How To Play College Golf Step by Step

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be going over how to play college golf, um, step by step. So if you're new to this process, maybe you're a parent, you've got a junior golfer and you're looking at this, you're like, I don't know where the heck to start. Um, you know, maybe we're working with a swing coach every single week, um, but you're not really sure, you know, if that's what needs to happen to play college golf or if there's other things involved. If you have to start talking to coaches, sending emails, going to camps, what have you. This video is going to be top to bottom how to do it, how I've been able to help my players do it, and how I believe that you can do it. This is not going to be stuff that's going to be necessarily unique to me. I do have a process and I'm going to show you guys what I do, but this is just principle. This is going to be based on here, it's like the literal steps. And so hopefully this makes sense to you guys. If this is something you guys want help with, maybe you've got, like I said, a junior golfer and you're like, hey, this, this looks cool, this looks like a lot, um, we need you need help, I'll have a link below that, below this video in the description where you can learn about how we can work together and what that would look like. So anyway, let's go ahead and hop right into it. Um, as well, if you're new to the channel, please go ahead and subscribe. I do come out with videos like this every single week, and if you enjoyed this video, please go ahead and leave a like. So that's all the pitch for this video. Um, let's go ahead and jump into it here. So pull that up. So foundationally, with all of college recruiting, it's really going to come down to rankings. Um, my go-to ranking index is Junior Golf Scoreboard. I know there's a bunch of different ranking indexes out there. Most of them are crap, to be honest. Um, they just don't really, you know, they're not that good. Um, Junior Golf Scoreboard is the broadest one that most college coaches are going to look at. If you say, hey, I'm ranked top 10 in my class on Junior Golf Scoreboard, that means something. That means something to college coaches. So this is the one you want to look at. Also pulled up AJGA over here, um, this is kind of another reference point. What you'll kind of see is there's a lot of overlap between these two ranking indexes. The players who are ranked here tend to be ranked over here, but there'll be players ranked on Jr Golf Scoreboard that are not ranked on AJGA just because it has a broader swath of tournaments. So that's really helpful for a number of reasons, um, which I'm not going to get too deep into. But moral of the story is AJGA, you gotta play their game. And that's great if you're trying to be, you know, top, top player in the entire country. Amazing, do that. Um, one of my students that I just worked with who just went to UCLA, that's a conversation that we had is like, how do we optimize this stuff? If you're just getting started though, Junior Golf Scoreboard's gonna be much better. It's gonna give you a lot more clarity about where you need to go. And then even if you are ranked on Rolex, so still talking to you guys who are, you know, at an elite level, um, you're still gonna want to have Junior Golf Scoreboard. It's just kind of like a benchmark so you can understand kind of like where your game's at. How it's trending over time and how you stack up versus the other players you're playing against. So that's just big picture here. Um, one of the things to kind of back this up here as well, um, this is a page that everyone can go to, rankings and honors, college signings, and you can actually see all the players who got recruited to all these different, you know, Division I programs. And most importantly, you're going to be able to see what their scoring differential was and where they ranked in their class. Now, scoring differential is just a fancy way to kind of show you how a player scores versus the difficulty of the golf course. So if two players shoot the same scores, the one who plays the more difficult golf courses is obviously the better player, and scoring differential shows that. Okay, so that's what you guys need to understand about that. Now you can see the best players in the country tend to be, you know, -7, -8, usually somewhere in that range. Um, before you guys get kind of freaked out by that, um, this is not— they're shooting 8-under on average or 7-under on average. This is just a function of between the course rating, which is how golf courses are evaluated for difficulty for elite players. So not slope rating, that's one of the ones you'll see where it might be like 130, 140, something like that. The course rating is what a scratch golfer should shoot on that golf course if they play to their handicap. So that's how that works. Now, just so we're clear on kind of what to expect out of, you know, elite-level golf. If you look at, you know, the top players in the country, we're going to see a scoring average somewhere between 72 and 74. Again, I just pulled