How To Help Your Child Play Division 1 Golf
Connor Stirling Peterson breaks down how to get junior golfers recruited to Division I programs. Only 10% of recruitment is tournaments; the other 90% is improving scoring differentials through data tracking and efficient practice. Recruits typically need to gain 3.5 to 4 shots per year, with a 1:1 practice-to-play ratio and a 3.5+ GPA.
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What is going on, guys? Welcome in. In this video, I'm going to be covering how to help your child play Division 1 golf. This is going to be a mastery-level video. I'm going to be covering a lot of ground here, and so you guys are in for a really good one here. If you're new to the channel, this is all we cover is helping your child play Division 1 golf and all the little different intricacies, nuances that go into that. And if you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. This is going to be a really good one. So I haven't done one of these for a while. I haven't gone deep into this. And so that's what I'm gonna be doing today. I'm just gonna get a lot of questions from you guys about, you know, what it takes to play Division 1 golf and really all the nuances that go into it. A lot of times some of you guys might watch my videos and you might see me talk about tournaments and think that that's it, you know, that that's all I have to talk about. And that's the only thing that really matters. And that couldn't be further from the truth. Typically, when I talk about this stuff, tournaments, while they are essential that we're playing in ranked events, it's really only like 10% of the total, you know, work that actually goes into actually getting recruited, right? It's a lot more complicated than that. So I'm just gonna be digging into this in this video to really show you guys what is happening. Now, first things first, one of the things I don't address a lot on this channel, why should you guys even listen to me? So I want to cover a little bit about my background here. First things first, I didn't just invent all this stuff. So I actually initially got started working with a guy, Jeff Smith, who's still very much my, my golf mentor. I started working as a junior golfer when I was 16. And now we work together and a couple different businesses. And then the other guy I learned from is TD Luton, who's the assistant coach at Duke for 4.5 years. So you have the experience of recruiting players, bringing them in, seeing the college experience and all that stuff. And Jeff teaches on the PGA Tour with about 6 different PGA Tour players. Davis Riley just finished second in the PGA Championship, obviously got Yeah, everyone got cooked by Scottie. But nonetheless, I'm very familiar with this space. And it's not just on me because I'm so smarter because I went to college, and therefore I know. It's because I've been able to learn from the best, and then be able to take what they teach and turn them into systems. So that's thing number one. Then as far as like the next layer of this, I've been able to help quite a few players get recruited. First, with working with Jeff and TD, I think there were about 7 players that we ended up getting recruited. So I can't exactly keep track of the exact number off the top of my head. And then I know since I went out on my own approaching things and with my own method, added about another 5 players there who have gotten recruited over the last couple years. So again, this isn't just theory. This is stuff that's actually backed up by actual players who have gotten recruited. So that's that. In addition to that, I track all of my students' performance. So I track how many shots per year they're improving by. So you guys can see this is a dynamic number. I have 2 different segments. I have students who, you know, are just like everyone in the program. And obviously some students are more disciplined than others. So I have that in a separate, separate category, just so I have clarity for myself of, of the players who are actually doing what I asked them to do, what's their performance compared to the average across all the students. So you can see the mean average, the median average, standard deviation on that. You can also see that for the disciplined students and the mean and median and standard deviation as well. So obviously, long story short, I don't know if you guys know any coaches that actually track this type of statistics on their players and see like, okay, how much is my them actually improving them. But, you know, this is one of the reasons that I would really recommend that you guys listen to stuff I'm gonna say, because it's not just, hey, I think that this works, or hey, I've gotten a few players recruited. Honestly, I don't even think that the players being recruited is that important. It's really the average improvement that the players that I work with end up seeing. Because I'll give you guys an example. One of the students that I'm working with just got recruited. And he's actually one of the underperforming students in my program. So again, for me, I can look at that and say, yeah, absolutely, I'm going to flex that in the future of like, hey, I've gotten this player recruited, or helped in that process. But on the other side of this coin, it's like, it's not the most impactful thing, most impactful thing is the number of shots that they're going to improve by. And so, you know, this process is really gonna be outlining that. And the other benefit of this before I really get into the meat and potatoes here is you guys can see within the spreadsheet, right? Aside from this little top layer here, got about 39 players that I've tracked. And so this allows me to understand not only like, how much have they improved? But what did that player specifically do? What was the practice they did, or the drills they did that worked? What are the tournaments that they played in? I know all that information. And I can deploy it across all my students and test things out. So if something just works with one player, I'm going to know. And I'm also going to be able to develop, hey, here are the most effective drills across the board, right? So you might have a swing coach that develops a particular swing method. For me, I've been able to develop a scoring method to understand the statistics that go into things. The practice that comes out as a result of that, what's going to be most effective as far as implementation of, hey, if I tell you to make this strategic change, how easy is that to implement? Not just is it the correct strategic change, but can you actually do it on the golf course? So just, just a few reasons why I highly recommend you guys taking the stuff that I cover in this video very seriously. And if you guys are in a position where it's like, hey, I don't have time to watch a video that's this long, but you want that kind of support for your child, you want to have data-backed clarity on what your child needs to do to play Division 1 golf, specifically from a scoring perspective, so they can