How To Pick The Right Tournaments For Your Junior Golfer

What's going on, guys? So in today's video, I'm going to be going and doing a deep dive into how to pick the right tournaments for your junior golfer and how to progress through the tournaments all the way to the highest level. Um, now this is going to be diving deeper off of the training that I did on how to get recruited without missing your window. So if you haven't already watched that training, just comment below "training" and I'll be sure to tag you in that. Make sure that you watch that before you watch this video. That way everything makes sense and you kind of understand where I'm starting here because I'm skipping a few steps. But, um, just to kind of kick this thing off, um, I'm gonna start with kind of just like which tournaments the best players are playing. So the reason for that is I see a lot of parents and kids kind of look at this where maybe they think D1 is like a really big daunting goal or something like that And so their reaction to that is, well, I'm not gonna try, I don't think I'm that good, or I don't wanna try that hard. So I'm gonna look at like D2, D3. And to be honest, you know, if you wanna be successful, like first things first, what I wanna encourage you guys to do is set big goals. If you set big goals, even if you fall a little bit short of them, you're still gonna be in a pretty good spot. I always use the Kobe and Michael analogy, you know, like Kobe tried to be Michael Jordan and he fell a little bit short of that, but he was still one of the all-time greats. And so when you guys look at trying to play college golf, I want you to aim high. And if you fall off a little bit from that, okay, fine. We still ended up in a good spot. But if you aim low, you're like, well, you know, I just want to play D2, D3. I just want to play college somewhere. Then you're not going to approach this with the seriousness that you need to. And you have a few setbacks and now we've, we've quit golf. And, you know, from a parent's perspective, I want you to consider like, who is your child around when they're in a Division I program? you know, playing college golf, let's say even one of these elite programs, who are they around? What kind of resources do they have available to them? What kind of scholarships do they have available to them? Maybe even not sports scholarships, how much help do they have finding the loose scholarships? Um, you know, how much support do they have getting through their, their schoolwork as compared to not playing college golf at all and they're just kind of doing whatever, you know, kids do in college, which, you know, um, can get a little bit shady sometimes. So, you know, this isn't just about golf. Um, this is about who your child is going to be around. So Um, all that to say, set big goals, set high goals. Don't be afraid to fail at that because it's just part of the process. It's understanding if you shoot high and we miss a little bit, that's totally fine, but we want to be strategic about this. Um, at the same time, if you're looking at that and you're like, well, I just don't want to put in that much work, we don't need to be putting in 8 hours a day to be able to play Division 1 golf. We just need to be intelligent about what we're doing. We put in work, but we need to put in smart work. So don't worry about like the burnout factor there. That's caused by completely different things. So without further ado, let's go ahead and jump right into this. All right, so I'm going to look kind of at the top, like 15 here, just to kind of start off. And what I'm seeing is, you know, it's pretty standard. You know, we've got AJGA, um, Ping Invitational Junior Players, Jack Burke Invitational, uh, US Junior Am, um, Western Junior, another AJGA Southern Junior, X-Spot. And what you'll kind of find is, you know, these are all kind of the high-level events. These are the elite AJGA events. I'm going to show you how you know that in just a second, but you can also look at the yardages here. I mean, we're playing long golf courses, 7,300 yards, 7,200 yards. You know, the shorter ones are maybe 6,700 yards, and that's kind of like these local events. That are getting played here. So, you know, with this player, obviously they're a top 10 player, but if they had the goal of being the number 1 player, yeah, I'd want them to bring their scoring average down, but we could also tidy up these tournaments a little bit. We could take out some of these local stuff. I understand that some players like to have kind of a ramp up. So again, I'm not saying that this is exactly what this player should be doing. It's just food for thought. And just to kind of validate that over here, strength of tournament is part of how this ranking is calculated. So we can see here strength of tournaments 30 right here. Some of these higher ranked players, you know, number 1 ranked player is 14. So closer to 1 is better. But anyway, these are the tournaments you want to be playing in. Uh, you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf or aiming high. These are the tournaments they want to be in. So how do you get into them? Well, what you want to do is you want to go over to Google and just go ahead and type in, um, essentially tournament name, like whatever, Junior Players AJGA criteria. So this is the 2023 criteria for all the Invitational events. You can do