this player randomly. And for the best players in the country, we're going to see a yardage somewhere around 7,000 to 7,200 yards as kind of like their normal yardage. You're going to see the shorter golf courses that they play might be 6,600, 6,800 yards, but a lot of times you're going to see golf courses that are north of that. Usually those events are not going to be accessible to you if you're just playing in like Hurricane Tour or stuff like that. Hurricane's great for just getting your foot in the door, playing in tournaments, but as you get to higher and higher levels of golf, the tournament quality that you need to be playing in becomes, you know, higher level. You start to see more AJGAs, more invitationals. Not all invitationals are created equal, I'm just going to say that right now, but you know, something like the Junior Players, something like Sage Valley, those are elite invitational events. They're going to have golf courses that are, you know, 7,000, 7,200, 7,300 yards. And that's typically what you're going to see from the elite players. So when you're kind of mapping out, you know, what do we need to do, does distance matter, stuff like that, it's going to come back to like, how long are the golf courses you're playing, what's your scoring average right now, and what we need to do to get that low enough to kind of meet this 72 to 74 number. The reason that number is so important is a few things. Number one, that's just kind of like the standard, um, you know, the best players in the country, yeah, they get down to like 71, you know, 70.5. But for the most part, the vast majority of players, 72 to 74 is gonna be solid. There's gonna be some variance on that based on how difficult the golf courses are that they're playing. Um, but the other thing that happens is it allows you to get through all of the qualifiers to get into these bigger events. You can go into a tournament and shoot even par for, you know, 2 or 3 rounds you're going to be able to make it through a lot of qualifiers and not have too much of an issue. You're not going to think about, oh, I don't know if I can qualify for this AJGA, you know, open event. It's like, you have a scoring average of 74, it's like, it's probably got a 60% probability of getting into that event. So you qualify a few times, now you got stars, like, you don't have to worry about it anymore. So that's kind of like the way to look at this stuff. That's kind of the criteria you guys want to be thinking— 72, 74 as a scoring average. I don't care what your handicap is. None of that stuff matters. But this is the thing you really need to be evaluating. This is, uh, one of the key principles I want to leave you guys with. You can make your golf swing look great, you can be flushing it on the driving range— if you do not have the scores, it does not matter. It just, it doesn't matter. Um, and so that is so crucial to just kind of like wrap your head around, and it allows you to approach this problem differently because we can say, all right, cool, we need to play in the right tournaments. And I'll show you guys how to do that in just a second. But more importantly than that, we need to bring our scores down and we need to be able to play on long golf courses. So what we want to be able to do is look at where our scores right now, what's our scoring average, and how do we lower that in the most efficient way possible. It's that simple. That's the approach that we want to take. Um, so before we go too deep into that, um, I just want to give you guys some context here. The average player on Junior Golf Scoreboard is kind of like looking at this across classes. The median player is going to improve by about 1.18 shots per year, give or take a little bit, sometimes a little bit better, sometimes a little worse. Um, and just so you guys know how I got there, um, there's this kind of handy-dandy tool called Trend Report, and as a subset of that— this is just a random player All right, as a subset of that, it has this thing called percentile. So that shows you where the middle player is, or where this, this player is versus the field, right? So as you get older, more and more kids get ranked, and so that adjusts for kind of like where you should be at, right? So if more kids come into the class that are worse than you, right, you're going to improve. If more kids come in that are better than you, you're going to get worse. Relative to the other kids, or in the percentile basis. So if we look at percentile over percentile, which is the only way to really like map this out— if I went like player by player, that'd be brutal— but if we go percentile by percentile, that's about the average improvement. So that's something for you to start thinking about. Look at, okay, cool, where's your junior golfer scoring average? How long are those golf courses? And how can we map this out? And you might be in a lot of different places. You might have a kid who could hit the ball really far and they are still shooting 80 or 78 or 76 and they can't break into the 60s. Or you might have a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old