actually shoot the numbers that they need to shoot, and that they can improve at the rate that they need to. There will be a link below to apply to work together. Just fill out the application, it'll validate whether or not your child has a high probability of being successful in my program. And then based on that, you guys will be able to book a call where we can go over the details of everything. So anyway, just want to throw that out for you guys. Anyway, continuing on here. Sorry, I'm just looking at, looking at my, my notes ahead of time because we got a lot of stuff to cover here. Another thing I want to cover here is you guys might take away from this video that like, hey, I'm giving away everything that I teach. And that couldn't be further from the truth. I'm giving you guys probably about 10% of what I can actually give you just because of the sheer like density of information that I have to push out here. But it's just, you know, this is an incredibly complex topic, and I'm not going to be able to divulge everything in, you know, an hour-long video or however long this ends up being. This is really only about 10% of that, and it might seem like it's more than that just because, you know, I know for a fact that there are other people who charge a substantial amount of money for the things that I'm going to talk to you guys about. But I just want to be clear here, this, this is just a very like little tiny bit of what I could potentially teach you, and the other 90% I'm reserving for the paid students that work with me. So the goal of these videos is really to get you enough of a result, help your child improve enough, help you understand enough that you say, hey, we've already gotten a lot better by listening to this guy. We want to be able to take this to the next level. We want to improve even faster and we want to look at, you know, one of his paid programs. So again, link in the description for that if you want to apply there and actually see if your child qualifies, because I'm not going to work with every student that reaches out. They need to be in a position where I'm confident that I can get them the result. And we also need to make sure that, you know, when I describe the program to them, they're sold on it. Because if they're not sold, they're going to drag down my average and make me look bad. So I say that, you know, half tongue in cheek, but in all seriousness, like, I want this to look really good. And part of that is the students that I let into the program. So again, if you apply, no guarantee that you're actually going to get accepted. But if you're interested, you want to give your child that competitive edge, and you understand that golf is more than just like, you know, playing in a few tournaments and like working on your golf swing, that actually requires a lot more to be able to score, and you want help with that and a proven process. Again, link in the description, go ahead and apply and see if we can do it. So anyway, one of the first things I want to address here is some of the common mistakes that I see. Because, you know, when we go into this stuff, and I tell you, hey, do this, or do this, or do this, the problem is, there's a bunch of other things you already have in the back of your head that are going to prevent you from doing those things, right? Because you're gonna think, oh, I have to do this other thing. It's just supplemental. Connor's not telling you the whole picture. In this video, I'm gonna be telling you guys as much of the full picture as I can. From a 30,000-foot view, you guys are gonna have clarity on this. So, you know, don't, don't feel like there's stuff that I'm not talking about that you really need to be aware of. I'm giving it to you guys as far as just like high level. The, the real value and the challenges here though become in the implementation of the specific cases and what you need to focus on. I'll kind of elaborate on that as we go through the video. So some of the most common things that I see as far as like mistakes that are made is delaying the age your child takes things Seriously, right? So there's a common thing where if you go out there, I've done this in Facebook groups before, I talk about how early elite players start taking things seriously and giving themselves a good possibility of success. I get all these people jump in and be like, oh, you're gonna burn them out, or, oh, like, you don't need to worry about, you know, recruiting until sophomore or junior year. And you got coaches who, you know, I don't know where they're necessarily at. I don't know why you'd be commenting in a Facebook group if you're a Division I coach, but, um, neither here nor there. You know, they'll comment and be like, oh, well, you know, I don't, I don't think about this until like this time period. And it's like they're not really answering in a systematic way. They're answering from a position of whatever their emotions and whatever their feelings and maybe like whatever they remember as an actual like impact on this. In my experience, I know very few coaches who are actually taking a child and saying, hey, my thing with you is we're going to get you to play Division 1 golf. Not, hey, I'm giving you lessons to try and get you better. And like, maybe we play Division 1 golf, maybe I'm working with hundreds of players, and I get a handful of them to play Division 1 golf. But when my thing when I work with a player is telling them, hey, I'm trying to validate whether or not you have a high probability of playing Division 1 golf based on the system that I'm going to run you through. There are very few people out there that are doing that. And obviously, like, I charge a premium price, you go through my application, you're gonna see that. But the thing is, the reason I'm able to do that is because This is a very specific process I'm walking, walking you guys through. And it's something I've had a lot of testing with. And so if I sell to a player, and they expect a result, and I kind of hinted at that I'm not able to deliver it, I'm going to get a bad reputation for that. So I'm very cautious about making sure that I have a very clear perspective of what your child needs to do. Anyway, long story short, realistically, you don't want to look at it and say, oh, well, we don't need to think about this until XYZ age. That's the wrong way to think about this. You want to think about this from the perspective of how much time does your child have, and how many shots that they need to improve by in order to reach that level of performance. And then understand, okay, well, how much is the average number of shots that people improve by, right? So just to give you guys that really quickly, you know, let's say, you know, we know that the average, you know, for the most part, Division I recruiting starts June 15th of sophomore year. Right? So like, that's kind of our checkpoint. Usually players are getting recruited by a year after that. So give or take, the elite programs, they might scoop you up right away. But for the