Is Your Junior Golfer Too Late For D1 Golf

What is going on, guys? In today's video, I am going to be covering how late is too late for helping your child to play Division 1 golf. It's one of the most common questions that comes to me, is just like, hey, like, what's the cutoff date? Like, how do we know if we're too late, or how do we even make that determination? And so in this video, I'm going to be covering exactly that, and it's specifically going to be around playing Division 1 golf. That's really what I do. I'm not, you know, somebody who does like placement for Division III or anything like that. My whole thing is helping your child develop into the position where college coaches reach out to them to play Division I golf. So that's what this video is going to be about. If you're a new subscriber, that's all we talk about is helping your child play Division I golf. And if you're a returning subscriber, welcome on back. This one's going to be really, really good. So it's kind of triggered from one of my most recent calls where I was on a call with a family where, you know, they were in their senior year or they're going into their senior year and they're trying to figure out like, hey, are we too late? And it was kind of like got me thinking about like, okay, cool. In my head, I had a particular, you know, date was the latest that I'd gotten a player recruited, um, and a particular score that that was. And I was wrong about that. And so I figured that I should just make this video for all you guys, um, and kind of detail this for you guys of just like what this actually looks like so that, you know, it's out there. If you're kind of wondering, hey, you know, are we too late? That you can actually know that objectively, right? Um, so cool. Let's go ahead and jump right into it. So when I'm thinking about helping a child or helping a player get recruited to play Division I golf, the first thing that I'm doing is I'm looking at this page on Junior Golf Scoreboard. So rankings and honors, college signings, and shows us all the players who recruited back in 2017, where they're ranked in their class, what their scoring differential was, and the program that recruited them. And so we can kind of use this to understand like, hey, you know, if we get to a particular level of golf, you know, what programs are going to be available to us. That's one of the most common questions I get asked as well. It's just like, hey, like, what programs do we go to for here? Like, what program should we target? This is the way that I like to think through that, you know, in the same way that if you want to go to Harvard, you know, you need a 4.0, right? If you know, if you want to go to a school that's maybe less academically rigorous, um, then you don't have to have as good of a GPA, right? So that's part of this process. And so when we're thinking about Division I golf, you don't go to you know, a UCLA shooting 80 on average. Like, that's just not how it works. Um, so anyway, this page is really, really valuable for just establishing like, where do we need to get to? Now, the other side of this coin is buy when, right? Um, and so I have a few different numbers that I throw out there, and I want to bring a little bit of clarity, um, to you guys for this, um, these kind of like thresholds, if you will. So the latest that I've had a player get recruited is August 9th of going into their senior year. So if you were to try and back out, hey, how early do we need to be looking at this? You would need to be in a position where you have a high degree of confidence that you can get your child's scoring differential to a -1.06, which is where that player got recruited at, um, and essentially like how much time you have and, you know, how much confidence you have that you could get them there by that particular date. Um, now obviously it's not like August 9th exactly, um, that in that case, player's case, it was, but let's just call it August, right? So if you're going into junior year, you've got a kid, you're like, hey, I want to help them play Division I golf, um, like how late is too late? That's kind of the way that I'm looking at that. So just so you guys have, you know, clear context on this, I work with players for a minimum of 1 year. And so if you're like, hey Connor, I want to work with you and I want you to help my child, the first criteria that I would want to see is, hey, we're prior to August going into our junior year, or we're in a position where we're really, really close. Um, so just so you guys are clear as well, um, I had somebody ask me the other day like, how do you actually like know that their like numbers are legit? Um, this is how I track all my students so I can actually keep track of like, hey, how much are they improving? And you can kind of see here of like where I've marked different players as far as the number of rounds that they've been logging, um, how much they are annually improving, um, where they started off in their scoring differentials, where they're at currently, and all that stuff. So, um, if I look at the total average is about 3.2. If we look at the players who are actually playing the amount of golf that I want them to play, which is a minimum of 13 rounds, um, per quarter, which is essentially 1 round of golf per week, which isn't really that crazy. It's closer to 4. And I also have here as a benchmark, Charlie Woods improved by about 4.2 shots per year. So you can consider that, um, in my book, that's pretty good. This fluctuates though, to be fair. Sometimes it's been as high as like 4.5, sometimes it's been as low as like 3.5. But if you come to me and say, hey, I've got a kid, they have a scoring differential of 3 and they're going into their junior year, can you help us play Division 1 golf? I'd have a reasonably