or a 12-year-old and you're like, okay, cool, well, you know, maybe we shoot good scores but the golf courses are still super short. What are we supposed to do there? And I'm going to do my best to kind of help you guys through that. Obviously, it's— there's more that goes into it that can really be put in any, any one video. I'm gonna do my best here for you guys, um, but the main point of this video is to give give you guys a really clear picture of the steps that go into this. And if you want a lot of help with like the nitty-gritty details, um, again, reach out to me below and we'll talk it through. So that's that. Tournaments— just go to tournaments and results, search for tournaments, find your state, find when you want to play, play from these tournaments. Don't go around and find other random events. You don't know if they're ranked. Just, just playing these ones, um, just keeps things really, really simple. So that's all I'm going to tell you guys about tournaments. The rest of this is going to be solely dedicated to talking about scoring average and, and how we're going to go ahead and bring that down, how I do this with my students. So first things first, you need to have a tool that allows you to track your students' stats or your child's stats. You need to have something that you're able to see all these numbers with. My recommendation is a tool called Draw More Circles. You know, this is something that I give to all of my students. And just as a shameless plug here, if you guys want to talk to me about any of this stuff, I do actually give my students all a $500 discount off of the circles tool. So if you guys want to talk to me about that as a little incentive there, I'll give you guys that $500 discount as well. So if you're on the fence, you're like, I don't know if I wanna talk to this guy, I'll give you $500 for it. Um, if that's valuable to you, cool. Um, but all the features I'll be showing you are, you know, part of that. So anyway, let's go ahead and dig into this. So you wanna be able to segment out tournaments and practice. Um, so other tools that can do this, Deckade can do this. Um, I'm also a really big fan of being able to look at custom date ranges, and I'll kind of get into that a little bit later, but you want to be able to segment out your data pretty much. You want to be able to say like, okay, cool, what's our average? Which you guys will see down here. And you want to be able to see how does that differ from tournaments to practice, because you might have a scenario where, let's say, your child does really well in practice and they really struggle in tournaments. Well, it's kind of useless to be like, well, let's go get another lesson and try and hit better on the driving range because they already hit it good on the driving range. That's not the point, that's not the problem. And if you want to improve anything, you need to be able to be really good at addressing like, what's the main problem? What's the biggest bottleneck that we're facing here and attack that rather than just, you know, go and do random stuff, which is what most, you know, people end up doing. So anyway, you want to be able to track your scoring average, right? We want to have some idea of where this stacks up versus whatever your junior golf scoreboard average is. Now, a lot of you guys are not going to be able to pull this average, um, number, but you will be able to see the scoring differential. So that's another way for you guys to be able to measure this. So if you go and play in a bunch of tournaments, sure, you're not gonna have your scoring average, but if you can look at Junior Golf Scoreboard and know here's all the tournaments I played in, you can calculate it. It's not really that hard. Um, and you'll also be able to see scoring differential. So scoring differential should be improving over time. Again, remembering about 1.18 shots is average normal. If you're doing better than that, fantastic, great job. If you're doing worse than that, that's 50% of everyone and that doesn't discriminate against the skill level. I've seen plenty of players who are elite players who just struggle to, to shave scores or to shave shots off. So anyway, back into this. You've got a scoring average. That's going to be like our most core thing. We want to know what that is in tournaments, and we want to know how it compares. Because if we have a situation— this is usually what happens for me when I'm working with a student— I want to know where we're trending. You know, if their scoring average in tournaments is better than it's been, then I want them to continue to play in more tournaments because we're going to continue driving that average down. And that's at the end of the day the main point here. If it's worse, then it's like, okay, cool, note to self, maybe we don't need to push a bunch of tournaments. Maybe we do, maybe we don't, but maybe we have a problem we need to solve. And you want to know this number. Then you're going to see a bunch of other stuff. You're going to see strokes gained, you're going to see, you know, birdies per round, you're going to see sand