most part, junior year summer is really when things, you know, start to get nailed in. Sometimes at the end of that summer is, you know, they'll have a few more kind of hangers on, but that's really what that ends up looking like. And so, you know, from that perspective, we need to be in position, ideally by, you know, sophomore summer going into junior year, like I think that's where we want to be. And so we need to have an understanding of where do we need to be. Typically, what I recommend, scoring averages 72 to 74. Ideally, we're ranked, so it makes it a little bit easier. Ideally, you're somewhere in a scoring differential like -1 or -2. That's kind of where I see the most success going into that kind of range there. And so we need to work backwards and say, how many shots per year are we going to improve in order to reach that target and make sure that that's realistic? Because if it's 10 shots per year, I can tell you right now, like, it's just not gonna happen, right? So we need to have clarity on that. The average player on Junior Golf Scoreboard improves by about 1.19 shots per year. So if you consider that you need to get to -2, let's say, and you have 4 years to accomplish that, we've got about 5 shots. We need to be within 5 shots, right? So if we're going back here, you've got a 7th grader with a scoring differential of, you know, let's say 4 or 3 or something like that, then they're in position, right? Because you can actually just mathematically say like, hey, yeah, we don't really need to do anything. We can do what everyone else does on Junior Golf Scoreboard, which is essentially play in tournaments, and have a swing coach, and, you know, just like work hard and hope things work out, you know, that's— that can work okay for you, right? You don't have to consider extra things there. Now, that said, having done all my research on this stuff, one of the things that I've found that actually stands out to me pretty substantially is that the players who actually get recruited, they tend not to actually be in that position. They don't tend to be some stick 7th grader, and then they get recruited, you know, 5 years later after improving by like a shot per year. That's usually not what happens. You usually a player who improves that slow burns out. And so even though that's the average, that's not necessarily on a per-player average. So we end up seeing on Junior Golf Scoreboard, the players who do get recruited tend to improve significantly faster. They improve right around the average student that I work with, the rate that they actually improved by. So I just showed you guys here, but again, you know, the average student across the entire program, the median average of 3.3, got a couple people dragging down the mean average at 2. 2.7 roughly. Um, the disciplined player is closer to 4 shots and 3.8 shots. And when I've done the research on this, it's about 3.6, 3.7 shots per year that a player who actually gets recruited, um, ends up improving by. So it ends up being a player who's in 7th grade, 8th grade, sometimes 6th grade, but somewhere in that range where they start to take things seriously and actually have something that is going to deliver results. And typically in my experience, the easiest way to implement that is actually having clarity over what your child needs to do specifically in order to lower their scoring differential. So let's It's not just going out there and grinding harder. It's not just working harder. It's working on the right stuff. That's, that's really the key to all of this stuff. So that's the first big mistake that I see. Next big one. I see people talking about, you know, sending out emails to coaches. They just got to email enough coaches. You see, like NCSA does this. I don't, I'm not like deeply enmeshed in NCSA, but I just know that that's one of the things that they sell. And the reality is, you know, what you're going to get if you start sending out emails to coaches, just presuming you're of age, is best case scenario, they're gonna reach out and be like, hey, like, keep me posted on tournament rounds. Like, that's all they're gonna say. It's not interesting to them, because they're getting a million of those emails. And it's like, all right, cool. If I don't see anything that jumps off the page, like, I don't care. Right? So thinking that, like, hey, if we send out enough emails, we're gonna get something, it's like, yeah, maybe. But is that really the way that you want to approach things is just like beg enough programs to try and get a spot, like, maybe it works out? Or do you want to be able to say, hey, I'll I want to go to that program and actually figure out what it takes to make it there. Right? So if you're in the first camp, and you're just like, hey, I just want to like play somewhere, and I don't really care where, then no reason to keep watching this video, right? But if you're watching this, and you're saying, okay, cool, I do want to play at one of those elite programs, then you need to be able to say, okay, where's that at, and then reverse engineer that back, which I'm going to show you guys here. Another one, camps get brought up a lot, you know, as far as like college camps, stuff like that, getting FaceTime with coaches. Having spoken to TD at length about this, it doesn't really have any impact on recruiting whatsoever. Realistically, those coaches are doing it to make a few extra bucks. They do a really great job with the camps. A lot of the time they're pouring their heart and soul out on that, but it's not a recruiting mechanism. Is it fun? Yes. But is it an effective use of your dollars from a recruiting perspective? No. So just, just to be clear on that one. And the last one here is probably the most common, is a swing coach. Right? Looking at the swing coach and saying, hey, I have a high-profile swing coach, therefore things are going to work out for me. I'm going to Mike Bender Academy, or I'm working with, you know, the XYZ high-end coach. This is gonna work out for me. I can tell you from firsthand experience, that is not how this works. The only reason that a coach gets a player recruited is because that player on their own merit is able to shoot the scores that that program needs to recruit. Like, that's it. And so a lot of the time when you look at a swing coach, and this is having deep knowledge of this and having been in this position myself, when you look at a swing coach, the way that they approach it is saying, hey, how do I get you swinging the best way possible? And they get you flushing it, right? Like, let's just say a good swing coach, that's what they're going to do. By the end of the lesson, you're hitting it good. If you got a swing coach where you're hitting it like crap for months on end, they're not a good swing coach, move on, get a different one. Um, but let's just say you've got a good swing coach, right? You leave, Leave the bay, you're flushing it, right? We've got a few problems. Number 1, if it's a major change, guess what? You're not going to know where your misses