the East Coast. Um, those are the things that you want to be thinking through and saying, okay, I just want to give myself the best chance playing the best possible tournaments. If I do reasonably well, and then it's going to get easier and easier to get into these bigger events because my ranking is going to get better, which is how they do the tiebreaker for those higher-level events. Um, for the events where everybody who's applied is exempt, that's how they do it. That's how they do the tiebreaker. And so again, going back here, you get closer and closer, and eventually you're in this, you know, top Rolex player, and then you get invited to these events. And so that, that really is the process. And again, like, why should you care? Look at the top-ranked players. Like, let's just, you know, start pulling up a few here. Look at the events that they're playing in— AJGA, non-AJGA, but elite events. So Junior Am, Jack Burke, Junior PGA, all these AJGA events. Like, this is what the best players are playing in. We are not gonna see the best players playing in random local nonsense. Um, like, that's just how this, uh, how this goes here. And so hopefully this video is helpful for you guys if you're in a position where maybe you're just starting off in AJGA and you're not sure like what, what the point is or what the long-term point is, or maybe you just got exempt status and you're not really sure what to do with that or which events you should be doing, getting into now that you have it. Hopefully this video kind of answers that question. And if you want more help, feel free to reach out or jump on my newsletter. I release stuff like this every single week. I also do a few of these in the email form. And again, if you guys enjoyed this video, please leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you're new here. Like I said, it really does help the channel grow. I'll be doing more stuff like this in the future since it seems like you guys do enjoy these AJGA and kind of tournament breakdowns. So that's, in my opinion, it's relatively simple, but I know it looks very complicated. So that's why I'm trying to do more of this stuff so that you guys understand what you need to do to accomplish your goals. So hope this video is helpful for you guys, and I'll be talking to you guys soon.