saves, all this stuff. Most of this information is meaningless in my opinion. Um, I don't think it really helps us move things forward. And as kind of a subset of that, what I mean by that is I don't think that by knowing a lot of this information it causes you to shoot lower scores. Um, that's just kind of like how it is. It doesn't really tell you that much. My biggest example of that is if you hit a pitching wedge to 30 feet on average and you start hitting it 26 feet on average, I know that changes the strokes gained number. And I apologize if this is all new to you and it's coming hard and fast. Um, again, I've got other videos, right? I'm a little bit more delicate here. Or again, you want help, you know how to do that. Um, I know that that changes the strokes gained numbers, but it— I can't see it, and I can't explain to a player, here's the, you know, here's how to know that you've done better aside from having a TrackMan. And at that point, we're $25,000 in the hole, which is not something I want to guide you guys into. So anyway, there's a few metrics that really do matter. There are a few metrics that do predict what we're going to shoot, and those are the numbers we want to look at. So this is a spreadsheet I give all my students. Um, this is just an easy way for us to be able to see like what's going on. Why are we shooting the scores we're shooting? What is producing this average that we can see today? Penalty rate is the first one. I don't care if you hit it in the rough. Um, we're gonna hit in the rough. Our shot pattern is big enough off the tee, we're gonna hit the rough. Um, hitting the fairway, great. We can't hit balls out of bounds, we're going to lose a shot there. That tells us something about what we're going to shoot, right? Um, in my perfect world, I'd like to be able to see line at the green because I think that that has a much bigger impact there. Because if you hit it in the trees, it's not a shot, but it's dang close. Um, but penalty rate is the one that I like to look at. Greens regulation is the next one. We know how many greens per round we hit, we know how many pars we're going to make. You know how many opportunities you have at birdie, um, and we just know a lot better what we're going to shoot on that hole. Scrambling— what happens when we miss the green? If we don't hit the green regulation, what happens? How often should we make par? 3 putts— this one's massive. How many times do we lose shots once we're on the green, right? This is usually one of the easiest places to clean up. A lot of junior golfers 3-putt like 3 times around, 4 times around, and they don't even know that they're bad at putting. I'll talk to them and I'll be like, yeah, I know I'm a pretty good putter. And then I'll look at their numbers and they're like 16%. It's like, whoa, we've got 2 shots right here. If we just improve like your lag putting or something, um, we're gonna get better. So that's, that's the next metric that I like to look at. And then the last one here is birdie conversion rate, which is just how often do we make birdie once we hit the green. Uh, it's pretty straightforward. The last number I— or, um, let's actually go here. That all produces what is essentially a scoring average, what you should shoot on average based on these numbers. And so with this spreadsheet, um, you can actually play around with it. You can actually change the numbers and see that the numbers in your average are going to change, right? That, that's the whole point. And this is fairly accurate. I've done this across a lot of players, and these numbers work very well to predict what we're going to shoot. Now the last piece here is compound errors. Compound errors is essentially What are the times that, you know, what are the shots that are not accounted for in any of this data? And those are going to be things like 2-chips, 4-putts, things like that. That's what's going to get tracked here. So sometimes this can be a very high number, especially maybe you have a junior golfer where, you know, they get frustrated and after they've missed the green, they're so mad that they can't focus enough to hit their next shot on the green, and they miss that or they chunk it or they blade it or whatever. and sometimes they're losing 2, 3, 4 shots per round on that. And just making clear to them, hey, here's how much you could improve if you just were a little bit more disciplined on that. That can be a big, you know, have a really big impact on their ability to shoot lower scores and also gain their— gain control over their, their brain. You know, like they're frustrated, but you can actually really get clear about like why they would benefit from not being frustrated or letting it go. That can be really, really helpful for players. But point is, you want to have clarity on not just like, again, what is the scoring average, but why is the scoring average, right? Like, that's the next step here. Now, once we have clarity on that, we're going to have drill downs on each one of these, right? There's— we can go and ask questions about that. And so just to give you guys an example, I'm