are. If you have 1, 2, 3, 4 misses per round, especially like off the tee, you're done. Like your round is not going to be good, right? That's problem number 1. Problem number 2, there's a whole bunch of stuff that goes into golf that isn't just that golf swing, right? That golf swing works most of the time, but you get into a situation where you're 4-under or leading the tournament or whatever, you got a few holes left and you start getting real anxious. They're not going to support you on that. Like, they might be able to give you some random mindset tips about like breathing or something, but at the end of the day, like, that's not the way that they're going to approach things. When you go and see them again, guess what they're going to do? They're going to work on your swing, odds are, right? Like, that's how their stuff is set up, and that's what their toolbox is, right? Is to say, hey, how can I make your swing more repeatable and reliable? And so on and so forth. And that stuff's all great, but there's a lot of other things that go into golf. Another one that I'll throw out there is being able to actually You know, let's say you're flushing the ball, you're trying to hit more greens in regulation. In theory, if you have a better golf swing, you should be able to hit more greens in regulation. That makes a lot of sense. The problem is, if you don't know your distances well, you're going to miss a lot of greens where you flush it, you're short or long. If you don't know where your misses are, then you could be left or right in the wrong spot. And again, just because you hit a bunch of good shots doesn't mean you're gonna make birdie, right? You can hit a great shot to 12 feet, you're only going to make 30% of those if you're a PGA Tour player, right? So it's important to have the perspective that like, there's a lot more that goes into the game than just your golf swing. And if you just sit there and say, hey, we're gonna work on it with our swing coach and pay for tournaments, like, good luck. But that's what everyone else is doing. An average player does not improve by that much. And the other thing that we see there is players thinking that, hey, I'm gonna have a few things, they're gonna click, I'm gonna have a breakthrough, and then everything's gonna be to the moon. And that's just not how— having seen dozens and dozens and dozens of junior golfers, that is not how it works. It is not how it works. It is consistent progress over a long period of time. That is how we actually see improvement. And so a lot of time when you look at the guys on tour, they don't have perfect golf swings, but they have golf swings that they understand. They understand how to manage it. If you guys watch Scottie Scheffler, Scottie Scheffler's got a weird swing, but he knows how it works. You know, watching him down the stretch there, he's hitting all of his balls left. You eventually figure it out and you're like, hey, I gotta figure out hold on to this face or something, get the ball, start going to the right. And you stuck with it and you figured it out, right? But no one would go out there and teach you to swing like Scottie Scheffler, you know, as an example. Jon Rahm's another one, you know, it's like not a lot of coaches are going to teach you to swing it like Jon Rahm, right? So these are guys that have figured out their swing, what works for them. Of course, they're working with a swing coach, but again, the context is they have a lot of skills that aren't just their golf swing. It's not just I have a pretty golf swing and therefore I'm going to play good. There's a lot of other skills that go into it. So So we wanna mention those. Honorable mentions here. GPA matters a lot. You wanna have a 3.5 or better, right? That's super important. Same thing with SAT, ACT scores. We want those to be high. We do not wanna be trying to get in with 3.0. We do not wanna be trying to get in with low SAT scores. That's not something that I specifically coach on, but that's something that's worth noting. If I'm talking to a coach, like one of the things that's been thrown at me is like, oh, well, you know, I don't look at scoring average until other things. It's like, it's reasonable for a coach to say, hey, I'm going to look at your score, your, your actual GPA first, because that tells me whether or not I can even recruit you. That would be one example. Another one of those things they might throw out there and be like, I want to see like a good attitude or like hard work ethic. That's great. I don't care how good your work ethic, I don't care how good your grades are. If you're shooting 85 on average, you're not playing Division I golf. And so that's why I solve for that particular problem, because if we've got that, that's the hardest thing to do. And then the other things are a lot easier, you know, as far as having a good attitude, Okay, cool. Like, it's not that crazy. Um, you know, as far as have good grades, you're like, yeah, you need to have good grades. That's important. But again, like, you can have all those things. If you don't have the scores, it's a problem. Now granted, if you have the scores but you don't have those things, that's also a problem. But again, I'm here to talk to you guys about the specifics of what I believe is really the hardest thing. So anyway, let's go ahead and get into the meat and potatoes. Like I said, this is a mastery video. So we're about 20 minutes in. We're just getting into the good stuff here. So first things first, you need to be ranked. Um, this is how coaches are going to see you when you reach out to a coach. You don't want to be sending them a little laundry list of all these random little tournaments that you played, and you want to just be able to say, hey, my ranking on Junior Golf Scoreboard is this, specifically to your class. My scoring average is this. You know, maybe you want to highlight your best rounds, but that's going to give your coach a really, you know, the coach you're reaching out to, a really clear perspective. It's also going to give you perspective on where you're at, which is probably more important because if you're watching this, you're taking this seriously. Your kids, 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, coaches aren't reaching out to them. They can't talk to them. And so they're not going to be able to talk to them until later. And it's not relevant to be able to say, oh, well, you know, hey, coach, here's where I'm at. Doesn't matter. What matters is for you to know objectively, because you can say, oh, I shoot 78 at home and, you know, 6,400 yards or whatever. But it's like, you don't know what it is in tournaments. And so if you don't know what it is in tournaments, we don't have a barometer of like how much you're going to improve year over year and be able to measure that. Right? So we need to be ranked. It's not just from a, I want to get coaches' attention. That's a benefit of it, but it's not the only thing. So continuing on here, when we look at this, you can actually see this is