Connor Stirling Peterson explains why junior golfers underperform in tournaments: they rarely practice 36 holes or play with others, so their practice never replicates the pressure and variables of actual competition. He says coaches need to make practice harder than tournaments to close the gap.
I think one of the reasons that junior golfers struggle in tournaments is simply because they don't make their practice anywhere close to what tournaments are actually like. And I'll start with just the basics. A lot of the times junior golfers don't play 36 holes every single weekend. Most of the time they're just out there practicing. Most of the time when they do play that many holes, probably playing by themselves. So when you take into consideration those two things, you don't even know how having other players in your group is gonna through with kind of just your own internal tempo, then you consider all the other variables that go into this. That's one of the reasons why a lot of junior golfers are going to struggle in tournaments. So if you're in that position, or if you have a junior golfer that's in that position, you might want to start looking at how their actual practice is really translating and how it might not be as similar to tournament performance as you think. And it becomes kind of obvious why they're struggling.