not going to go through every single one of these because, again, this video would be way too long. Penalty rate. If we're really struggling off the tee, which is what that represents, a really easy place to start is do you hit one ball flat off the tee? Because if we're trying to work the ball both directions, two things happen. Number one, you're probably not good enough to do that. Most tour players don't do that, um, so you probably can't do it. And if you say that you can, I almost— if this number is bad for you, you're wrong. Um, But that's, that's the first thing. Second thing is it actually shrinks your margin by error by essentially half. Because if you think about it, like, if you knew that your ball was not going to curve to the left— let's say we're hitting a fade and we're a right-handed player— if you knew your ball was not going to move left, you could aim it on the left out-of-bounds line, and you have whatever your target width is. You might have 60, 70 yards if you're in driver that you can slice this golf ball and still be in play. Like, that's just— that's a very powerful piece of information. I know it's like, when's the last time you hit a 60-yard slice? Probably never. Um, but it's very easy to hit maybe a 30-yard slice, especially with the wind or something like that. Um, especially if you just like weren't focused. Like, those are all things that can happen. So being able to say, okay, I'm just gonna hit one ball flight, could be— have a massive impact on this number. So that'd be an example of something that you might apply in that particular circumstance. All right, but anyway, we have these numbers, we're going to drill down and say, okay, cool, why are these numbers the way that they are and how can we improve them? Like, what's the way that we want to prioritize this? As you can kind of see here, and this is like a live spreadsheet that I've used with student, in this case for this player, we identified that improving his greens and regulation was going to have the biggest impact on his scores. And so that's, that was kind of the biggest change here. The— and we're able to do this with every single one of these numbers. The way that I like to approach is adjust each one of these by 5%. If we improve by 5% in one of these categories, what's going to have the biggest impact on our scores? And that number pops up here. Okay, so in this case, you know, this next kind of cycle, if you will, it still greens and regulation is a primary thing for him. He doesn't really hit balls out of bounds. Scrambling's fine. Doesn't really 3-putt tons. and it's pretty conversion rate's pretty good. So if we improve just this 5%, we're gonna improve by 0.8 shots. And knowing that the average player improves by 1.18 shots per year, that's pretty good. Um, you know, we can take a long time to accomplish that and still be at average. Usually it doesn't happen that way. Usually we improve even faster than that, which is why when I work with players, they tend to improve significantly faster, somewhere between 3.15 shots per year. And if we go with just the mean average, it's closer to like 4.1 shots per year. Um, because we're able to get really focused on what we need to do. And I think that's another principle I want you guys to take away from this, is focus is extremely powerful. Um, focus is like why light in the form of a laser can cut through a table, um, is because all that light, you know, is in one spot versus, you know, otherwise you can just light a room or something like that. Um, so anyway, you want to know what these numbers are, and you want to be able to prioritize and really say, okay, this is the thing we're going to screw around with. Everything else we want to stay stock standard. Um, but we want to have a way to practice that. We also want to be able to have a way to track this over time. Because if I say, hey, I'm going to do these things in practice, or I've identified these problems and this is what we're going to do to fix it, we need to be able to measure that. If we can't measure that and say, hey, last time we did this, this time we did this, here's the improvement, here's the adjustments that we're going to do going forward, it's useless. Um, and that's how most lessons go. So you go in, you hit balls, coach tells you what you don't like about— that he doesn't like about your swing, or she doesn't like about your swing. You go ahead and change those things. You will be hitting it about the same, maybe a little bit better and maybe a little bit worse. And then you just repeat that process and until you're either a tour player and you're still doing that, or you're not playing golf anymore. Anyway, when I work with my students, I like to track their stuff. So this is an example again with this student. These are the numbers that I kind of track for him. These are kind of the way that I listed out the priorities and then we built around, okay, cool. Here's what we're going to do for practice. So this is actually our first practice adjustment here that happened back in August. And this is how we built it out. We said, okay, cool, these