How To Improve 3x Faster Than Average

All right, in this video I'm going to be talking about how to improve 3 times faster than average when it comes to junior golf and developing to play Division 1 golf. This is an absolutely essential thing that you need to understand if you're going to help your child pull this off. Um, it's just one of the things that I see consistently. Not only is this, you know, something that I help my students consistently do, it's also something I noticed within the data of the players who do end up getting recruited. For the most part, is you essentially have two camps of players who end up Division 1 golf. You have camp number 1, which is they've been good since they were like 5 years old, and they pretty much maintain that level of performance with increases to distance, um, just since that, that time period, right? So I've talked to coaches where, you know, they have a player that they work with who is number 1 in the world for junior golfers, and that's who they were at 10 years old, and they just continue to play at that level. And to that, that coach's credit, that still requires, you know, that's still a challenge, right? You still end up in the spot of, okay, cool, what do I do considering I have this really high-level talent? How do I guide them effectively, right? The other side of that is a player who improves rapidly comparatively to average in order to put them in position to play Division 1 golf, right? Those are essentially the two different categories because there's not really a third option, right? Because I'll get to this in a second here, but the average player only improves by about 1.2 shots per year. So anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Uh, if you're new here, this is what we talk about, is helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. If you enjoy this video, go ahead and leave a like, helps push it out to more people in the algorithm. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back, always great to have you. So first thing we got to understand here is, is the reality of the timeline and June 15th of sophomore year, because when we're trying to play Division 1 golf, it's not a thing that just materializes one day out of the blue, right? We can't wait around until we're a senior. There's a time that we need to have scores that are solid by, right? And so that is June 15th of sophomore year. That's really where we want to be. That's going to give us the most options, right? I talk about Division I golf all the time, not because there's, there's something wrong with Division II and Division III. It's primarily because if you get the scores right, it's easier to get recruited. And so it makes my life easier, right? Versus DII, DIII, a little bit more legwork involved. You can still do it. So great arguments, uh, why it's good. I'm not necessarily saying that there's something special about D1 intrinsically. I'm just saying, hey, it makes sense. It's a great target as well, because if you fall short, you still have D2, D3, versus if you fall short of D2, D3, you're just not playing golf in college, right? So that's an important thing to consider. So essentially, I have sophomore years when it opens up, and I would say August going into senior year is when it closes. That's kind of the window of true recruiting, right? You might find yourself in a situation where you're watching this, your child's a sophomore, you kind of resonate with the stuff that I'm saying here, but you're like, oh crap, we're like, we're behind. Yeah, 100%. And so it's just, it's important, you know, that so you can make decisions accordingly, right? If I told you, hey, you actually have a bunch of time in front of you, you'd make different decisions. And if you're just like, oh shoot, we're actually behind, here's what we need to do as a result of that. Okay. So to talk about improving 3 times faster, we have to establish what is the actual average. Average player on Junior Golf Scoreboard improves by about 1.2 shots per year. I've talked in other videos about how I calculate that, but essentially it's looking at the average, the, the middle percentile, and how that changes year over year. It's about 1.2 shots. And so that accounts for all the players that are both coming into the class and going out of the class, rather than just looking at the individual progress, right? Because there's a survivorship bias, right? If we just look at all the players who are on Junior Golf Scoreboard who are still ranked, then they might be slightly better than that because they're actually improving. They like playing golf, they like improving. So as a result of that, they continue to play and they continue to be ranked. A player who got 3 shots worse, they quit. They're just like, you know, golf isn't for me, right? And so we have to really look at that average because that gives us, I'll say, a pretty good segment of— these are kids who are, are actually ranked. They're putting in effort, their families are putting in effort, to, to actually be ranked, you have to play in a minimum of 4 36-hole events in order to be ranked. So it's like, we're investing in the lessons, we're doing all this stuff. This is just the average amount of progress that you see. So if there's kind of like the lament of just like, well, you know, how are we supposed to compete with these kids who've been doing it since they were 5 years old? That's a real thing, right? Because this is the universe that pretty much everybody lives in when you think about you know, junior golf development, getting lessons, um, that's essentially what you're getting. Here's the other thing that's really just kind