How To Get Your Junior Golfer Ranked In 2024

All right, what's going on guys? So in today's video, I'm going to be going over how to get your junior golfer ranked in 2024, and I'm going to be going over the 4 most important things that you need to know about that process. I'm going to talk about why you need to get ranked at all, where to get ranked, how to find tournaments that are guaranteed to be ranked. A lot of times I see parents think that their kid is ranked somewhere they're actually not, or the tournaments say that they get points or they get rankings when they actually don't. And then the last one, which I believe is the most important, is going to be covering how to monitor their progress over time and really how to make the most out of their ranking and be focusing on the right things. So first things first, if you're new to the channel and you enjoy videos about junior golf, or maybe you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf, Division I golf, then go ahead and subscribe to the channel below. Um, dropping one of these videos every single week. Um, so if you enjoy this one, I'm sure you'll enjoy the other ones on the channel. Um, go ahead and do that. So let's go ahead and hop right into this. Now, first things first, why should you get ranked at all? Um, why should you help your junior golfer get ranked at all? A lot of the times when I talk to parents, there's kind of a weariness of, of getting their child ranked at all. You know, they've talked to— maybe their coach says, you know, they don't think it's a good idea, or maybe they're worried about putting pressure on their child. Um, you know, maybe they, you know, kind of see that in kind of a toxic way. But here's kind of the right way to look at that and really the way to understand ranking. Now, first things first, if your junior golfer is under 10 years old, then they can't be ranked, um, in any meaningful way, and you don't need to worry about that at all. Their main concern really should just be playing golf, enjoying the game, and lowering their scores. And that's going to be the biggest thing, you know, regardless of what level they are. They always want to be lowering their scores. And so rankings aren't even really accessible until you're 10. So if you've got a 9-year-old, you're cool, you know, don't worry about it. But, you know, if you have a junior golfer who is, you know, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, they want to play college, then having them be ranked is going to be a really valuable asset. But it's probably not why you think. So a lot of the times, you know, parents look at a ranking and say, oh, well, my kid is here compared to all the other kids. Kids, or, you know, something like that. And that's not really the best way to use, uh, the rankings. It is definitely a function. It definitely shows you how your child compares against other kids, but at the end of the day, it really doesn't tell you that much. Just, you know, that information just says, oh, this other kid is better, better than my kid. And that's not really a healthy way to look at it. The way to look at rankings is to help you understand how far away from their goal that your junior golfer is. So what does that mean? If they want to play college golf, they need to reach a certain level of performance. And thankfully, you guys can actually like look that up based on where they want to go or where they have an idea where they might want to go. You can actually just go and look up what level of performance will your child need to have, and you'll see that in the form of scoring differentials. So let me just go ahead and show that to you guys. Right now. So we're going to go on over to Junior Golf Scoreboard. It's the largest ranking index, um, for college, uh, coaches and for junior golf. So we're gonna go over here and we're going to go to rankings and honors and then college signings. And then we're going to go to this page here that's going to show all the players that got recruited to play college golf in the last 4 years. So 2024, '23, '22, '21, boys and girls. And this is just— this is public information. Like, you can just go here, you don't have to pay anything, and you can just go to this site and check it out. And what you want to do next is, uh, organize by the class rank when they were recruited. And so this will show you which players were recruited to which programs, where they ranked in their class, and what their scoring differential was. And if you're new to this, Scoring differential is just how your junior golfer performed versus the difficulty of the golf course. So for example, if they played on a course rating, which is just to say how hard the golf course is for a reasonably good golfer, is 72 and they shot 70, then they have a scoring differential of -2. So that, that's pretty much the simple way to understand. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but just for the sake of this video, that's what it is if you're new to this. And so all you have to do is say, you know, you can also sort by school here. So let's say your junior golfer wants to play at UCLA. Well, you can just go ahead, search here, scroll all the way down. UCLA, they need to be ranked roughly, let's say 50th in their class by the time they're roughly a junior in high school. And the most important thing is that they probably need to have a scoring differential somewhere in the, you know, -4-ish, -4.5 range in order for that to be a realistic goal for them. It's kind of like if you were trying to get into Harvard, there's kind of, you know, GPA and SAT scores that you kind of want to target that are acceptable for that type of program. In the same way, you know, you probably aren't going to go to UCLA if your junior golfer has a scoring differential of you know, zero, that's probably not gonna happen. Maybe if you guys have a massive amount of money that you wanna offer at the school, maybe they'll take your child as a walk-on, but you know, that's its own case scenario. For the most part, if you wanna give them a good chance, then you wanna say, okay, well, you know, let's probably target a scoring differential of -5. Now, once you know that information, well, you can say, okay, well, where are we at today? You know, where's your junior golfer at? And if they're ranked, which you'll be able to see