are the main things we needed to work on for approach. These are the main yardage gaps, and these are the standards that we want to play to off the tee. This is why we're struggling the most. Another thing here is par 5 greens regulation is too low. I believe now we've improved that. Yep, still needs to get better, but it's gotten better overall, and that's why the overall greens regulation number is better than when we started. All right, so it's, it's going at this one piece at a time with hyperfocus. So again, you didn't quite hit those measure— or those numbers with off the tee, but again, off the tee is still pretty solid. So again, it's just getting those reps in short game putting. All in all, this practice takes about hour and a half, 2 hours, and then we're going to build a schedule based off of that. I'm going to encourage everyone who watches this video— that's one of the things that most people have told me, hey, this helped me, um, this is people who don't even work with me, um, they just listen to this piece of advice, they're like, oh, that really helped, is play a round of golf for every practice session you have. So you practice for 2 hours, next time you go play golf. You do not go practice session, practice session, practice session, practice session, because you want to think about it like inputs and outputs, right? If I click, you know, if I push my my light switch. My input is me pushing the light switch. The output is the light goes on, right? When I do a practice, that's an input. I'm trying to put something, and I'm trying to do something different. I'm trying to do something better. The output is going to be better scores because that's the whole reason we're doing this, you know, is better scoring average, right? And if I don't ever get that output, or I have input, input, input, input, input, output Well, that I'm getting a greater gap between that first input. I don't get feedback on whether that was a good input or not. And you guys may have experienced this. Not every practice session is good. Not every swing feel is good. Um, you can practice so much you get worse. In fact, some of you guys watching this might have experienced that, or your junior golfer might have experienced that. You can practice so much to get worse. Um, you know, the cliché of like You know, practice doesn't make perfect, practice makes permanent, or perfect practice makes perfect. Um, all those analogies, you know, aside, you want to be able to see the input, the, the benefit of whatever you put in right away. And you can play multiple rounds of golf because again, it might take you a second to sort something out, and we want to see what that looks like on the golf course. And you want to be able to track those rounds. So over a long period of time, we're going to tie this all together here. You can actually say, well, I started with my scoring averages here and I identified that this was the main issue for me and I was going to practice in this way. And then every time I play a round of golf, I can see if— let's click into these categories here— I can see if that particular area is improving or not, right? That is the key to progress. That is the way to do this. And so when you go out and you play in these tournaments, isn't about winning the tournament, it's about improving these particular categories that you know on average is going to improve your scores. And you allow variance to take care of your really, really good rounds and even your not so good rounds, right? Because we're going to have variance on our day-to-day basis. Not everything's going to be clicking all at once. This is the process you go through if you want to play college golf, is you want to reverse engineer Where do I want to be? What do I need to do to do that? Which tournaments do I need to play in? This is my scoring average. How do I bring that down? What do I need to do specifically? Is that working? And then rinse and repeat, because these numbers are going to change. The way you're going to practice is going to change. So, um, I just wanted to share that with you guys to make this really clear. Again, if you want help, you know what to do. But hopefully this is at least helpful to kind of illuminate how you're approaching this, um, and just make it a little bit clearer. You don't have to spend tons and tons of money on, you know, camps and all sorts of nonsense. Uh, you want to spend it on tournaments when it becomes appropriate. You want to spend it on instruction when it's appropriate. You don't want to just be going and getting lessons just for the sake of it because it sounds like a good idea. You want to get coaching that's going to lead you through this process. And if you don't have a coach in your corner looking at your scoring average, looking at how your stats correlate to what you're doing in practice and how you're performing in tournaments, you got the wrong coach. Um, so hopefully this is helpful. If you guys enjoyed this video, leave a like. If you want to see more stuff like it, go ahead and subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys in the next one.