college signings, rankings, and honors. Um, we can look at class of '25 all the way back to 2017. We can do this for boys and girls, and you can find the program that you want to go to and say, okay, what's the scoring differential that's required? You can look at where is that player ranked in their class in order to go to those programs. So if you have a specific program in mind, that's what you want to do. Otherwise, you can just scroll down here and kind of figure out like, all right, where's the place where, you know, pretty much everyone who's getting recruited is going to a Division I program or is going to programs that I've heard of before? Can you scroll all the way down and like find a Division I program that recruited somebody who is ranked like a million? Yes. Like, is that the way that you should approach this? No. Like, you don't want to optimize for the edge case scenario. You want to optimize for like what's most probable. And if you fall a little bit short, you've got a little bit of wiggle room there. In the same sense, you know, some of you guys asked me about like, hey, well, you know, we really want to play Division 1, but like, you know, realistically, it's probably gonna be Division 3. So we're just gonna aim for Division 3. It's a bad strategy. You want to aim high and then fall down because the players who are the best players on Division 1 programs, they're trying to be PGA Tour players, they're trying to be major winners. And they might fall a little bit short and only play, you know, elite level Division 1 golf. Right? You're always going to fall a little bit short of your target. So knowing that, you want to control the target you aim for. Aim higher so you have a little bit of margin for error, right? So anyway, this is where we're starting here. We want to have this end target here, and then we want to be able to work our way back and say, okay, where am I at right now? And do the exercise that I went over with you guys a little bit earlier here. I will also link a, a link to a pacing calculator that I created down below as well, so you can do that exercise for yourself. Anyway, continuing on, once your child is ranked, you're actually going to be able to see, or you should be able to see, at least this data will be available, at least to me, their scoring average and their scoring differential and the tournaments that they're playing in, right? So this is tremendously important because we need to be able to say not just, hey, here's our scoring differential right now. We need to be able to say, okay, cool, what do we need to do in order to lower that scoring differential, right? So one of the things that I talk a lot about is playing in good tournaments, playing in AJGA events, playing in longer events, you know, so on and so forth. I've got other videos on that, but it is only just like a little tiny portion of it. The bigger thing is how do we bring the scoring average down while increasing the length of these golf courses? That's the, that's the real challenging thing. Um, and so we need to be able to analyze this. We need to be able to say, number one, is that possible, right? So in this player's case, you know, 76 point— let's say 76.5, right? We've got about 2.5 to 4.5 shots we can really shave off just by lowering the scoring average. We don't have to make the tournaments harder. Is he going to continue to make the tournaments harder? Yeah. But again, we've got a lot of room to work with here. Once we've got this, we need to be able to analyze, okay, cool, can we make the tournaments harder? That's an easy yes or no question. That's why I say it's only 10% of like the total stuff that we need to do, right? So this is not that complicated. Don't watch these videos and think that, oh, I just need to figure out and play the right tournaments. Now, the thing you need to be able to do is get your scoring average to 72 to 74 on average, while playing these really hard tournaments. That, that's really the way to do this. So anyway, we need to analyze this. And so when I'm doing that, I'm having all my students track their statistics. If your child is not tracking their statistics, they need to. My recommendation is called Draw More Circles. I give all my students a discount code so they get a substantial discount off of it. But this is the tool that I highly recommend. It gives you the data that you need. It is also very easy to use. There's a lot of tools out there that have like the GPS thing and all that. It's kind of a pain in the butt. This is easy, so that's why I have it. I understand that there are variables that are missing from this. I understand that you could be much more granular with your data. In my experience, the problem isn't that we don't have granular enough data. The problem is players don't log their rounds, and so that's, that's what we're trying to solve for here, and we're trying to make sure we have enough data to go along with it. So once we've done that, we need to be able to analyze this and say, okay, cool, based on these statistics, what should we be shooting on average? That's really the way that you want to understand yourself or your child as a golfer is what is their scoring average. And this is another layer that I'm not going to go through on this video, but how much variance do they have, right? So apex Tiger Woods, scoring average of 68, plus or minus like 2.7 shots, right? He was highly consistent and really, really good. So you just pencil him for somewhere between 66 and 70 pretty much every time he went out there. A lot of consistency to his golf. Most of your golfers, a little bit more volatile. Typically, it's about plus or minus 4 shots on whatever their average is. And typically, one of the big mistakes that players make is they look at the last round or 2 rounds— parents do this too— they look at the last round or 2 rounds or tournaments, and they make a judgment about where their child is at based off of those events. And it leads to this kind of whack-a-mole, up-and-down golf that doesn't have a lot of emotional stability. And so then they go to the golf course and try and solve mindset problems with breathing techniques. And it's like, hey, you just have kind of a screwed up idea of like where your game's even at. You think you just went out there and shot 72. So therefore, now that's who you are, as a player when you're scoring after 78. And that was just a really lucky round. Like everyone would think you're a moron if you're a PGA Tour player, you go out there and shoot 61. Next day you shoot 69 and you're pissed off because yesterday you played better. It's like, yeah, your scoring average is 69. You way overperformed that. And it's like you fell back to your average. Of course, that's what happened, right? You're not going to go shoot 61, 61, 61, 61. In the same sense, if you have a scoring average of 78, you're not going to go into a tournament and shoot 71, 70, 69. Like that's just not gonna happen. So it's important to have that as a concept here. So anyway, you got your statistics, you