of annoying. It doesn't really come from lower scores for the most part. It comes from the players hitting the ball further. So scores tend to cap out around 78. So if your child's stuck shooting high 70s, low 80s, uh, that's normal. Like that's where pretty much everybody gets stuck eventually. And so in order to move past that, you have to be a little bit more deliberate about what they're going to do to improve. It can't just be work harder, right? Because they're essentially at this point where their ball striking is pretty good, um, but they just have these other holes in their game, right? So an example of that that I would give is— and this is getting ahead of myself a little bit, but just to get— have you guys start thinking this through— a player who hits 50% of their greens who 3-putts 1.5 times per round, who hits maybe a ball out of bounds every other round, and maybe they get up and down a third of the time. That player's shooting in the high 70s on average pretty routinely. And from the outside, it'd be like, well, I don't think my putting's that big of an issue, or I don't think that, you know, the tee ball is much of an issue, or I, I think my ball striking is pretty good. They're kind of stuck, and then they end up in this game of let me try and make more birdies which tends to exacerbate the 3-putt rate, we're probably not going to make that much more birdies because the things that would allow us to make more birdies, we can't really do because we're not hitting that many greens, right? So we have all sorts of problems, and if we're not aware of that and can actually see some of the stuff I'm going to talk about here, you're just going to be stuck. So just, just something worth, you know, considering here. Most of this progress is coming from the kids get taller, they're going through puberty, they get stronger, right? That's where they're actually playing better. Um, it's also just to clarify, when I say most of this from playing longer golf courses, if you shoot 78 at 6,000 yards and then you do it at 6,300 yards, you're technically about a shot better because you're playing a longer golf course. And so that's just worth considering as well. Okay, so let's talk about why they stay stuck, right? We have to kind of define like what are the things that maybe we want to be more skeptical of, I guess, for lack of a better term. Um, Most people, swing lessons. Everyone's taking swing lessons. I don't care if you're just beginner golf, you're a hack golfer, you're a PGA Tour player, everyone's taking swing lessons, right? It's not really differentiator, doesn't really separate the best from the worst, right? You can make an argument and maybe the best swing coaches are going to be way better than the, you know, the $50 swing coach. I would agree with that. I think that's, you know, true in most cases. Not in every case, to be fair. Um, there's definitely some people who undercharge and there are definitely some people who overcharge. But I would say, you know, within reason, if you're seeing a swing instructor, that's probably $150 an hour, um, to maybe $250 an hour. It's kind of like a reasonable sweet spot for, you know, you're working with somebody high quality. If you're shopping for discounts on swing lessons, tough. That's tough. Um, anyway, a lot of people are doing swing lessons. A lot of them are doing it weekly. You might be in this boat. You might do more than weekly. You might look at that as like, that's your child's practice session, uh, which is not, not a good spot to be in. Uh, but that might be the case for you, just to fair. Sometimes I see people layer these, right? So we've got our swing coach and we've got our short game coach and then we've got our putting coach. Um, I see that sometimes, and that none of these things really make that big of a difference on player stuff. Then we get the mindset camp. Mindset quotations. Because mindset becomes a catch-all of, I don't shoot the scores that I think that I should, and sometimes I hit good shots and sometimes I hit bad set. Um, that's just patently false. Um, and so I just want to address that. Um, yeah, do I work with kids who are in that boat who have to harp on that all the time? Yeah, absolutely. But those are kind of the things that most people do, um, some variation of them. If you're doing one of these, just— this is also for you to know as well. Like, hey, just because you use some of this other stuff doesn't really mean it's going to move the needle that much, right? These are all just categories of things you could do. And I think that that's probably the best way to understand that is if you're thinking in terms of category, then you're going to really miss out on what actually is going to cause progress. We have to be a lot more specific and deliberate about what progress looks like, and I'm going to show you guys how to actually do that and what that looks like. So here's what you should do. The real problem that we're experiencing here, that you're going to experience, is you're not going to be able to effectively categorize problems. Like I said, you're not going to be able to effectively categorize the problems they're experiencing, and you're also going to have some level of squirrel brain because we're talking about 14-year-olds essentially, give or take, right? A few years on either side. We're going to have squirrel brain. Adults have squirrel brain. Of course kids are going to have squirrel brain, okay? And the swing coach is at the mercy of that squirrel brain because how does the lesson go, right? You go into the lesson, the kid tells the coach, hey, here's what I'm struggling with. Obviously the coach is