How To Play Division 1 Golf Step by Step

What's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be covering just step by step how to play college golf. So if you're new to the process, maybe you want to play college golf, maybe you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf, I'm just going to be walking you through step by step how to figure out where you need to be going, what you need to do to get there, and kind of like what those steps look like because there's a lot of misinformation out there about needing to go to camps or needing to do all this different stuff on social media or sending out emails and all that kind of stuff. And I'm a big believer in the 80/20 rule, um, you know, which pretty much says that 20% of the stuff we do, uh, gets about 80% of the results that we see. And so that's kind of the process that I like to follow, and that's what I'm gonna walk you guys through in today's video. So enjoy stuff like this, go ahead and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more stuff like it. And if you like this video specifically, um, and please go ahead and leave a like, um, helps push it out, um, there in the algorithm here. So let's go ahead and jump right into it, shall we? So the first thing that you want to do is you want to, um, understand that rankings are huge when it comes to playing college golf. Uh, you can't just go play at your high school and expect that you're going to go and get seen. That's just not a reality, um, in today's world. And so that's, that's the first thing that you really want to keep in mind here. So which ranking specifically? I recommend Junior Golf Scoreboard. Um, so if you're following this video and you want to just guarantee that this works for you, use Junior Golf Scoreboard as your metric here. The next thing you want to kind of define here is where do you want to go to school? Because, you know, it could be as broad as just any Division I, it could be any college at all. Um, you want to get as clear as possible with this because that's going to help you set your goals and it's going to help get through the rest of this here. So if you go to Junior Golf Scoreboard, your rankings and honors, college signings, you can actually see which programs are recruiting which players and what level of golf that they're playing. And so we'll talk about the scoring differential in a second here. And it'll also show you where the player is ranked in their class and what division that that program that recruited them is in. And so you can go through this and say, well, you know, I want to play Division I. What gives me the highest probability to do that? Um, you know, what level do I have to be? Or maybe you're okay with Division III, or maybe you want a particular school. Regardless, is you want to figure out where you want to go and what's kind of your average that you need to, um, to get to. Now, for the sake of this video, I'm going to talk about Division I, um, since that's what the most kids that come to me are looking for help with. And it's really what I recommend that you do if you are not sure. If you're starting off early, um, you know, ideally I like to start working with kids when they're around 10. So if you're in that kind of range and you have a lot of options, I encourage you to aim high. Um, that's where I'm going to be starting from. So my kind of average here that I like to look like— look at is about 150. So if I can get a player ranked 150th in their class, if they can get to a scoring differential of -2.5, if gives them a very high probability of not just playing Division I, but also playing Division I at a program you've heard of before. There's all sorts of Division I programs here, but a lot of you guys probably, you know, don't know about all of these programs here. So we want to play at something that we've heard of before. When we think about Division I programs, we want to play at something pretty solid. This is how you're going to find that out. So this is step 1, and this is something every one of you guys can do. Just pull up your browser and go ahead and do this. You don't have to pay for anything. It's really, really simple. All right, next thing that we're going to want to do is figure out is what level of golf you need to be able to play in order to make that happen. All right, so the next thing we need to be able to do is figure out what level of golf you need to be able to play in order to make that happen. So hopefully recall the scoring differential I just talked about here. We can go back to it and say this number here. So whatever school you wanted to go to, there's a scoring differential. I'm going to be looking specifically at negative roughly 2.5 or 3, somewhere in that ballpark. What does it take to do that? Well, I'm going to go ahead here. This is going to be stuff that you probably aren't going to have access to, but this is just so you have reference and kind of get over that, that hurdle here. So I'm going to go ahead and look at the kids in the class of 2025 just so you guys can have a reference point here. Is going to be closest to him. And we're going to go ahead and see about -2.5 right here. So this is just randomly picked. Um, so we're going to see scoring average of 74, a little bit over 74. We're going to see golf courses that we're playing at about 6,800 or 7,000 yards. And those tournaments that they're going to be playing in are going to be pretty solid events. We're going to see AJGA, US Junior, AJGA Scott Robertson. These are all high-quality events that you want to be playing in, especially once you get to, um, kind of that elite level. And so I'll do other videos, and I do have other videos posted where I talk about kind of how to work through those tournaments, because obviously if you're 11, you can't play in AJGA, so you're not going to go play in the US Junior most likely. And so there's a way to work your way through that, but I just want to give you guys a perspective of where are we trying to get to, like what's our end goal here? Because if we have clarity on that, then we can really start to make better decisions about what we're doing in the process. For example, if you get to a point where you have a scoring average of 74, and I'll show you how to measure that in a second, but your scoring differential is like 2, well then you know you need to play harder golf courses. Right? And so then that's a problem that's, you know, solvable, right? And you could say something like, okay, well, we need to go and play in, I don't know, AJGA, which is not— that— don't take that as like a blanket thing of like only playing AJGA or AJGA are always great. It's just an example here. Let's say you have a scoring average 74 