here— let's just— you can do the same thing for girls as well, but just, you know, for the sake of this, we're looking at boys. You can just look up their name. So let's say it's like a common name, James. Let's see how James stacks up against everyone else. All right, well, James is Is there any non— oh, we got a 2027. All right, we got a 2028 here. So let's say James here, um, James, if you're ever watching this, um, not picking on you, let's say he's got a scoring differential of 9.4. And I want to say that 2028 is a freshman right now, so he's got about 3.5 years in order to get down to a scoring differential of -5. And obviously I'm just making this up. This is saying— this is imagining James came to me and said, hey Connor, I want to play at UCLA. I'd be like, all right, cool, let's just pull out our handy calculator and say, all right, we've got 9.4 as our scoring differential and we need to get to -5, so we need to improve by 14.4 shots over the coming 3.5 years. So we're going to take 14.4, we're going to divide it by 3.5, which is essentially how much time it is. So he needs to improve by about 4.11 shots per year. And so this is just, you know, this is a simple exercise to say, okay, that's what he's going to need to do. Now, for context on this, the average junior golfer on Junior Golf Scoreboard, because I've measured it, improves by about 1.18 shots per year, give or take a little bit. And so, you know, if James came to me and said, hey, I want to play at UCLA, I would say, hey, that's probably a little bit of a stretch. That would be great, you know, if we can have something amazing happen, that would be wonderful, but that is a massive jump. When I work with students, on average I see them improve by about 2.7 1 shot per year. So, you know, that's still, you know, probably— it's not quite double average performance, but, but that's a pretty big jump. So I'd be able to say, hey, we might need to adjust expectations back. But, you know, let's flip this around and say, let's say James had a scoring differential of 4. Let's, you know, it's still 4 plus 5, right? So we have 9, but we still have 3.5 years. Well, now he only has to improve by about 2.5 shots per year. I could say, hey James, you're in a really great spot here. You know, this is, you know, kind of the path that I would recommend. We're going to be on pace. You kind of go it on your own, maybe, you know, you're still going to have to jump— you're going to have to figure out a way to outperform the average. But that is the, the real reason to use our— your ranking. That, that's the purpose of it, is to be able to see how, like, where your junior golfer is right now, where they're trying to get to, and you can really start a game plan. Like What do we need to do to get there? What are the steps that we're going to need to take? How much do we need to improve in order to, to reach that goal? So that's really step number 1. Now, where to get ranked at this point, it's fairly obvious. You should be getting ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. The reason for that is there's a few different major ranking indexes you'll see. You'll see AJGA Rolex, which is, which is great, especially once your junior golfer is probably in the scoring average of 77, 76 range. Um, that would be something you'd want to track. If their best round is, let's say, 72, their scoring average probably isn't 76. But if their best round is like 69, they're probably close to that. If their best tournament round is 69, they're probably close to scoring average, maybe 77, 76. So anyway, Rolex rankings, and I've done videos on, on Rolex, that's good, but it's not the best for a beginner. It, it's going to be very difficult to get into a lot of those events. So you don't want to worry about that right at the get-go. Golfweek is another big broad one. They do a lot of tournaments across the country. It's good. It's not as good as Junior Golf Scoreboard though, because Junior Golf Scoreboard is the broadest one, so it includes the most events. So if you look at your standard like Hurricane Tour, Golfweek, AJGA, Future Champions, Under Armour, all those events are ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. And that's why So many college coaches look at Junior Golf Scoreboard and use that as a measurement of who they're going to reach out to. And it's also super useful for tournaments. So if your junior golfer is ranked really well and, you know, on Junior Golf Scoreboard, well, when they apply for, let's say, a bigger event and they're trying to get into it, they can say, hey, my Junior Golf Scoreboard ranking is this, and that's going to get them, um, you know, at least some credibility. They're able to say, here's where I'm at, versus they don't have a ranking, they're just like I shoot some good scores every now and then. I did well in my, like, state tournament or something like that. And it's just not quite as compelling of a pitch. So you want to be ranked on junior golf scoreboards. So next question is, how do you find the tournaments? Like, how do you actually get them ranked? Like, what's that process like? Pay for it? How's all that work? Well, it's actually pretty simple. So what you want to do is go to tournaments and results. Search for tournaments, and you guys can see here I'm not logged in. This is all like free information. Then go down to, you know, search junior golf tournaments and just pick your state. So, you know, let's say, say we live someplace that doesn't have a lot of events. Uh, let's go Iowa. All the Midwesterners out there. All right, cool. So if you're in Iowa and you want to find some events that are ranked by junior golf scorebook, Here they are. It's pretty straightforward. It doesn't matter where you're at in the country, you can do this. These are a bunch of, you know, June 3rd or the 4th. We've got field size of 20. Here's who to reach out for. Here's a website, phone number if you need to reach out, and it looks like this deadline has already passed. That's, that's kind of interesting. Oh, so this is 2023. I'm screwing this up. So let's go ahead, make sure we're looking at the right year. You guys can do that as well. So, all right, cool, perfect. So this one's probably past the deadline, right? It's still showing the events, right? And then I guess I've got to figure that out if I looked