the same thing for the Western or some of the other events I'm going to show you guys. This is how this looks. So let's just go ahead and say like, what is it for the Junior Players? So it's the top 58 boys based on Rolex ranking. All right. Hopefully that makes sense. This is going to be different for everything, you know, like girls, um, AJGA Invitational top 59, paint is going to be, you know, different criteria here. You want to find the criteria for all these events and say like, okay, cool, how do we develop a strategy to become one of the top-ranked Rolex players? So I just jumped over from junior golf scoreboard rankings to Rolex ranking. Why did I do that? Well, what you'll find is there's overlap between these two ranking index. Junior Golf Scoreboard is a wider, like, broader ranking index. It ranks a lot more events, so more coaches are going to look at it. But you still have to understand the Rolex rankings, and you still have to move up the Rolex rankings if you want to have the best rank on Junior Golf Scoreboard, because, you know, you have to qualify for bigger events. That's just kind of how this works. So how are the Rolex rankings calculated? Well, go to the AJGA website, rankings, and what you'll see here is there's a few different, you know, things in this like little accordion. So there's the 225 events. These are the events that give you the most points in junior golf in the Rolex rankings. These are where the best players are playing, and by extension you're going to see this reflected on Junior Golf Scoreboard. These are where the best players are and that's where they're going to be shooting the good scores. So these are all like the, the majors, if you will. So in theory, like, you could get in all of these, like, that would be great. Um, but assuming you could get in all these, then you'd want to be a little bit more selective and say like, I really want to play in this one because I like that golf course or whatever. You can be strategic about this stuff. But these are the majors in AJGA events, and then these are the non-AJGA majors. So you see like the Western, US Junior, Girls Junior, Junior PGA, whatever. Those are the top events that are non-AJGA events. So that's that. Then there are other tournaments with different amounts of points. So if a tournament has more points, more valuable. Tournament has fewer points, less valuable. Pretty simple. Your standard AJGA Open— I know some of you guys might think like that's like the pinnacle. If you're playing in 5 AJGA Opens, that's great. Um, yeah, that's just like the entry level here. Like, there's higher, higher level AJGA, and then the Invitationals, um, as well. And part of the thing about the Invitationals is you might know that there's a limit to the number of AJGA events for Opens you can play in. Well, there's no limit to the AJGA Invitationals you can play in. So that's part of how these players at high level really continue to increase their Rolex ranking, is they're not just playing the 5 AJGA events, they're not just playing in 1 or 2 other non-AJGA events that have Rolex points. They're also playing at higher and higher value tournaments, which continue to kind of push that advantage. You'll also get ranking points for, you know, the Junior All-Stars and what have you, but this is just where you find that information. We can, we can deep dive into all this stuff, but for right now, I just want you guys to have a baseline understanding here. So the next highest value is the 120-point events. So the first one here, I This actually became the X-Spot, I believe. No, actually, no, I'm sorry, I'm mistaken that one. The Innsbruck became the X-Spot. But these are, you know, the highest point events that are non-225 events, and it'll just show you, like, some of these are non-AJGA, some of these are AJGA. And so these events are really applicable once you have exempt status. So a lot of times you might think like, oh, exempt status is like the highest tier. It's not, you know, like exempt status, you probably get to like some level of Division I. Um, but just know, again, like we want to have high goals here. So we want to say like, okay, cool, like, like exempt status is cool, but like let's get to that next level, you know. We'll always be pursuing like the highest level here. So anyway, once you get exempt status, then this stuff becomes relevant. Until you get exam status, you really want to be focused more on the open events kind of in general and just get that knocked out as fast as possible. So going from there, what you can do is you can see like how many points are won in every event. Um, that's not, uh, the greatest thing in the world. Just, you know, go play golf. But if you wanted to be a nerd and dig into that, then you're more than welcome to. But the next thing that we really want to go over here is kind of how these points are made up. So I'll just go over to Checkpoint Rankings here. And all right, so let's take somebody like top 10 again. So again, you can see here, you know, this player is playing as crazy as he can say. 2026 here, and he's already playing the junior player. So that should tell you again, like, get ahead on this stuff. Like, don't like just try and say like, oh, I hope we have this done by our senior year. Like, get it done as early as possible. Like, have high goals again so you can fail into a healthier range