Set Your Junior Golfer Up For Success In 2026

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering how to set your child up for success in 2026, specifically when it comes to helping them position themselves to play Division 1 golf or even college golf more broadly. I'm going to be talking about stuff that, you know, quite frankly, most people don't even talk about. Most people don't even know this stuff exists. Um, I'm going to be backing up everything that I talk about with, you know, just data that, you know, is essentially publicly available for you guys to be able to look at. Um, my big goal for this video is you just understand like, hey, going into this next year, um, what do we need to do? Um, this is the time of year where a lot of the time people look at, you know, golf as kind of like, let's put this away, you know, let's go play football, let's play, you know, basketball or whatever in the winter, um, and we'll just come back to golf in the springtime. And, you know, conversely, there's a few people who are actually going to continuously, you know, take golf seriously and set themselves up well for, you know, the coming year. Because at the end of the day One of the things I harp on all the time, especially when I'm working with my students, is consistency beats intensity. And so, you know, it's better to be consistent, you know, that we're consistently preparing ourselves, um, staying consistent with our skill development, rather than just saying, hey, we're going to drop it during the winter and they're just going to pick it up in the springtime, just like work super, super hard through spring and summer, and then you're just going to put it back down again. It's like you can't expect to actually see meaningful progress following that approach comparatively to if you just have consistency week over week over week. So anyway, like I said, the big point of this video is to help you guys understand what you need to do, um, in 2026 to be able to set your child up for success. So thing number 1, um, is they need to get ranked. Um, they need to get ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard specifically. Now why is that? I see so many people, especially on the ads that I run, where there's like, oh, you know, Junior Golf Scoreboard is not the only thing that matters. Or, you know, I was talking to a guy the other day, he was like, well, you know, I think that we kind of get punished if we play more Junior Golf Scoreboard events. And so a lot of parents, you know, maybe you have this idea, it's like, hey, it's like ranking every tournament your child's ever played. And so hopefully I'm going to dispel some of those myths. But I just want to start off with like why I use this tool so regularly. So, um, Junior Golf Scoreboard, for you guys who don't know, is the largest ranking index of junior golfers. And why is that valuable? Well, it has a tremendous amount of data for us. It gives us a really clear perspective of just like, you know, what what it takes to be successful as a junior golfer. So there's this page under rankings and honors, college signings. It shows us all the players that are recruited back in 2017, shows us where they're ranked in their class, what their scoring differential was, and the program that recruited them. And that allows us to really reverse engineer what we need to do specifically in order to, to play Division I golf, right? If you want to go to Harvard, you know that you need to have a 4.0 GPA. A, um, it wouldn't be good advice to just say, oh, just be smart, you know? Like, that'd be pretty stupid because it's like you'd go through that and be like, okay, well, I got a 3.75, like, that's pretty good. And junior golfers do this all the time to be like, well, you know, I got a pretty good golf swing, like, we'll figure out the scoring. Meanwhile, we're shooting 80, and it's just like, that's not how this stuff works. Junior golfers do not just figure it out. You're not just gonna get the swing right one day and everything's just gonna click. I promise you this, I've seen so many junior golfers. I cannot— I can't point to a single example where I've ever seen a junior golfer really take off just because they got the swing to click. Like, I've just— I've literally never seen it. I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of junior golfers. I've worked with going on 100 junior golfers now, and it's just like, I've never seen that. So anyway, we want to know where we're trying to get to. And so this is somewhat subjective, right? You can say like, hey, we want to play Division 1 golf, and you can just make up your own mind about like, you know, hey, here's what I think is, you know, realistic, right? You know, here's the type of program I want to get recruited by. Really simple thing to do is just go ahead and filter this out and say like, hey, I want to go to this particular program, you know, what kind of player do they recruit, um, what's the scoring differential, you know, they're typically recruiting, and that's a good target for your child. Um, to be clear, this is not quite as comprehensive for Division 2 and Division 3. You'll notice with that over on this side here, you know, D3, D1, D1. Um, so that's something to be aware of as well. If you're looking D3, D2, you're going to need to still improve the scores, obviously. Um, you need to still get those scores to a realistic range, but there's— it's a little bit more complex, mostly because D2, D3 programs don't have quite the budget size that a Division 1 program has for recruiting. So hopefully that makes sense. Also say, across the board, academics are very important. Your child needs to do very well academically. Do not sleep on that. Do not ignore that. Um, maybe this is motivation for your child as well if they're watching this. Um, it's very important that they have good grades. That's something they need to take very, very seriously. Um, when I say good grades, think 3.75 and above. Um, and very good SAT, ACT scores as well. Um, that's one of the reasons why in some of my other videos you guys can go watch, I talk about the importance of efficiency in practice because your child needs to do their homework, you know, like your child needs to be able to study. They might need tutoring. Um, they need to be able to do everything in an efficient way. So don't buy into that idea of like, oh, we need to