high probability of being able to make that happen. At the same time though, that's kind of the cutoff here. Now if you're in a situation, say, oh crap Connor, I'm like watching this in December and I've got a junior and they have a scoring differential of 1, is that too late? Well again, we just want to look at this in the same way. It's like, okay, can we improve? Like, how much time do we have? In that case, they'd have about 9 months And from there we'd say, okay, cool. You know, is it reasonable that we can improve by whatever, 2 shots in 9 months? In which case, looking at these stats, I'd say, yeah, it's about a shot per quarter. That seems reasonable, right? So that's the way to think through this stuff as far as like, what is the cutoff there? There's not like a hard and fast cutoff until you're like right up against that number that I just gave you guys, or just kinda like going into senior year. But we really want to think about this in terms of where is your child's scoring differential versus whatever their goal is. That's one of the reasons that I advocate so heavily and have so many videos on this channel on how to get ranked and be in a position where you can actually see your child's scoring differential and know what that gap is, because it just becomes a lot easier to understand what's going on. Um, so that is what it takes. That's kind of like that cutoff threshold. Now My advice to you is if you're watching this and your child is going into their sophomore year or their freshman year, you know, what have you, that you do not take this as an excuse to say, well, you know, you just push it off. Do not do that. Um, I— it's just, it's a bad strategy, right? We want to make sure that we're aiming toward higher goals. We don't want to try and like aim for the floor because if we miss, then we get nothing, versus if you aim for Division I and you fall a little bit short decent chance you're still playing Division 3 golf, you're still playing college golf. Most of the players who are trying to play elite level Division 1, they're trying to be, you know, PGA Tour players, right, or LPGA Tour players. They're aiming at a very high level. If they fall short of that, they're still in a really good spot. So I would encourage you guys to not squander the time if you have it available to you. And I also want you, if you're in that position where you're kind of up against that wall, to like paint or get off the ladder, you know. It's just like the best way to put it. Like, don't be that person who just like sits around and like gets frozen up and can't do anything, like, do something. Like, pick something. Don't do the whole thing of like, let's go play another tournament, like, see how that goes. This is like, one tournament is not going to make the difference. It's, it's not. Having a clear plan is going to make the difference. Um, so if that's something you guys want help with and you want help building out that plan, you want me to personally do that for your child where they'll know exactly which tournaments to play in, exactly how to improve, how to read all their statistics and even make sure you guys are tracking the right statistics— you guys want help with all that, got an application below. Go ahead and fill that out. It'll let you know, first of all, if you're even qualified for us to get on a call together. If you are, then we'll walk through that whole process together and make sure it makes sense to you and go over next steps. If you want to learn a little bit more about this process in detail, I've also got a video pinned below on how to guarantee your child gets the attention of Division 1 coaches. Still applying all the principles here, the improvement numbers are not quite as good as they are now, so, you know, just take that with assault. Um, I've gotten better as a coach, but if you want to just kind of get a little bit more educated on the space, again, go ahead and check that video out as well. So anyway, let's talk about the thing that is more interesting. Let's talk about how good do you want to be to have player— or to have coaches reaching out to your child when they are eligible to be reached out to. So technically, that's June 15th, the sophomore year. What does your child need to be at by that point in order to have coaches just like reaching out and like been bombarded with that? So just so you guys are clear, in my experience, being around -2.4 is where that happens, where you get an excessive amount. -1.5 is also pretty good. Um, so for both of these players, they had more than 5 college programs reaching out to them literally as soon as they you know, became eligible to, to be reached out to. So just so you guys have that context there. So if you're really saying, hey, how do we have maximum options? You want to be in that position by sophomore year, June 15th, right? So it's like going into that junior summer, that's really when you want to be in that position. So we can kind of reverse engineer this math here. If you have, you know, let's say, let's just go up and pick a random, um, so let's go back here and I think this is going into freshman year right now. So let's just go back to like middle of the field here. So let's say your child has— I'm just gonna pick on this one, um, so let's say your child has a 4.42 scoring differential and they have a scoring average of 76.5, right? So their class of 2029, so they're going into their freshman year. I believe that Sounds right. Um, and so in that case, we essentially have 2 years. So we got going into freshman and going into sophomore, and then, well, 2.5 years to actually bring this number down, right? So we've got 4.48. Let's say again, let's take the conservative number that I showed you guys of you actually like do the things that I talk about, you