already looking at— we're just looking at score, or we're just looking at through the prism of golf swing, not considering anything else that happens on the golf course. We're not considering strategy. We might adjacently say something about strategy, we might adjacently play a few holes, but it's not a cohesive thing. So we're just looking at strategy. Maybe you as the parent, maybe you're sitting there telling them, be like, well, I think this happens right now. We have a 3-person thing where it's like, well, the coach is trying to understand what you're saying, and then they're also, you know, got to manage the kid and whatever. They do the lesson, you feel like you got something, but there's not continuity and real progress. Like, I don't meet hardly any coach that documents what they do with a student lesson over lesson over lesson over lesson. Sometimes what I do see is having the student say what they did, and that can be really great, um, but there's just not a clear, um, dividing line here, right? And so that's just one of the things that I see as a substantial problem, right? We're not clear on what we need to really be doing. We don't have a way to really quantify any of this stuff, and we're just kind of jumping around from thing to thing to thing that just sounds smart. And so what's the solution? Well, number one, we need to track our stuff. We need to track our statistics, right? And then tracking statistics is not an end unto itself. Tracking statistics is cool. I do find sometimes, to be fair, that just tracking the statistics does help a player shoot lower scores. I categorize that under the 'what gets measured gets done,' right? So if we measure our scores, we're more probable to get better scores, which is justification enough to track your statistics. But we have to actually do something with the data. Like, we just collect a bunch of information, but we don't actually say, okay, based on this information, I interpret it in this particular way, and I'm going to do this based on that information. Like, how are we supposed to get better? It's just not going to happen, right? Or doesn't have a high probability of happening, right? So what we need to do is, you know, what I would call the scientific method, right? I'll just kind of break this out for you guys, and I'll show you guys what it actually looks like in, in practice here. So step number 1 is we essentially have to, you know, what would be the first step in the scientific method? We're essentially asking a question, right? So that question should be, how do I shoot lower scores on average? Really important that we say on average. And so when I say average, I'm thinking in terms of like 10 rounds. When we're looking at junior golf scoreboard, it's even more. But I like to think in terms of 10 rounds because it's enough that we can see meaningful progress, but it's not so much that we're like dragged down by something that happens 17 years ago. Um, so that's really the question. How do we shoot lower scores on average right now? How do we determine that? Well, we have to have some numbers that we're looking at, right? So we have to have some measurement criteria. And then beyond that, once I have my measurement criteria, I have to design an experiment. Design an experiment. And so once I have that experiment, right, so I've got how do I shoot lower scores, right? I'm measuring my stats, I have my statistics in front of me, right? I have my criteria for measuring those statistics. Then I have to design an experiment. I can say, okay, I need to get greens regulation up. That's the main thing out of all these things that are going to have an impact mathematically on my average. This is the thing that's going to have the biggest impact. Right. That's what I think. And so I'm going to do this particular thing for this defined period of time in order to improve that number. Right. So I'm saying, okay, I'm going to do this experiment, I'm going to do this thing, you know, define time period. If I could spell, define the time period, and then we're going to evaluate results. Results, new hypothesis, new question, experiment, hypothesis. All right. So that's, that's really the cycle here. So I'll give you guys an example. I was on a coaching call with my students the other day and one of them was asking me, and this was a great question. I'm happy that he did this. Um, one of them, he was asking me, it was like, hey, should I do the drill that you gave me for hitting the ball further? Um, from developing distance, or should I do Speed Sticks or whatever his particular brand of kind of speed training was? I was like, okay, well, before I answer that question, which is normally kind of my, my method of teaching, right? I could just say, hey, do the thing I told you to do, which is technically what I told him. But we want to know why. It's not just like, hey, do this thing because Connor says so, because Connor's smart. It's, it's because the thing that I'm telling you guys hopefully actually makes sense. Hopefully you guys enjoy these videos is to actually see why this stuff works, how it fits together. Right? And so what I told him, I was like, look, obviously I think you should do what I told you to do because I have lots of data to back up that I know that it works, right? But regardless, we have to go through this process here. So what— in his case, his question is, how do I increase distance off the tee? I'm like, all right, cool. What's our measurement criteria? It's got to be measuring our distance. We're going to be looking at our stat tracking or something to be like, all right, cool, what's my actual distance on the golf course, right? We