here. So, you know, if our goal is to be there as a sophomore or a junior, then it's going to be very easy to have it done by senior, right? So anyway, What you can see here is this player is playing a lot more than 5 events, and, you know, the reason for that is because they're playing in these invitationals, which do not count toward that 5-event limit. And then they're also playing in events that are high-value events that are not AJGA events. So when you guys talk to me about like, hey, like, are the only events that matter AJGA? No, that's not true. Um, there are events that are non-AJGA that are also very high-value events. You can play Division 1 golf and be one of the top, if not the top-ranked player in the country without playing a single AJGA event. AJGA events are just more plentiful. There's a lot more opportunities to play in AJGA events, even though I know that it's kind of this thing about like, oh, I can't get into any AJGA events. It's like, usually it's because you don't know what you're, you're looking for and you don't know where you're trying to apply and a whole bunch of other stuff. Um, but yeah, there's a lot of AJGA events out there. So anyway, let's see, junior players, right? Or I'm sorry, the junior PGA, US Junior. Let's see here, Sage Valley, gotta get an invite to that one. There's not even open criteria there, so you just gotta be as good as possible. Dustin Johnson World Junior, that's one you'll see on the minimum points list. So what I did for all of our students, I just like turned it into a spreadsheet, so it's just very easy to sort through all that stuff. Um, if you want, you can do that for yourself, but it's, it's a little bit of a pain. It takes a few days. Uh, it's pretty brutal. Uh, but maybe you're better at Excel than I am. So anyway, here you can see that he stacked that up because what he's doing is he's going to have whatever number of points he got, got for these placements here, and that number is going to be divided by the number of events that he played in. All right, and to have the best ranking possible, what you want to have is at least 6 events that are ranked. If it's less than 6 events, then it's still gonna— your number's still gonna be divided by 6. So let's find something that's easy for me to divide by 6. Um, let's say you got 60 points, um, and then you— let's see, let's say we had 50 points I'm gonna have to bring in my calculator here, but we only played in 5 events, so we got 10 points per event. We're going to be dividing that by 6. So for him, his average, which is what that's going to create, is 47 points per event, right? You know, if I had 50 points and I played in 6 events, then, you know, I would have an average of whatever it was, like 8. So again, if I just played in that extra event and earned the same number of points Now I'm getting 10 per event, so that's going to boost my ranking, right? So sometimes it's not always like, um, you know, just play strategically. You want to have, uh, you know, a strategic approach to how you're moving through these rankings here. So we're thinking about an AJGA, you know, and we're trying to move ourselves up. We want to say like, okay, how do we get those 5 AJGA events? Probably gonna have to qualify for some of those. We're probably, you know, earn stars, yeah, but you want to make sure your game's in a spot where you don't panic about like, hey, I'm going to go qualify for this AJGA event. We're going to get into, you know, several, several qualifiers. Um, but if our goal is to get into 5, like, you better believe that you're probably gonna have to at least plan on playing in 5, 6, 7, 8 qualifiers if you can, especially if you don't already have status here. Sure, there's other ways to like get stars, but again, that's why it's rewarded, you know, if you start off early and you beat up Junior All-Star Now you have a bunch of stars, it's easier to get into some of those events and so on and so forth. But, um, you know, that's kind of how you should be thinking about this. Okay, get into these events, get into these 5 AJGAs. I'm also looking at what are the non-AJGAs I can get into, right? Um, I'm getting increased status there. So eventually you want to be trending your game, and I'll talk about this in a second. You want to be trending your game so you're going to be able to top 5 in one of those AJGA events. So now you have exempt status. Now you level up again and you can go into picking events based on point value and not just going for your minimum event. And then as you get higher and higher on that, eventually you get into the invitationals. And then that's kind of where it's like game over, like go out and play, but like you're playing against the best kids in the country. And you'll just kind of experience this once you get to that level. Some of you guys in this group, um, have already done this, so you kind of know, or it's like it's a different tier of golfer, it's a different tier of family, it's a different tier of kid. Like, everyone's dialed in at that. Like, it's almost like pseudo-professional. Um, but it's one of the coolest things in the world. You can give that shot— your child that experience, um, that confidence themselves. Like, it's really incredible. So, um, that's the high level of this. That's how you reverse engineer this whole process, is you start off at the baseline here, um, and you kind