Connor Stirling Peterson tells junior golfers to compete against themselves, not others. Track your own performance over time, identify the gap between where you are and where you want to be, then focus on the specific actions to close it. Rankings are useful as targets, but they're not the main point.
I can't stress this enough. If you're a junior golfer, regardless of the level of golf you want to play at, the most important thing you can learn to do is to compete against yourself and yourself alone. Now, that's not to say you don't need to play in competitions. You do, but you need to be evaluating yourself based on how you've performed in the past and where your game is trending, not what other players are doing. And this might sound contradictory. You might hear me talk about rankings and the importance of understanding that. But that's why this is so important, is because you want to know where you need to get to, but then you need to focus on what you need to do to get there. That's really the key.