can't just say, well, I think it's different. You're like, okay, cool. Like Why does the data say that it's what it is, right? You always got to have a defined criteria for whatever that is. And we get to design an experiment, right? This is the thing that we're going to do. So whether it's my drill or the, you know, Speed Sticks, you've got to define, okay, I'm going to do Speed Sticks and I'm going to do it this many times per week. And, you know, I'm going to be measuring my clubhead speed in that. I'm also going to be comparing that versus my on-golf-course clubhead speed. Okay, we have to define the period of time that we're going to do, right? So in his case, he's just like, oh, I just do it sometimes. I'm just like, dude, how are you supposed to get results if you don't actually have this measurement process, right? And so, you know, to his credit, it's just, it's, you know, a lot of parents are going to think the same way and be like, oh, we're doing Speed Sticks, or like, oh, we're doing TPI, or we're doing this fitness thing. And they're like, okay, like, what are you doing specifically? And, you know, how are you measuring that? And, you know, over what period of time are you going to find what determine whether or not it's working? Crickets. So, so we have to actually have this stuff clearly defined, right? So we say, okay, I'm gonna set a period of time. In this case, I was just like, dude, 30 days. Like, you're gonna do whatever you're gonna do for 30 days. You're gonna find the number of times you're gonna do it, right? And we wanna see over that 30-day period of time, how's Clubbed at Speed trending? And then also, how's the on-golf-course stuff trending, right? Then we can evaluate at the end and be like, hey, It moved, it moved by this amount, right? I increased by 5 yards over that month. Okay, cool. So what should we do in our next experiment? Well, do we still need to increase distance? Let's say we do. All right, cool. What should I do? Well, we still want to think of probabilities. I increased by 5 miles per hour this last month. Let's see if I can do it again. Let's do the exact same thing and see if I get diminishing returns. If I do, then okay, now I know I'm going to get diminishing returns. Right? And maybe I do something else. Maybe I continue to do it until I can't make any progress, right? Maybe that makes sense depending on whatever your long-term targets are and stuff like that. Talk about that in the timeline video that I did, um, earlier this week. But that, that's really the way to be thinking through this process, right? Is say like, okay, cool, what should I do next? Now on the flip side, let's say it doesn't move at all. Well, then you can throw that out and say, hey, that didn't work. We have to define what we're doing so that we can say, hey, that didn't work, or that did work, let's do more of it, that didn't work, let's avoid it, right? If I just go to swing lessons, I'm just having like random tips or just like little adjustments or little changes in the way the coach is looking at stuff, or, you know, just like a new training aid or whatever. It's like we don't have any of this, like, as you can see. And that's why the scores don't come down, because why would they? Because we're just doing like— just hitting the ball better sometimes doesn't really do that much for us because there's so much else so much other things that go into golf, right, beyond just hit the ball good, right? We've got strategy, we've got all these different scenarios we have to figure out, uh, on the golf course. There's all these uncertainties we have to deal with on the golf course. Um, there's just so much stuff that just isn't in the golf swing, right? So let's just talk about implying this, um, in the concrete here. So this is one of the students that I've worked with, uh, you know, since about July here. And so over that period of time, he's gone from a scoring differential of 3.59 to a scoring differential of negative 0.97. Now it's kind of hilarious because when I was first talking with them, um, I was like, hey, you know, the average player I work with improves by about 4 shots per year. I don't think that's going to happen for you guys because you're already pretty good, so it's unlikely that that's going to be the case. More likely we're going to improve a little bit slower than that, but you know, we're still on pace to reach our goals, so that's the main point here. Um, they're like, all right, cool, makes sense to us. Um, he's absolutely blown that out of the water. He's done a phenomenal job of tracking statistics and doing what I've asked him to do. So I was just all the credit to him. But anyway, here's where we started off, 3.59, right? And so now he's ranked whatever, 11th in his class, which is pretty cool. So he's going to be in a great spot. Anyway, I'm going to start tracking statistics. So this is the tool that I use. I'll draw more circles, um, anyway, they're awesome. But all right, so the first time I look at his statistics, penalty rate, not an issue. Greens regulation, 60%. Well, like, you know, pretty solid. Obviously he's a good player, you know, we're starting off, he's in a pretty decent spot. Scrambling 50%, uh, 3-putting about 4%, birdie conversion rate about 20%. So all in all, like, you know, pretty good statistics. And my job with any player is just to essentially look at where are we at and what's the most efficient means of improving regardless of where they're at. You know, if they're, uh, you're shooting in the 80s, you know, there's a good shot we've got penalty issues, there's a good shot we've got, you know, way too many 3-putts, there's a good shot