and scoring differential of 2 instead of -2. Well, then you know you need to play in harder events, and so you can make decisions about How to do that, which events to play in. Maybe you don't need to play in that one golf course that's 6,000 yards that has a course rating of 68. Maybe you skip that one and you focus in on the, on the harder events and you use that to bring that scoring differential down. And you might have a problem in your game where you have to hit the ball further off the tee or your long irons have to become more proficient because you're playing a longer golf course. Those would be kind of the scenarios that, you know, would likely happen. But once you've got that, you kind of know, okay, cool. Our target is 74-ish. Um, my kind of general rule of thumb is 72 to 74 is the range that I want you to shoot for if you're wanting to play Division I golf. If you want to play Division III, it's probably closer to about 77 and probably a scoring differential of like somewhere between 1 and -1 is going to be really, really solid for Division III. So that's kind of how to be thinking this through. So again, recap the first two steps. Find the school you want to go to, find the scoring differential you want, then go ahead and get your scoring average in that 72-74 range and play in tournaments that kind of correlate with that, that are reasonably difficult. All right, cool with me so far? All right, great. So how do you find out which tournaments are ranked and which tournaments to play in? Well, I'm gonna go over here to tournaments and results, search for tournaments. And you're going to go ahead and put in whatever state you're in and whatever months that you want to play golf in and whatever the year is. So I'm just going to go ahead and do this for California, and I want to do it for October, and I'm going to say that I am not a robot. All right, cool. So what you're going to see here is you're going to see every single event that is ranked in California in the month of October in 2024 that you can play in. And if you play in these events, you're, you're going to get ranked. You need to play in at least 4 Junior Golf Scoreboard ranked events in order to have a ranking. So if you don't already have a ranking, this is like priority number 1. So, you know, for complete ranked beginner golfer, um, then I would just say like go play, go track your stats, um, get your score somewhere down where they're just consistent. They don't have to be amazing. It could be 85. At least you know it's 85, and you can go and make— you can go and figure out from there, 85, how do I get to 84, 83, 82, 81, etc. That's how you want to be thinking that through. But this is massive for you. So if you can play in these ranked events, please, please do it, because it'll show you where you're at today and where you need to get to. So for example, you go out there, you finally get a ranking, you've never been ranked before, your scoring differential is 6. All right, cool. Let's say you're in 8th grade, right? So you've got a scoring differential of 6, you need to get to -2, you're in 8th grade. So you need to improve by 8 shots over the course of about 4 years. Okay. So when we consider that, that means we need to improve by about 2 shots per year in order to accomplish that. So that's why this is so important. It doesn't really matter what you shoot. It doesn't matter that you, um, go out there and beat everyone in the tournament. Don't even worry about who else is in the tournament. None of that matters. It just matters to see where you at, where are you trying to get to, how big is that gap, and is that realistic? Because if you were in a position where, let's say you're a junior and you have scoring differential of 7 and you want to play Division I, it's like Well, you need to improve by 9 shots in a summer. It's probably not going to happen. And so you can actually like start to map this stuff out. If you're 10, you can kind of see again, like I've got a long runway out ahead of me, right? So that's the way to kind of think through this stuff. So again, recap, find where you want to go, get your scoring average down, figure out where you're at, play in ranked tournaments. You actually have a hard number there. So you can actually look at these and say, okay, cool. Here's where I'm at right now. Okay, now you might be saying, okay, cool, that's great. How do I know what my average is? I just go out there and play and I hope to God that I play good. You're going to want to track your stats with something. My recommendation is an app called Draw More Circles. So just sharing with one of my students here, it's going to allow you to track tournaments, practice, um, last 5 rounds, 10 rounds. 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, you know, custom time ranges. And this stuff is really, really useful because you can actually track when you make decisions to change particular things. If you're not already thinking like this, you should be, because you have a game that you have, you play. You can go out there and figure out what this is. If you're unsure, if you've never done this before, this app is free. Go and download it and go play 5 rounds. Don't, don't practice, don't worry about any of that stuff. To be honest, if you don't have this stuff, most of your practice is going to be a waste of time anyway. You've got your, your 5 rounds. You can actually look at that and say, what is my scoring average? Not my best round, not my worst round. What's my average? How many greens per round am I hitting? How often am I 3-putting? How often do I get up and down when I miss the green? You know, knowing those numbers is so valuable when it comes to understanding what am I supposed to do here. And so this is how my students track their numbers so we can actually see, like, is the stuff that we're doing working and are we moving in the right direction? Now, um, this isn't perfect by any means. I don't— you know, I have my own charts that I use with my students, and I'll show you this in a second here. But this has the information that we realistically need. It has more information that we need, so this is why I like to parse this down for my students. But if you know this information, then you can actually strategically say, okay, cool, I'm shooting this number and I want to shoot this other number. How do I get there, right? And so I'll kind of take you guys into the next, next step of this. So this is the spreadsheet that I use, or one of the spreadsheets I use with all my students, kind of understand, um, these numbers. So just like quick for you, in my opinion, the most valuable statistics that predict what we're going to shoot are penalty rate off the