of work your way up. Now Here's the caveat. I told you guys at the beginning of this that there's a bunch of other stuff that goes into not just the tournament selection. A lot of people mess this up. If you go out and just say, hey Connor, I'm just gonna go find some AJGA events, I can almost guarantee you're not going to be successful in doing this unless you've already just got yourself like a complete stick that just beats the crap out of every golf course they play on. If your junior golfer is shooting kind of like, let's just say like okay scores, let's say the scoring average is like 80, 79, or let's say you don't even know that their score— what their scoring average is, like objectively, like it's, you know, 77.4, you know, like if you don't know that, uh, it's just kind of like, oh yeah, they kind of shoot high 70s, um, then it's— don't even bother doing this. Like what you need to do first is get their scoring average down as fast as possible. Like you need to get that number lower. And yeah, sometimes, you know, it's mechanical stuff that they need to be working on, but odds are, like, if they've already been working with a swing coach for a while, they've already been doing stuff that, that can be beneficial to keep doing that. But again, like, you're not going to get any big jumps by doing that. Usually at that stage, the biggest thing that's missing are insights. So maybe that is they need to make a mental, like, mindset shift. Maybe they need to start approaching something different on the golf course. Usually when I work with students and we have like one little mental shift, usually those are good for a couple shots on their own, um, off of the overall scoring average. So That's something. Another one is strategy. You know, if we don't have any sophisticated strategies, just kind of like, I'm just trying to hit it on the green or trying to hit it at the flag, sometimes they get short-sighted. I've got mental chatter like, oh, I hope I don't miss it here. Those are definitely opportunities to, to shoot lower scores. And same thing for practicing. If we don't have a clear method for our practice where we're targeting our scoring average— so again, this practice doesn't make sense. I guarantee your practice isn't dialed in if you don't know what your scoring average is. to go ahead and move those levers down. I would focus on those first, get the scoring average down, so when you go into those tournaments, it's not a question of like, oh, are we going to be successful? We know we're in a spot to be successful. That's what the lower level tournaments are for, is to really dial in that average. And then when you go into the next level events, you don't go out there and embarrass yourself. You don't get into one AJGA event, you can never get into another one again. Played so bad. Um, and you don't want to do that to your junior golfer. You don't want to stress them out like that. So get their average down first, tackle that problem, then dial in the tournaments, then work your way through this stuff. Otherwise you're going to run into burnout, you're going to run into all sorts of problems. So anyway, um, hope this helps you guys. If you want help, um, doing any of this stuff, whether it's navigating these tournaments or, you know, you're in a position just like, oh crap, like, actually don't really know our scoring average that well, or it's a little bit too high and kind of doing the same stuff, um, but like we need to level that up, um, go ahead and comment me below and I'll shoot you a DM. Um, that's, that's what we do with our students. Like, that's what we help them through, is we make sure the scoring average is low enough and then we get them into terms to tell them what they need to do, you know, what they need to be thinking, how they need to approach every single shot on the golf course, what they need to be practicing every single week. and then, you know, which tournaments they need to be playing on based on their situation. It's not all just, hey, here's the top AJGA events. Sometimes it's like, all right, cool, let's, like, let's just pump the brakes, let's solve this one problem before we go into this next level. That way they're always at the appropriate, um, position. And, um, yeah, so, um, that is really for you again if you're somewhere between the ages, uh, or if you have a junior golfer that's kind of between the ages of like 12 and 15. Over 15, like 16, 17-year-olds, we're really kind of running into crunch time. So just kind of like, no, we're on the back burner there. Um, and if you've got a kid that's, you know, 11, that's kind of like a real in-between stage, um, because you're going through different types of tournaments and you're getting ready to play in AJGA. So if you're like, oh crap, this is around the corner and we've got a scoring average of 83, let me get that down as, as fast as possible, um, and get that to the next level so that you can hit the ground running when they're 12. They're younger than 11, um, then we've got some other stuff coming down the pipeline for you guys as far as like trainings and stuff. Um, so keep your eyes peeled for that one. But that's kind of a little bit, um, before a lot of this stuff becomes relevant to really dial this stuff in. But again, um, if you want help, just comment me below and I will shoot you more information on that. Talk to you guys soon.