know, 3.8, let's call it. You improve by 3.8 one year. 3.8 the next year, you're at a -3.12 scoring differential. You're going to have lots of programs reaching out to you. Now, if we bump this back here and said, hey, you know, your kid's in 8th grade and they have a scoring differential of like 6 or 7 or something like that, the same logic applies, right? You want to think about this in terms of that actual pacing. Now, just so you guys are clear, the average junior golfer only improves by about 1.2-ish shots per year, a little bit less than that. and so that's something to just have in context here. Let's see if this player beats that out. Okay, so in this case, this player's improved a significant amount, and you can see that as evidenced by their percentile changing. So you guys can see they're at 60% here, now they're at 25%. So what that means is relative to the entire field, they've improved a substantial amount. In this case, it was about like— looks like 5 or 6 shots. So just for context here, just so you guys can kind of like see that, that's, that's what that ends up looking like. Um, so that's really where you want to aim for if you want to be in a position where like coaches are reaching out to you right away. This is like scholarship city. Um, you're going to be in a really good spot to, um, to have a lot of options. Now once you have those coaches reaching out to you, that's a whole nother ball game. That's a whole nother thing you're going to have to manage. That's something that I help my students manage is how to have those conversations and how to make sure that we're not leaving any money on the table if you guys care about scholarship money. Um, and at the same time, just understanding like where those college coaches are, what they're looking for, when they're going to be making their decisions on stuff, so that you can kind of be ahead of that stuff. So again, that's something that I help you guys with. Um, but anyway, that's that. Now, if you really want to aim high, um, this is kind of like for the third category of, of player, is if you're just like, hey, like, what's the best that I can do? If we look at Junior Golf Scoreboard about the best that players get to is about a -9. Maybe there's like probably an asymptote, just like a limit of about -10. So if you really wanted to be psycho and say like, okay, cool, you know, our, my child's 10 and they love golf, or 11 or 12 and they love golf, what can we do? Again, the first thing to do would be to say, okay, well, can we get ranked, right? If we're able to be ranked, then we can say, okay, here's where we're at today. and we can model out what we would need to do to get to that number. So once again, I was looking at a kid the other day, or I think, I think he is 11. I wanna say he's 11. Yeah, I think he's 11. So we're, we're just gonna go with that. So right now he's got a scoring differential of 9.63. And so if he improves again by that, you know, 3.8 per year, so 11 goes to 12. 13, 14, 15, 16. So if he did that all the way up into 16, he would have a scoring differential of -9.37. So again, if you're crazy and you want to do that, um, that's like the highest end, you know. It's like when you think about like what actually it takes, you would want to use that as kind of like your modeling out. Now just kind of like put a cherry on this because I think one of the, the things that's kind of interesting that this people talk about is just like, oh well, they kind of like diminish results until like you get to a certain like level. They say like, oh, you're just gonna work on like your swing mechanics and then eventually you're gonna get to this place you're gonna play really good. And typically that's not what I see from players. Typically I don't see them suck and then they get to their sophomore year and then they're really good. Like that's just not how that works. It's like generally we consistently improve by a certain amount kind of year over year. And sometimes we have sporadic bursts, um, sometimes we have plateaus and valleys. That's part of the reason I like to track player statistics so we actually know if something's like bottlenecked or stuck, we know exactly why it's bottlenecked or stuck. Um, and then we can deploy different strategies in order to get that to move. And then once it does finally move, we know exactly what we did to get that to move. And now we can lock it in and make sure it's solid. So, um, that's really, really crucial, um, thing to kind of be attentive to. Um, but I think it's so crucial to say like, hey, our end goal is we want to shoot better scores. And so if we're screwing around with their golf swing or applying strategy or tracking statistics or we're doing a particular practice or practicing more, whatever, it should correlate to improvement in our overall scores. And as a result of that, our rankings, right? I think that makes a lot of sense to approach it that way. And it gives you kind of like honest feedback, you know, versus if you just go and play in like a bunch of random tournaments and be like praying to God that you're gonna like do well and like win it and like have coaches reach out or something like that. Like, that's just not a smart way to go about this. It makes a lot more sense to say, hey, we're 11 right now, we're shooting, I don't know, 80. And we're at this length golf course and we hit this far off the tee, like how much further do we have to hit it off the tee year over year? You know, like as a, like a starting point. Okay, cool. If we do that, like how much do we have to improve green speculation or like where are we gonna need to like keep that up? Um, what skills are we gonna need to develop? What tournaments are we gonna need to play in? Like actually start thinking through this stuff and