In this instructional video, Connor Stirling Peterson explains how junior golfers and their parents can determine whether they are on track to play college golf, particularly at the Division I level. He emphasizes the importance of obtaining a national ranking based on a scoring differential calculated from at least four tournament events. Peterson outlines a benchmark of roughly a 150 scoring differential (equivalent to a -2 to -2.5 handicap) as the typical threshold for Division I recruitment. He discusses average yearly improvement rates, citing research that suggests about 1.18 strokes per year, while his own data shows a median improvement of 3.15 strokes and a mean of 4.07 strokes per year. Viewers are guided to map their current differential against these improvement rates to assess if they can close the gap within the remaining high school years. He advocates for detailed statistical tracking of specific game components (e.g., putting) to identify high‑impact practice areas and design data‑driven training plans. Peterson also advises focusing on ranking rather than social‑media outreach, as coaches will seek out ranked players. The video concludes with an invitation to work with him for personalized coaching, linking to additional resources.
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What's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering how to know if you're on track to play college golf, or if you have a junior golfer, if they're on track to play college golf. I think this is one of the most important things that you need to know as a parent, um, or just trying to pursue, pursue any goal, is you need to know, all right, well, what am I trying to pursue exactly? What am I trying to do specifically? And where am I at right now? And I think it's very difficult for a lot of junior golfers and parents to really I answer that question. And so in this video, I'm going to hopefully help you guys kind of clarify that. So, uh, the first key here is you need to be ranked and that's not just, uh, something as far as like, oh, you need to be ranked so that college coaches can see you. Sure. That's maybe a benefit to that, but it doesn't really matter that much when you're 14. Right. Um, what it matters for is to understand where you're at in your game, um, where your junior golfer is at in their game. And kind of how that stacks up versus the competition and also where they're going to need to be, right? Because you can have this conversation with your coach and they can say, well, you know, I just want to prepare you to be the best 17-year-old. I don't care if you're the best, you know, 14-year-old or whatever. Um, and that sounds good, but the trouble with that is if, if you're shooting 90, players don't go from shooting 90 to shooting, you know, 70 in a year or 2 years. Um, that takes time. And so it's important to kind of understand, like, where are we at right now and, and what's a reasonable, uh, expectation for, for our progress. So when we think about progress, it's, it's really difficult to narrow down exactly how much the average player improves per year. But what I can tell you from having doing— having done a decent amount of research on this is it's about a shot. Typically when I've kind of referenced this, I've seen it as about 1.18 shots per year. That fluctuates a little bit, but it's about a shot. And the way you can kind of see that if you dig into the background numbers is each class has different amounts of kids. And long story short, you know, you might be the best player in your class when you're, you know, 10 or 12, but as you get older, there's more and more kids in your class. And so that kind of normalizes things for all the kids that weren't necessarily ranked at the time but are now ranked. And so if you kind of look at the difference between— if we look at the 5th percentile as a senior, junior, sophomore, freshman, so on and so forth, you see an average improvement of about a shot. And so that kind of normalizes for exceptional cases and the non-exceptional cases, because again, if you're improving by more than that, then what's actually happening is you're, um, you're improving relative to the overall field. Right? So that kind of shows that, hey, if you've improved by 2 shots, you improved significantly compared to what is normal. And so you can't just look at like who's the most elite player and see what's their trajectory, because of course that they're going to probably do exceptionally well. Um, but you want to be able to look at that average there. So when you're looking at your junior golfer, the first thing you want to have is like, where are they at? And so you guys are going to be able to evaluate that based on this column here, the scoring difference. Differential. This is, this is available to everyone. Um, you need to play in at least 4 events to, to get ranked. And so I've got other videos where I go over here into the search for tournaments, but it's pretty straightforward. I just want to get 4 tournaments that you're at least ranked in, and you're going to look at like, what is this number? What is the scoring differential number? And the reason for that is actually going to tell you where your junior golfer is at relative to wherever they want to get to. So if they're saying, hey, I want to play college golf, Well, you can actually see, okay, which program do they want and what is the average scoring differential of those programs are recruiting? You can actually just see that here. So for me, when I'm working with players, I like to get them to about 150 or better because that's going to be a Division I program 99% of the time. It's about -2, you know, -2.5, right? And so from that, you can actually go back here and say, okay, cool. You