at results. Let's look a little bit further out. Okay, cool. So this one, this deadline's still in the future. Um, let's see, this deadline still got 9 days for it. This deadline, you still got a few days for it. Here's who to reach out for, and it's, it's pretty dang simple. Obviously all these have entry fees, but this is how you should be picking your junior golfers tournaments if you want to get the most bang for your buck. Now, is there a rationale to play events that aren't ranked? Sure. Especially if your junior golfer needs reps where they, let's say, feel a lot of stress in tournaments, they're really struggling to kind of overcome that. Well, then there's no point in getting them ranked because they still kind of have a major stressor that they need to figure out how to handle. Let's go ahead and get that handled first in a less stressful setting. You know, if they're really stressed out in tournaments, no reason to throw them in an AJGA qualifier because that's going to be traumatizing. Right? You want to throw— let's figure out if we can do it in one day first, then we figure out if we can do it in two days. Um, but this is really how you guys should be looking at setting up your tournaments, especially if your junior golfer is like, you know, I shoot some pretty good scores, like I want to see how I stack up. This is how you should be doing this. So all you need to do is play in four of these events and your junior golfer will have a ranking that will appear over here in rankings and honors and girls or boys rankings. So, you know, it really is that simple as far as getting started. But I really want to emphasize that this is just the getting started spot. You know, you pick a tournament, that's great. You pick a set of tournaments, that's great. I'd recommend you probably, um, you know, probably 2 tournaments a month is pretty healthy, or, um, pretty healthy. You know, it gives you enough opportunities to play, but it also gives you time in between those events to practice. So that's really how I would be, uh, approaching this. But the, the kind of most important thing is like, okay, you know, they've got the ranking. Let's go over here again. You're going to look them up and see, okay, here's where we're at. What you want to do is measure how they are improving month over month, um, you know, quarter over quarter, 6 months over 6 months, year over year. So again, if we take James here you don't want to be in this space where you're working with a coach and you're just working on whatever you're working on. You're just in a vacuum. There's nothing else going on. You're taking the coach's word and be like, hey, here's the thing we're working on mechanically or whatever. I think it's moving in a good direction. But then they go out and they're struggling. Well, you need to have some measure for that, especially as a parent, you need to be able to say like, hey, we're either on track or we're not. Or we're speeding up and we're improving, okay, validates whatever you're doing, or we're not really improving that much at all, or we're even going backwards. You need to have measurements on that. And so that's the real, like, benefit of, you know, having the rankings here is because you can actually see, like, here's exactly where we're at. No delusion, no, like, well, you know, I think if I play good I can do this. It's like, these are the hard numbers about it. And then you can say, all right, how do we incrementally improve to accomplish our goals, and are we moving in that direction? You can be checking in on this fairly regularly. So, you know, again, let's just take another random James here, class of 2028, scoring differential of, you know, 1.23. So, you know, if in 6 months we still have a scoring differential of 1.23, we're not really progressing. There's something going on, there's some reason we need to take a look at that. It's a check engine light for for you guys. Versus if you don't have this information, you're like, I don't know, I think I'm getting better, but we need to be able to have concrete evidence of that if you want to be able to get where you're trying to go. If you're flying a plane across the country, you want to be able to look at your instruments and be like, how high off the ground are we? It's the exact same thing for junior golf. And this is really it. If you have these pieces, then you can really map out where your junior golfer is at, where they need to get to, And are they doing the things they need to do to get there in the time that they need to get there? It's kind of like you got your GPS out, you're trying to go across town. What time are you going to arrive? Are you going to arrive on time? Do you need to speed it up a little bit? Do you need to find a shortcut? Um, those are the things that you need to be thinking about, and that's how you want to approach this so that it's very, uh, smooth for your junior golfer. There's no surprises. And once they get to that level where, you know, they have that really high quality scoring differential, high-quality ranking, you're going to find that coaches start reaching out to them organically. And especially if they get into the Division I level, they're going to have a lot of programs already at lower levels. They're offering them scholarships, they're putting pressure on them, like, hey, are you going to commit? Are you going to move forward? We really want you here. We want you to do, you know, X, Y, and Z. Um, and all of that happens without any crazy, like, email campaign, or here's my resume, or look at my social media, or any of that stuff. It just comes from understanding this process. So I hope this video was helpful for you guys in understanding what you need to do to get your junior golfer ranked in 2024 and how that can be tremendously beneficial for them without putting any extra stress or, or strain on them, you know, trying to compare them to other kids. Because that's not really what it's about. It's about helping them understand and helping you understand what you guys need to do to accomplish their goals so you guys can have realistic expectations. So hope this video is helpful for you. If it was, go ahead and leave a like. It really helps push this video out to more people and helps the channel out since still pretty new here. So appreciate you guys and I'll see you next week.