Is Your Junior Golfer In Position To Play Division 1 Golf?

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be going over what you need to do to play Division 1 golf and how to evaluate whether or not your junior golfer is in position to play Division 1 golf. If you enjoy videos like this, you want to learn more about development to play college golf and all the things that go into that as far as tournaments, mindset, development, all that stuff, go ahead click the button below to subscribe to the channel. And if you enjoy this video, please leave a like. It helps push it out to more people. But in today's video, I really want to tackle what it takes to play Division 1 golf and also whether or not your junior golfer is positioned to play Division 1 golf. A lot of time, uh, when you don't have anything that's kind of like tethered in reality, um, so to speak, it can be really difficult to know where you're at. And you might experience this with your junior golfer. You might say, okay, cool, you know, my junior golfer is a 4 handicap. Is that good? Is that bad? I don't know. Or, hey, my junior golfer is on their high school varsity team. What does that mean? Is that useful? Um, those are all things that are really confusing, especially if you've never been through this process before. You don't know anyone that's been through this process. You might also be doing something where you might look at other parents and other junior golfers and think to yourself that Okay, well, you know, they seem to know what they're doing, so I'm just going to go follow them around. That, that's very, very common. But in this video, I want to make it super clear for you exactly where your junior golfer is at so that you can understand, okay, are we on pace? Are we not on pace? If we're not on pace, what do we need to do? And if we don't even know where we're at, where do we start? And so hopefully this is helpful for you. So the first place that I want to start with is just establishing like, where are you at right now? This is pretty easy to figure out. So, um, you've heard me probably talk about this a lot. You guys will continue to see me talk about this a lot. This junior golf scoreboard, this is the primary ranking index that you're going to want to go to when we're thinking about developing to play college golf. There are other ranking indexes out there. They're not as comprehensive. Um, so this is the one that you're going to want to look to. This is the one that the most college coaches are going to look to, even if this isn't the main one that a college coach looks at. If you're a highly ranked player on True Draw Scoreboard, that's going to stand out. That's going to help you get into tournaments. That's going to help you get attention from programs. So this is, this is the ranking index you guys want to be looking at here. And so from there, what you want to do is find like, where are you at? Because we can see how all these players are ranked relative to each other. And we have 3 main criteria here. We have how they did, like their wins or their top 5s or the top 10s. A lot of the times I see parents focus on this stuff. You can see right here, this is, uh, this is only 10% of what goes into the ranking, right? So it's not very important how your child does in the tournaments. It, it's just not that, you know, useful. Strength of tournament— this is another one that's kind of a common misconception. You'll hear me talk a lot about AJGA events, or maybe you've heard AJGA events are good to play in, or other big national events. You might think because it's like, oh, the field's really good And that's not actually true. There's a little bit of that. It's worth more, quite honestly, than whether or not you win, because if you're playing some backwoods, you know, nothing tour and you win against 3 players, it's like, okay, whoop-de-doo. Um, you know, if you play in a little bit stronger field, that matters a little bit more. But again, it's not that important. This is the thing that you guys really want to pay attention to, and that is scoring differential. Now, scoring differential can be a little bit difficult to understand, but the easiest way to think about this is scoring differential is the relationship between how you score on a golf course and the difficulty of the golf course. So if we go out there and we play on a course rating, which is just how difficult, um, the golf course is essentially for a scratch golfer, um, of course rating of 70, we go out there and shoot 75, that's not as good a score as if we go out and shoot 75 on a golf course with a course rating of, let's say, 76. Those are massively different scores, and because of that, we're going to be ranked differently. And so what you'll see, and I'll just use Miles as an example here, is the best players in the country are playing in the best tournaments. So, you know, pretty much every single one of these is like elite, elite stuff, um, and, you know, golf course reasonably long, and they're going to have a pretty solid scoring average. They don't have a, you know, 64 scoring average. You might see -8 and think, oh, they're shooting 64 all the time, but their scoring average is going to be pretty dang low. Now, this is exceptional, obviously, because it's best player in the country, but this is the starting point here. So your junior golfer is ranked, you should be able to figure this out really, really fast. Where are they as far as their scoring differential. That's the first number that you, you want to have here. If they are not ranked, what you want to do is go over to tournaments and results. You guys can all do this for free, doesn't cost you anything. Search for tournaments and then look up your state. Let's just pretend I'm in Arizona here. Let's say we want 2024. Search, and we can find all the tournaments that are in wherever your state is that are ranked. And so very simply, if you do not already have a ranking for your junior golfer and they are serious about playing college golf and they are more than like 12 years old— like, if they're 12 and older, do this. Um, that, that's just like Easiest thing in the world. They need to play in at least 4 events to get ranked. So they need to play in 4 ranked events. Go find them. I've showed you guys how to do it. Click here. If you can't find it immediately, you can't get on the website, just email them. It's pretty simple. But that is foundational because that will give you— once they have their, their rounds, that'll give you this number for them. That'll give you their scoring differential. That'll show you where they're ranked. And that's not