know, let's say I've got a junior golfer. And, you know, maybe, you know, we're, we're a freshman right now, our class of 2028, and let's say we've got a scoring differential of, I don't know, 1.76. Is that going to put them in a position doing kind of the normal stuff? Um, you know, typically, you know, most families are doing, you know, the once or twice, uh, you know, once a week or a couple times a month lessons. depending on the quality of your coach, you're probably paying somewhere in the range of, you know, a couple hundred bucks or north of that per lesson. Um, if you're looking at that, you're probably looking at about a shot of improvement per year. Um, just depending on kind of like your junior golfer's specific case, you can actually just map that out and be like, okay, we've got 3 years ahead of us and, you know, our current scoring differential is 1.76. Are we going to be able to get to where we want to go in 3 shots of improvement? So in this case, you're kind of taking our average. The answer would be no. That would kind of put us at a -1.2. Um, so because of that, then you can sort of say, okay, cool, well, this is where we're at. Or you might be in a situation where you're just like, hey, you know, if we just kind of improve mediocrely, we're going to be there. Okay, fantastic, you know, no problem at all. But if you're not, you can actually have that warning sign ahead of time. You could have the check engine light that says, okay, cool, we need to figure out a way to increase the rate of progress in order to make this happen. And then you can actually track it and you can say, okay, cool, well, here's where we were 3 months ago, where are we at now? Or here's where we were 6 months ago, where are we at now? 12 months ago, so on and so forth, right? And so you can actually map this out and say, okay, well, how fast am I improving and am I on pace in order to, to play college golf. And you can do the same thing for if you already had this data. You could look back and say, all right, well, how much have I been improving? And you can actually be very sensitive to when, you know, when does that rate speed up or slow down, and then do more of the things that cause your child to improve faster and do the things that cause them to improve slower. Um, so that, that's kind of like the way to, to approach this. Now, when I work with junior golfers, I'm really big on tracking their stats because what it allows me to do is I can get really granular about like, we shoot 75 on average, why, right? Because we might have all sorts of different issues in our game. We don't need to just go into every single lesson and say, oh well, I guess I just need to work on my golf swing and make that better. You know, we could have a situation here where, you know, maybe we're 3-putting twice a round. That's going to be some really kind of low-hanging fruit there, especially if maybe a situation where it's like we're just missing 3-foot putts. 4-foot putts. Okay, well, that's a pretty simple solution. We don't necessarily need to ball strike our ways— our way to, to 73 or 72. We can just have a little bit of time on the putting green with kind of the right structured practice, and we're going to improve a lot. So that's the way that I like to coach players, is look at like, okay, what do we got with our game, um, statistically? What areas of our game are kind of like holding us back? And then how do we design practice around that? Because we can't just say, oh, we'll just scrap everything, just do putting. Because then the rest of our game is going to fall apart. But we also can't have a situation where we just go hit balls and then never address that, that issue, because we're always going to run into that roadblock of just like, hey, I 3-putt too many times, shoot low scores. So that's kind of like the way that I really encourage you guys to, to approach this, is to look at and say, okay, cool, we're ranked where we are right now. Is it reasonable that we're going to accomplish our goals? Again, I would encourage you guys to look at this from an average perspective, or probably improving by about a shot a year. Does that have you on track? And if no, adjust course, right? Like, that, that's the most kind of like basic thing here. But I wanted to make this video to kind of help you guys just kind of simplify this a little bit. Don't worry about like the social media stuff, emailing coaches. Most of that stuff doesn't really do anything, um, because if you get in front of a coach, they're like, hey, you're not good enough, well, that's all you accomplished. Versus if you are good, the coaches will find you. Um, you just got to be ranked in the right spots. So, um, just kind of like I kind of touched on my process a little bit. Typically what I'm seeing now is, you know, on a median average, I'm seeing players improve by about 3.15 shots per year. Um, on a mean average, so there's a couple outliers in there, we're looking closer to about 4.07. So if that's something you guys want help with, you want to be able to apply stats and you want to be able to have practice designed around that information so that your child can be in a position to improve faster and ultimately play college golf, there will be a link below this video where you can learn a little bit more about my process and how to work together if that's something you're interested in. Other than that, hopefully you guys enjoyed this video and helpful. Hopefully this helped you understand a little bit exactly what you need to do. You know, it's get ranked, see where you're at, see where the gap is, figure out how fast you have to improve, and then adjust accordingly. So hopefully this video is helpful, and I'll talk to you guys in the next one.