we've got compound errors, which I'm not going to touch on in this video. There's all those things that are probably affecting us as we get better and better, um, we're going to have different things that we're going to have to, to kind of focus on. So in Jason's case, biggest opportunity for him was greens regulation, right? That was kind of just like the high-level thing. And so when we kind of think about that from a big picture, we can also quantify that, say, hey, if we improve this by 5%, we're going to improve by 0.63 shots. Okay, so that's just a target, right? That's, that's a, you know, a general area that we're aiming for here. Now when we go over here and we look at what we actually did So at the time, we had a scoring average of 75.2, scoring differential of 3.59. And so we identified greens regulation as the main thing that we needed to improve. And so when we're looking at this, we're trying to improve the par-4 approach distances, right? So for him, we wanted to get these numbers up from 100 to 150 yards. He's hitting about 56%. We wanted to get those up. It was kind of like the main focus. And then we also wanted to sharpen up some of his, um, some birdie conversion rate. We wanted to get that up a little bit. A little bit, right? And so a couple things we looked at on Speed of the Greens, but the main thing, to be fair, was just, hey, we want to get these numbers up. And so that's what I ended up focusing on. We said we were going to do specifically this. All right, cool. So next time we look at this in July, scoring average is down, scoring differential is down. So all in all, the whole point of doing this is to get the scoring average down, right? So that worked in this case. And if I go back over here, you can see in July We're hitting 80% of our greens. So he took what I told him and ran with it, which is why I say credit to him. Scrambling also improved as a result of having more control over our golf ball. 3-putting stayed about the same, right? Actually improved just a little bit even with him hitting more greens. So the stuff we were doing on the lag putting actually had a pretty big impact. And birdie conversion rate jumped up 27%, right? And penalty rate come down a little bit. So for him, that had him scoring under par on average And so when we look at him on Junior Golf Scoreboard, this is kind of this time period. You guys can kind of see why that's really how this process works. And so, you know, when we're looking at this and we're saying, okay, cool, what are we actually trying to do here? Again, if we're trying to lower the scores, we've got our measurements, right? We're looking at what our statistics are. We're designing that experience. Hey, I want you to focus on these approach numbers, right? I want you to get these up. We're going to do that over— in this case, it was 10 rounds of golf was our kind of target here. Took him about a month. And so then we evaluated those results, right? In his case— I guess I misspelled this— in his case, he was in a position where he executed on the thing that was the main thing. And so we were able to move on to the next thing, which was, hey, let's make more birdies, right? Let's, let's try and, um, you know, make more 10 to 15-foot putts, right? And for the most part pretty much every elite-level player, that's the last frontier. Like, that's all we really have as an option for us, um, just in terms of efficiency, right? If we're under 70%, it's very reasonable to get to 70% greens regulation. And so that, you know, becomes the main priority. But once we're at that point, it's like, hey, let's just push up birdie conversion rate, let's make more 10 to 15-foot putts. And then we end up handling more case-specific things where it's like, hey, we're playing in this tournament, we're trying to prepare for these particular conditions or scenarios or what have you. US Junior Qualifier is just higher level, more sophisticated problems. But this applies no matter what, whether you're, you're shooting in the 90s or shooting in the low 70s. Um, but that's how you improve faster, right? You guys saw Jason and how he did it. Um, Jason is obviously exceptional. Like I said, the average player I work with improves by about 4 shots per year. So if you want me to apply this process for your child, um, you want to help them improve faster so that they can actually play Division 1 golf. Because like, hopefully you guys can kind of see— again, just kind of reemphasize this— unless they're already in position, they need to improve faster. And so you guys are doing whatever you're doing, if you're not measuring it, that's strike one at least. Um, so I just highly encourage you guys, if this is something you want to do, if you want to take this seriously and play Division 1 golf, um, fill out the application. Let's at least have a conversation about it, right? If your child's in a position, let's at least see, you know, what it would look like for them. Um, they can kind of line out you know, what this process would look like and what would make sense for you guys. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this. If you want to go check out other videos on the channel, you're obviously welcome to. Got a number of different playlists covering different topics regarding this, going into more detail. Um, once again, you know, if you're watching this, you guys don't have infinite time, so smarter to just say, hey, let's have a conversation about it. And then if you want to continue doing your research in the background, then that makes all the sense in the world. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this, and I'll see you guys in the next one.