really the important part. We don't care about that they're ranked well today, but we want to know where they're at. We want an objective measurement. We don't want to just say, hey, well, when I play my best golf, I go out there and shoot 69 or 67 or some, you know, uh, I want to be delicate with this, but just going out there and shooting some nonsense, you know, hit a second ball on one hole, I don't really think about it. Like, that's just not how actual golf works. And so we want to know where's your junior golfer at when they're under the gun. And so we know exactly where they're at, we can see their scoring differential. And the next piece of this is, okay, they want to play college golf, what's required of that? So you want to go to rankings and honors, college signings, and then you want to go ahead and filter by class ranking here. And you can actually see what the scoring differential— see scoring differential right here at the date of signing was for the different college programs. And so if you have a junior golfer and you're saying, hey, I want to go to this program here, well, this is going to help you kind of map that out. And you can kind of see that the better the scoring differential is, the better the program is that's recruiting them. For the most part, you know, we're not going to see, you know, Stanford recruiting a kid who's ranked 400 in their class. And that's not to knock any of these other programs, but this is just to help you be realistic with where you're at right now, where your junior golfer's at right now, and where they're trying to get to. So at this point, you should have 2 numbers here. Um, and if you need to pause the video and come back to this later and go through this yourselves, I would encourage that. But then you can say, okay, well, these are the programs that we want to go to. This is where we're at right now. And so you can say, all right, well, this is essentially lovely. And you guys get those, uh, those spam calls. Um, it's fantastic. All right, so you can look at this and say, all right, well, we're here. We need to get to this scoring differential by essentially end of junior year is where most of these numbers are coming from. And so you can say, all right, well, let's say we're a Oh, let's say we're 12 and we've got a scoring differential of whatever our scoring differential is. Let's see if I can come up with round numbers on the spot. So let's say we're a 12-year-old with scoring differential of 5 and we want to go to, you know, one of these kind of pretty solid schools. We want to be a top 50 player, um, so maybe we want to get to -4, right? So we've got 9 shots that we need to map out And we also have about 5 years because we're going to be about 17. So 12 minus 17 is going to be 5. And then we've got 9 divided by 5 is going to give us the, uh, the number of shots that we need to improve by per year. So in that case, it's 1.8 shots, right? So that's just a hypothetical example. You're probably going to be in some completely different universe. But this is important for you as far as pacing goes, because if you look at your junior golfer stats Well, you're going to want to be able to see, okay, cool, we need to improve by 1.8 shots. Then you can ask yourself, how do we do that as efficiently as possible? And are we currently on a pace that's going to accomplish that, or do we have absolutely no clue? I can tell you from doing this research and looking at players, the average on Junior Golf Scoreboard as far as just like normal improvement, it's about 1.18 shots per year, right? And so that's just average. Some players do a little bit worse than that, some players do a little bit better than that, but that's just kind of like normal. When I work with players, I see them improve by about 2.71 shots per year. So again, we're not talking about a universe of movement here. You know, it's a lot faster than average, but again, it's really important that you're able to be methodical with this stuff because otherwise you fall into this trap of, well, I need to go and fix my whole game tomorrow, and that never works. You can't just go out there, blow up your whole game, go out and shoot 65 all the time. That's not how it works. You have to go and actually commit something and, and work at something for, you know, quarters and years, not, you know, week to week, month to month. That's one of the things that I see so often with junior golfers is that they're getting a lesson every single week and they get the same lesson over and over and over again, and they're not really moving forward in their game. They don't really have any measurement. They don't know what tournaments that they're playing in and how that's moving them closer to accomplishing their goals. And they just have no clarity. And then they have a bad stretch and then they get to the end of the road and they're like, okay, great. Um, and they just don't know where, where they're going and they, they get screwed like that. So, um, I want to make sure that you guys don't fall into that here. So again, to recap here, if you're not already ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard, let's go up here, tournaments and results, search for tournaments. If you are ranked, rankings and honors, boys golf rankings, girls golf rankings, and then you want to go to college signings to get where you're trying to get to, right? So you have all that information, divide those out and say, okay, we need to improve by this many shots. You can see, are we on pace to do that right now? Uh, or are we not on pace? And so that's true whether you're young or old. And again, the point is not that you're ranked amazing today. It's to understand how big the gap is and how to start eating that elephant. So to speak. You know, it's one bite at a time, not all at once, right? And so if you don't have a clear picture of that, it's just going to be very difficult to be successful. So hopefully this video has been helpful for you guys. If you want more help, definitely feel free to reach out. I have a few resources below this video. You can hop on my newsletter. I talk about stuff like this all the time. Or if you want to talk to me directly, if you have some questions about, you know, what working together looks like. There should be another link down there that'll kind of go into more detail on all this stuff and also kind of what I do when I work with my students. But anyway, like I said, hopefully this video was helpful. If it was, please go ahead and leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you want more content like this. So I'll see you guys in the next one.