wanna figure out where that average is and understand that your scores are made up of the skills that go into that. So a lot of the time, you know, a player might look at that and be like, well, if I just fix my golf swing, then I'm gonna score better. That's not how this works. There are skills that make up those scores, tee shots, and you can have a great golf swing. You can flush 10 out of, you know, 10 of your 14 tee shots. If you hit those 4 out of bounds or in the trees, not gonna score very well. So it's, again, it's not about hitting the perfect shot all the time. It's about developing the skill of being able to get your way around the golf course and be able to score, right? If you need to hit good shots all day, you're not— like, you're not setting yourself up for success. You need to be able to go out there and hit a bunch of mediocre shots and shoot pretty well. That's when you know you actually have high-quality strategy, you have high-quality mindset, and you're approaching the game in an intelligent way. So anyway, continuing on here. We need to be able to analyze those statistics. So this is one of the things that I talk about where it's like, this is a spreadsheet I give all my students. This is highly impactful because we're going to be able to calculate out what should you be shooting on average and how are the statistics, you know, making that up. And then the skills, they get correlated into each one of these statistics, right? So birdie conversion rate, 3-putts, scrambling, greens regulation, penalty rate are all attached to specific things your child needs to be able to do. Right? So if you're not even clear on like the big picture of how those impact the scores, there's no way you're going to be able to zero in on the specific skill that they need to develop. You're just going to label it some broad thing like course management or mindset or whatever. But you're not actually going to have a lot of clarity. You're not going to be tracking it. And so whatever happens next is just going to be randomness because you don't have the long-term perspective. Right? This is why it's so important to, to actually track statistics because if you don't have those statistics, it's just like, You can't evaluate 10 rounds of data, you can't evaluate 180 shots, or 180 holes, just, you know, you know, at a glance, like your emotions are going to be way off. And I have the benefit of knowing that because I talk to students all the time where I'm looking at their data and ask them, hey, what's going on? And a lot of the time, like sometimes they're accurate about it. But a lot of the time they need to be guided by the statistics. And that's why this is so important. But even beyond that, we need to be able to understand like, what is the skill that we need developed? And then beyond that, we need to understand how are we going to train that skill in our practice to be able to actually improve that. And then we need to be able to measure that that practice is effective and actually causing us to shoot lower scores based off our statistics, right? One example that I could give here is if you shoot 2-under on the backside, and you might be thinking, oh, I shot 2-under, like, that's really good. But if you only hit 40% of your greens, you could kind of flip that around and say, hey, I got kind of lucky here. I ended up missing myself in really good spots. But 40% is not very good considering, you know, the average green is 20 yards wide. You know, that's far below what I would expect from shooting 2-under, right? So I need— even though I did shoot 2-under, I didn't really help myself as far as an overall performance on my ball striking. So next time I go out there, I need to be a little bit more conscious of trying to hit more greens. That's a healthier perspective. Or flip side, you could say, hey, well, I hit every single green on this backside and only shot even par. And a lot of players would be pissed off about that. But if you have the perspective saying, okay, well, yeah, I actually did really good. I didn't have any 3-putts. I hit all my greens and my tee shots are pretty solid. And I just, I just didn't really get lucky. You know, it's just like, it was kind of unfortunate. Maybe I missed a few putts close, but it's like, my ball striking is really good. My putting didn't really have any problems. It's like, if I give myself enough attempts, I'm gonna start making some of those putts. And if you do that for long enough, where your ball striking is excellent, you never 3-putt. You're just not making those, those, you know, putts for birdie, then we can see very clearly, okay, cool, we need to work on birdie conversion rate. We need to work on the skills that go into, you know, that particular area, right? We might need to work on our green reading. We might need to work on our 10 to 15-foot putts, and we might need to work on the strategy that goes into that process. And this is kind of what I mean. It's just like, I can touch on that, I can tell you guys that, but it's like there's a lot more detail that goes into that. There's a lot of little nuances of how you would solve those problems. And I I can't cover all that in a YouTube video. So again, if this is something you guys want for your child, and you're actually serious about helping them play Division 1 golf, I highly, highly, highly recommend at least go through the application and just see if your child's in a position to play Division 1 golf. If they are, we'll be able to talk over, you know, if this process would even work for them, right? If they're actually in a position where they actually buy into the idea, right? But again, like, if you guys are an aspiring, like, there's like, this is a layer of detail you're not going to get working with pretty much every swim coach I've ever seen. So it's just really important to kind of keep this context. It's like this all fits together. You know, it's like, you can know how to play an instrument, but it's one thing to play an instrument. It's another thing to run an orchestra, right? There's a lot of moving pieces here and we need to know where specifically do we need to focus at any given time? Cause we can't keep, you can't keep all of this in your head at all, at all times, right? I can, cause this is my job and I have systems to help me. But for you guys, like, you can't just watch all my videos and retain this and then know exactly what to do. Not to mention all the things I haven't even talked to you guys about that I just, you know, the stuff that I'm just going to give for my paid students. So anyway, if that's something you're interested in, go ahead and apply below. Continuing on here, we have clarity on this and we need to be able to analyze those statistics. From there, we need to be able to develop, okay, what's our practice going to look like? And we need to measure whether that's a practice is effective. Effective over a long period of time, right? So this is something I do with all my students. I build out their practice, tell them how