homeschool and play golf 24/7 to have any chance of playing Division 1 golf. Like, that's just not reality. Like, that's not what actually happens. And so that's kind of foundation number one, right? We need to understand like where we're trying to get to, um, as far as our long-term target goes. All right, so once we've got that, the next question that's logically going to come up is 'How do we actually get ranked? Like, what does that actually look like? You know, my child's played in a bunch of tournaments.' And odds are, uh, your child's probably played in a lot of 1-day tournaments. They might even be playing in 9-hole tournaments. Um, long story short, they need to be playing in 36-hole ranked tournaments. Anything that's not those— are they great for, you know, if your child's only played 9 holes ever, it's like, yeah, bumping up to 18 makes a lot of sense. Um, but eventually they need to be playing 36-hole ranked events. They need to do that sooner than later. Just for context here, we start making the jump to 18 holes when they're 10 years old. So if your kid's 14 and they're still playing 9 holes, congratulations. Like, obviously it's awesome that they're just getting started. If they want to take that next step, they need to get to 18. They need to get to, you know, 36 is 18 holes back to back to back, um, 2 back-to-back days. So hopefully that makes sense. Um, how do you go about doing that though? It's really important you guys aren't just like blowtorching money. Obviously golf, golf's expensive, um, but we don't need to make it needlessly expensive, right? We want to make sure that we're spending out the dollars on, you know, the things are actually going to move the needle. You know, when I look at, you know, those kinds of expenses, um, I'm okay to spend a lot of money as long as it's actually getting the thing that I want, right? It's like, that's the worst thing for all of us is like you spend a bunch of money and you don't get the thing you want. It's like, I don't want to cheap out and get some garbage. It's like, I want to spend a lot of money to get something that's awesome, right? And so if you guys spend a bunch of money on tournaments that are just a bunch of one-day tournaments, God forbid you're traveling for those events, I mean, you're just lighting money on fire. Like, I did that, you know, like, more clearly my parents hit that. Um, so I want to make sure you guys don't have that problem. Anyway, you want to make sure that you're finding ranked events. Best way to do is go to tournaments and results, search for tournaments. Just super simple. And then what you'll want to do is just go to search your state or any state you're comfortable going to. I'll just use California. Um, I know you guys in like Iowa are gonna hate me for that, but you know, just keep things simple. Search for the year that you've got and you'll find one of two situations. Either A, your child, you know, you'll have tournaments that are readily available through, you know, October, November, December. Um, kind of word of caution here, if your child is already ranked and you already kind of know some of this, make sure we're not playing in tournaments in the winter that have crappy conditions that are just going to like wreck their average just because they're hitting out of the mud or something like that. Um, but you want to have the perspective also, even if you can't sign up for tournaments right away, maybe you can't sign up for tournaments until the springtime, you want to know when those tournaments are coming up so you can get on the waitlist or you can go and sign up for those ahead of time. If you guys are in a place STPGA and NTPGA are super competitive, and there's a lot of places like that, especially, you know, even in a place where they have fewer people, you know, those can be very, very competitive. So you want to be ahead of this. You want to know what's coming before it hits you in the face. You don't want to be reactive and be like, oh, my child's struggling in tournaments, now I'm going to get coaching. It's like you want to think proactively, right? Hey, we're not ranked, or hey, you know, I don't know what tournaments to play. It's like, figure that out now in October, November, December, not you know, January, February, March, when those tournaments are coming up, right? If that's something you're interested— you want more, obviously I'm going to give you guys some good stuff here, um, but if you guys want an extreme detail of what your child should do based on their age, what they're scoring, how far they're hitting off tee, all that type of stuff, I do have a link below where you can get my entire tournament schedule framework. Um, so if you want to see that, you can also add on, um, when you get that, um, you can add on a call with me just to actually review your tournament schedule if you're you want to make sure you're doing everything correctly. But I digress, back to the video here. Um, what you want to see is like, these are all the events that are ranked, and you can literally see up to the, um, to the end of the year. You can see stuff that's scheduled here, and you always want to default to this, this page here. You do not want to default based off of whatever the tournament told you, uh, because I just can't tell you how many times I've seen a tournament say, yeah, we're ranked on your golf scoreboard, and then it doesn't put post. So I'd rather go straight to the source and say like, hey, you know, these are the tournaments that, you know, Junior Golf Scoreboard says it's going to rank. They're probably going to be ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. So go ahead. What you need to do is you need to find 4 of these. You're playing 4 ranked events. Obviously your child's probably going to play in more than that, um, just kind of context. When they're getting started, they're probably going to play in more events. You know, I see kids typically playing somewhere between 10 to 20 events when they're younger. Um, as they get older, you're playing fewer events because they're there's just fewer good tournaments to play in. And in that, you know, tournament schedule framework that I just talked about, um, I kind of detail what I mean when I say like good. But long story short, it means more difficult golf courses, longer golf courses more likely. Again, I give clearer criteria on