tee, greens in regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, and birdie conversion rate. If I know these 5 numbers, I can pretty much tell you what you're going to shoot give or take how many times you, you know, 2-chip and 5-putt and dumb stuff like that. So when I started working with Moses, he had these numbers, right? So penalty rate was 3.6, greens regulation was super high, um, scrambling, 3 putts, birdie conversion rate. Now we've improved his birdie conversion rate, which has been a major focus for us, and his putting as well. We've also improved his scrambling. His greens regulation has pretty much stayed the same, and his penalty rate has improved. You can see between these two number sets that he's improved his average by 1.94 shots, and we've been working together since June. So we started working together in June, now it's September, so it's 3 months. June, July, August, September— 4 months. Um, and so that, that's how we're actually going about this and saying, okay, cool, here's high level what we're doing. Now once we have these numbers, we can actually drill down into circles and say, okay, cool, well, how do I 3-putt less often? I can go in and say like, okay, cool, well, what's going on? Is our lag putting, um, needed to be improved? Does our you know, short putting, or kind of our middle distance putts need to be improved? Or making a high enough rate of those? Are we making our short putts? And so we can actually really define here what we need to do in order to, to improve these numbers specifically. And just so you guys can kind of see the background on this, we started working together in June and now it's September. So we've improved on Junior Golf Scoreboard by a little bit over a shot in about 4 months. So we're on the pace to improve by about 3 shots over the course of this next year, which is about average for, for me when I'm working with students. I see them improve somewhere between 3.15 shots per year and 3.97 shots per year, depending on whether I'm looking at the mean average or the median average. But just so you guys kind of have a perspective there. Um, also just so you have context here, when you're doing this math for yourself and, or if you're doing this math for a junior golfer, average player on Junior Golf Scoreboard improves by about 1.18 shots per year. That's kind of what I've seen is like standard, and you want to kind of take that into consideration. You do not want to be going into this and saying, well, I'm going to do the same things that everyone else does, but instead of improving by like a shot per year, we're going to improve by like 4 shots per year. Like, it's just not realistic. I did a recent video where I actually looked at Charlie Woods, and he's improved by about 4 shots per year, or like 4.5 shots per year. That's, that's the max you're probably gonna realistically do. I mean, that's, you know, you've got the GOAT coaching you, you've got every resource in the entire world. Like, that's as good as you're gonna do. I'm not quite there yet, um, but that, that's the way you want to be evaluating this stuff. So if you look at your stuff and you're like, hey, well, if we only improve by, you know, a shot for the next 3 years, we're gonna play Division 1 golf, congratulations, you're in a really good spot. If you're in a situation where you're like, oh, I didn't improve by 2 shots or 2.5 shots or 3 shots, You, you might want to start looking at that and saying, okay, we need to start making different decisions here. And I just want to kind of like leave you guys with a little bit of something of food for thought here. If you're doing the same stuff that everyone else is doing, you're probably not going to get very different results. And so when you guys are looking at this stuff, I'm a big advocate of tracking stats and using that to build practice out of it. Based on knowing exactly what we need to do, because not very many people do that. And not many, very many junior golfers do that. They just go out there and they hit balls. They get a lesson every single week and they're working on stuff. Their coach gives them tips. And in my opinion, and just kind of like watching what people spend on lessons and the results that they get, I just don't think that that's that valuable. I don't think it's a great allocation of resources. That's why I do this with my students, and they get outsized results compared to whatever is, is normal. And so when you're looking at this, if you're looking at this and saying, hey, we've got these major holes, we don't know what these measurements are, we don't know how to apply this stuff, we don't know how to put it into practice, we don't know the right drills to do, then that's something you need to look at. And if you're not getting the results that you want, that's the first place to go. Because if you don't have the drills, you don't have the stats, How are you supposed to go into a lesson and say, well, we need to get better at this? You don't need— you don't even have the first place to start. You're just going to go hit balls and you're not really going to accomplish anything. And so this is why this stuff is so important. This is why I harp on it all the time. So for you guys watching this video, hopefully this makes sense. Number one, you can understand, okay, we want to play college golf. Here's where we want to go. Here's what we need to do. Here's how to get ranked. Here's how to track those numbers. Here's the main metrics to look at. But if you really want to take this to the next level and you want to get help, you want to have someone in your corner actually guiding you through this process that's done this over and over and over again, and actually just have it built out where you know exactly what you need to focus on, exactly what stats to be looking at, and really just exactly what to do in your practice down to the drill, down to how long drill should take, how to adjust that over time. If you want help with that, click the link below this video. Um, I'll have a link where you can book a call with me. With me where we just talk through and look at your junior golfer's specific situation. And if they're in a position to play college golf, then we'll, we'll talk that through. If they're not, you'll know ahead of time. Um, and yeah, it'll just help you a lot in this process of trying to understand like, okay, what do we need to do? What's that entail? And how much is all that going to cost? So hopefully this video is helpful for you guys and just kind of understanding big picture what you need to do, what the pieces are, and then kind of how you can start to manipulate those variables. So, um, I'll see you guys in the next one.