many balls to hit, which drills to do, explain these drills, and also track where their junior golf scoreboard is at, right? So we started off here at 8.15 back in July, and now, as you guys can see, we're down to about 4.16, and it's been almost a year of working together. And so you guys can kind of see just like firsthand, this player's improved. Right about 4 shots over the last year. And that's all been from just incremental progress, right? Just so you guys can see here, again, we started about 8.15. And now we're all the way down to 4.16. Right? So it's, it's not just one giant leap. And this player improved a lot, you know, 4 shots is a ton. For context, Charlie Woods improved by like, he's like 4.5 shots per year. And he's got the GOAT coaching him. He's got all the privileges that come along with being the GOAT's kid. But again, here, like, the perspective is, if you have the right system, if you're approaching things the right way, you know, you can improve significantly. And then this kid, you know, not even to mention, like, he had a major injury through the middle of the year, and he's still able to make this progress. So again, it's about having the right system in place so your child can consistently improve. Anyway, continuing on here. So we're looking at the practice And we're looking at the analysis, looking at the statistics here. I want to just go ahead and summarize kind of some of the things we've already been over. So number one, just like big picture here, about 10% of this is tournaments. About 90% of this is actually scoring. Now going beyond that, we need to have different methods for improving that scoring, right? So one of the common methods I've been over a million times here is you just go get a swing coach to try and make your swing better. And you hope things get better, right? Like, that's one way to do it. Now, when we're thinking about improving your scoring, we want to keep two big things in mind. We want to think about efficiency, right? So we want to be able to be more efficient, want to spend less time out there, ideally, for a couple reasons. You know, one, it's like your child doesn't have infinite time, right? We already went over they need to have good grades. So the more time they have available to them if they need it for school is really important. They also need to be able to continue to develop their golf game. And they also need to not have like a psychotic breakdown as a result of just having like all these things as they're trying to juggle and lead to burnout, right? That's something we want to avoid. We also need to consider what's going to be most effective, right? So there's a million things that they could do to get better, right? They can go complete swing overhaul, and maybe that's going to make them better over some undefined period of time. They can work on just their putting, they can work on just their chipping, they can work on just their ball striking, etc., etc. We need to be able to pick the combination of variables that is going to help them improve the most, the fastest, for the least effort and energy. That is super, super important. We need to be able to give them the things where they don't have to put a lot in, that they're going to get a lot out. If you've had any measurable success in your life, which I hope that you have if you're watching a video like this that's going through these things at the level of detail that I am, that you understand if you want to be successful, you need to be looking for those high leverage opportunities. You're not just going out there and working your butt off you understand that it's not just grinding. It's about being intelligent about what you're doing. Right? So the other reason why it's so important for us to be efficient is that we have a limited amount of energy and focus. So when I hear a junior golfer says, hey, I practice for 6 hours a day, I immediately have alarm bells go off, especially when they tell me that they've been stalled out for a long period of time. Doesn't matter how good the player is, if they're stalled out, we know a few things. Number one, we know that they're not being very effective with the time they're putting in there. They're putting in a lot, they're not getting much out. Right? Like that could be a situation that they're in. The other thing here though, is if I go and work out or do anything for 6 hours, how is the quality of hour 1 versus the quality of hour 6? Like how is, how's the quality of reps? Hour 1 is substantially better than hour 6. And obviously there's a, there's a, optimal time, right? I can't just go out there and practice for 5 minutes. That's not enough, right? It's not going to be optimal enough. On the flip side, if I practice there for 6 hours, there's eventually a point of diminishing returns. So where is that? Lucky for you guys, I've already done the research on this. I've measured myself, I've measured literally dozens of students. It's about 2 hours, about 90 minutes to 2 hours. That's an amount of time that a 10-year-old can do, the amount of time a 16-year-old can do. It's the amount of time that an adult like myself can do. I get mentally tired after about 2 hours. So the idea that your child can go out there for 4 hours— they might be able to do it physically, you know, they're young, they have a lot of energy, but they're not going to be able to do it emotionally, and they're not going to be able to do it psychologically, right? So it's important to set limits on this. I had the benefit of being able to talk to Sean Foley about this in a recent Inner Circle group call I had with, with Jeff and some other players, or the other coaches that we help develop themselves. And I was talking to Sean I had to ask him about practice because, you know, that's, that's my whole thing. That's what I'm talking to you guys about. And I was like, hey, when you're working with Tiger, what did his practice look like? Right? Like, what did he do? Because Tiger's so famous for, you know, grinding and whatever. And I was just like, curious. I was like, what did the GOAT do? And he was like, you know, he would hit shots very, very slowly. He would do a lot of methodical work of trying to like set up certain feels. And for the most part, he would, you know, maybe he would grind for about 45 minutes. And again, very slow between the reps. And then he would rest for maybe 15 to go to the cart, you know, maybe listen to some music, respond to some texts or whatever. And then he'd go on to the next thing, right? And he was incremental about that. And then he would go and play golf, and then he would come back, and then he'd go and play golf again, right? And that's, you know, somebody who's known as being like a complete grinder. But odds are, when I talk to junior golfers who are practicing for 4 hours, it doesn't look like that. It's not slow and methodical and working through feels and working through and touching all the parts of their games. It's like one little thing that they get neurotic about, and they're just grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding until they run out of gas. And if you know that your child's body has run out of gas physically, you know that they've mentally ran out of gas a long time ago, right? So again, here, so important to be efficient and effective. Another piece of this, I'm just going to give you guys this one for free, is sticking to a ratio of play and practice of 1 to 1 at the minimum. Ideally, you're playing more than you're practicing, because the point of practice is to shoot lower scores. Right? So if we're going out there, we're just grinding, trying to fix the swing, and we don't play any golf, or when you do play golf, play like 4 holes, that's not going to help you be successful. It's just not. I've seen it over so many, literally hundreds of players that I've talked to about this, that universally, if you just play more golf and you practice, that's going to help you so, so much. Are there a bunch of other details I could go into? Yes. Am I going to in this video? No. That's again for the reserves. That's reserved for the students. That's something you guys are interested in, go ahead and apply below. The other thing we want to talk about here, I want to kind of like wrap this up here, is there is an optimal path for your child to take, right? There's an optimal set of variables that they'd be looking at, right? If we accept the idea that there is a maximum efficient, maximum efficiency and effectiveness that they can have the decisions that they make, we can all agree on that, right? If they just went out and worked on their putting alone, and they didn't have any drivers, we'd all agree that that's less effective than having a more balanced approach, hopefully. So based on that, there is an optimal path. Right. If you are working with a swing coach, odds are you do not have that path. You are just working on that swing. You know, to him with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, right? You're going out there. You've got one variable. Odds are they're not building out their practice. Odds are they're not evaluating your practice. Odds are they're not tracking the impact of your practice on their statistics. It's just not happening. Right. But understanding that there is an optimal path and also understanding that there's kind of an upper limit of how much your child can improve. Per year, it means you need to take this seriously because odds are your child is going to need to improve significantly faster than average. And within that, the odds that they're going to do it doing what literally everybody else is doing by trying to just work harder is not going to work. Like, that should be fairly obvious if you've actually been able to get through this much of the video, right? So that's just really, really important here. The last piece that I want to leave you guys with is understanding— this is, this is so, so crucial. Is understanding that progress does not come in massive jumps. You do not go from shooting 80 to shooting 70. You go from shooting 80 to 79, 78, 77, like that. That's how it goes. And there's the illusion that you can go from 80 to 70 because you'll have a scoring average of 80 and you'll shoot 70 once. And then you'll think, oh, now I'm capable of that. And that's not how scores work. Again, going back to what I talked about, you've got your average and you've got the variance. That's who you are as a player. Over a long enough span of time, you will shoot some of the best rounds and some of the worst rounds. That's inevitable. That's why you don't want to look at those. You want to look at the average improvement over time. You want to look at the scoring average and say, this is who I am as a player. And the variance on that is, you know, this is how consistent or inconsistent I am. If you're looking at those variables, you can actually control those things. You can measure and say, hey, I've become more consistent over time. Not only has my scoring average dropped by a shot, 2 shots, 3 shots, 4 shots, I've also gone from, I would say, a variance of 4 to a variance of 3.5. So not only have I gotten better, I've gotten more consistent. Like, that's one of the things that you'd want to be able to see. But it's just understanding that your child's not going to get one lesson and then like, boom, all of a sudden, we're shooting 65. That's not how this works. They're going to get incrementally better over a long period of time. And every time they make a major change, every time they try and blow something up, there's a risk. If they can only get 10% better because of making that change, I can guarantee that in the short term they're going to get worse because they're going to be less familiar with what's going on in their, in their game. They're going to be less familiar with whatever their misses are. So it's important to really consider here when you're going to go blow something up, it's like, what is the potential gain, right? If we got injury concerns, that makes a lot of sense, right? Because it's just like, hey, if we got a guaranteed injury here, we have to take the step back, right? There are other things that, you know, we consider. You know, if your child doesn't hit nearly far enough and there are some mechanical issues where, you know, they need to be able to hit further, it makes a lot of sense to make those changes because it's worth it in the long term. But in the short term, there's a bunch of other stuff that goes into that. It's not just hitting the ball further. It's how are we going to keep the game continuously moving forward and allow ourselves the room to continue to improve with that ball striking when we have this temporary drop-off, right? It's understanding that full picture. So hopefully this makes sense to you guys. I wanted to do a video that really goes in depth on this. that not just goes over, you know, rankings are important, or tournaments, or, you know, practice, or all that stuff. I wanted to give you guys the full picture, as many details as I can, you know, and just like sitting down and talking to you guys on this subject. Again, if this is something you guys want support on, application link below. If you guys want the calculator, I'll have a link for that below as well so you can figure out where your child's at based on either their ranking or their current scores and the amount of time that they have left. And the average length of golf course that they're playing in. I also have a link below to jump on my newsletter if this is something you guys want. Every single week come out with videos like this. Every single week. If you guys enjoyed this, please go ahead and leave it a like. It'd mean the world to me, especially as a longer one. I know a lot of people aren't going to watch this all the way through, but I want to make sure that's valuable to you, and the likes really let me know that. And as well, if you're new, go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Really appreciate you and look forward to talking to you guys in the next one.