it's just gonna make golf so much easier for your child cuz it's like, again, they don't need to improve by like a lot. The thing that really stalls people out is everyone thinks like, oh, I'm gonna improve by 10 shots in a year by like screwing around with my golf swing and, you know, changing it and whatever. And, you know, they end up spending all this time working on their golf swing on the driving range, they improve by like a shot because they're just like, they're too focused on like the wrong target. So when I'm working with students, one of the things I really focus on is just like making sure we're focused on the right damn target. Um, so hopefully that makes sense. It's like if you're out there grinding your golf swing, it's like your golf swing might like look better, but it's like, does it perform better? And even if it does perform better, it's like— I've talked about this in past videos— there's so many shots that you can only learn how to hit on the, on the actual golf course because so much of hitting the shot is not just like, can you hit it solid, you know, is it curved in the right direction? Like, how many junior golfers struggle with just aiming the ball effectively? Like, if you're looking at your child, like, do they consistently aim effectively? There's a good chance that they don't. You know, if they do Fantastic. And they probably hit the ball decent. Um, but if they don't, like, that's, that's one of the most common things that I see is just like, we don't have a clear ball flight strategy. We don't have the ball consistently curving in one direction. And because of that, we can't aim right. Because we don't know which direction the ball's gonna go. And then beyond that, it's like, what if I put the ball above your feet or below your feet? You definitely don't know where the ball's gonna go from there. Now I put wind in your face and you don't know how to adjust for the wind. Now it's a little bit downhill, so you don't know how to adjust for that either. And it's like, You layer on these things. It's like, you can't work on any of those things on the driving range. Like you have to be on the golf course in order to figure out how to hit those shots. And so once again, it's just so, so crucial that we want to go in through all of this stuff clear-eyed. That's like the biggest thing that I want to like give you guys here. You know, when I was a junior golfer, I was not clear-eyed about this stuff. I did not have somebody like, like me coming at you guys telling you, hey, here's exactly what you need to do. To make this happen. It's just like it wasn't a thing. And so I want to be that for you guys so you're not going out there blowtorching a bunch of money on tournaments, praying to God something works out, only to find out you're— you never had a shot to begin with. Um, so again, just kind of like summarize here, if you're kind of like wondering like what the cutoff is, I would say if you have a scoring differential of 3 going into your junior year, that's kind of the cutoff. If you're a little bit better than that, then you could like scoot that timeline a little bit further down. Um, but really kind of like that final timeline ends up being about a -1 by August going into senior year. That's kind of like boom, like that's the cutoff. You're not realistically gonna have a lot of success at the point where, um, you're like a senior or something like that and you need to improve by a substantial amount of shots. Like, that's just not— that's not realistic. I would encourage you if you're in that point to, um, to look into like some type of placement or recruiting, um, I know AJGA's college advisors do a really great job. Um, so that's something that I would look into if you're in that position. If you are in the position where you say, hey, we want to maximize the number of programs reaching out, we really want to get ahead of this thing, then I would encourage you, if you've got a child who, you know, is a freshman or earlier, to really get on top of this. You know, do something like go through the application I've got below here and actually just use it at least to figure out, like, is your child, like, on track, you know, like that's something that's super, super crucial to know, um, and it's, it's something that you can actually find out, um, because you got videos like this to actually tell you what's, you know, what's possible. So again, if your kid's got a, you know, scoring differential of 3 or 5 or something like that, they're going to their freshman year, I mean, like, that is the time to really capitalize for them and make sure that they're in a good position. They're going into 8th grade or 7th grade or what have you, again, it just gives you an opportunity to get ahead of things. It gives you an opportunity to take the stress off of them. It's not like they've got to go out and they're grind every single day for hours and hours and hours every single day. Like they can be very precise about what they do. They can still take academics very, very seriously. They can still, you know, have a social life. It's just about having the right plan to be following. So, um, once again, um, I've got links below for either application if you want to talk to me directly about what this would look like for your child, or if you just want to learn more about the process, again, um, got that link to that video on how to guarantee your child gets the attention of Division 1 coaches. Hopefully this cleared some stuff up for you guys. Um, you have a clear perspective of what it actually takes and kind of where those cutoffs are. Um, if you guys enjoyed it, go ahead and leave a like. Uh, if you're new here, go ahead and subscribe if you want to see stuff like this every single week, and I'll see you guys in the next one.