that, um, and more case-specific stuff because it's just much more in-depth training. Anyway, once they're ranked, reason this is important is now we're going to be able to see where they're at relative to their goals. So you're not just going up there and saying, hey, you know, I hope things work out for us, um, and saying, hey, you know, we're just going to go these lessons and, you know, it's just like one day it's just all going to click. It's like, just again, I can't stress this enough, that's not how this works. That's not how this has ever worked. Your child is going to improve relatively consistently. They might have bursts, but even those bursts typically are going to have limits, right? Um, are there exceptions? Yeah, absolutely. Is it a good idea to think that your child is going to be the exception? No, it's not a good idea. And even if they are going to be, you don't get there by trying to force that, right? It's just, it's like bad planning. It's like, you know, I think that I can get from LA to New York without, you know, a GPS. Um, I think I'm just gonna, I'm gonna wing it. Comparatively to the person who has GPS, just like, just maybe because somebody could do it doesn't mean it's a good idea, you know? So that's just something to kind of keep in context here anyway. Once your child has their ranking, you're gonna see their scoring differential, you're gonna see the tournaments they're playing, you're gonna see their scoring average. This is gonna give you a lot of clarity on what they need to do going forward, right? You're gonna see especially the scoring differential as a way of saying, hey, if you shoot lower scores on— or more clearly, if you shoot the same scores on harder golf courses, that's better than if you did it on easier golf courses. It's kind of the easiest way to understand that. Once you've got that though, you're gonna be able to look at where's their scoring average at and how long are these tournaments. In general, you want to look at the scoring average and say, hey, to play Division 1 golf, I need to have a scoring average somewhere between 72 and 74. That's kind of your target here. So if you look at that number and say, well, you know, let's say it's a scoring average of, you know, in this case 78, right? Got a scoring differential of 4. So if we move that down to 74, well, we're gonna have scoring differential roughly 0, right? Now if we got that to 72, then we're gonna have a scoring differential of -2, right? So hopefully you guys can kind of see, you know, generally how this works out. And so, you know, long story short, you want to be able to do that. If you're getting to a number that's, you know, not that, you know, maybe you get down to a scoring average of 72, but their scoring differential will be like 3. Well, then you know that the golf courses need to get harder, right? It's kind of the easiest way to understand that. Anyway, once we've got that, it's obviously a great start. If you just do this, it's going to be fantastic. And if you're in this position where you already have a ranking, uh, for your child already has a ranking and you just want to supercharge everything that I'm talking about here, there's an application below where you can apply to, to work with me in my program where I'm working with junior golfers and telling them exactly like, hey, here's the exact tournaments to play in. You got me looking over your shoulder. Um, I'll tell them exactly how to track their statistics. I'm gonna go over that here in just a second. I'll tell them exactly what they need to do in their practice. And long story short, you know, what I'm going to do is just say, hey, what's the most efficient way for us to get one shot better? And just consistently do that. We'll get on monthly one-on-one calls as well. Just to make sure that your child is trending along and everything's happening the way that needs to have the accountability that they need to make sure that they're staying consistent here. And you also just have somebody who's, you know, just done this time and time and time again, who just has a lot of experience not only helping players play Division 1 golf. It's like, sure, I could flex that, but more important to me, you know, I'm working with a lot of players where I've helped the average player improve by about 4 shots per year off their scoring differential. So it really helps from like modeling out and just not having so much anxiety anxiety around like, are we on track, are we not on track? So anyway, last little piece here is— and this is just if you really want to set your child up for success— get them tracking their statistics. This is the tool that I use, it's called Draw More Circles. It's a fantastic tool. Um, they're able to see— you compare their practice versus tournaments. They're able to look at 5 rounds of golf, 10 rounds of golf. They're able to look at specific date ranges. Um, and this just gives you so much clarity on where your child's game is. It's one of the easiest tools to use. I think we've got a free trial for like the first 5 rounds or something like that. Very easy interface. All those things like Arccos and whatnot that like allegedly do it for you by like sticking something on your club— number one, they're lacking some of the statistics that they really need to be tracking, at least for the way that I like to approach things. And number two, you still got to go back and check them. So it's like, it's just better to do it right the first time. Um, this is the best tool that I've found that does that. Um, you're going to get a lot of statistics here. My recommendation here is to pay attention to a few numbers. Greens regulation, huge one. Penalties off the tee, right under the off the tee section, um, just to kind of show you guys here. Penalties off the tee, huge. And 3-putts, those are the 3 main things if we're trying to just isolate 3 variables. 3-putts, we want to stay under 5%. Greens regulation, we want to get above 70%, or just like right around 70%, really, really good. Penalties, obviously want to keep that down, ideally under 5%, ideally 0% if that's at all possible. But, um, that's really what I would do if you're trying to set your child up for success. Obviously, if you want to supercharge that, got the link, um, down in the description. And just as an example, guys, I'm not just throwing this out here. I started working with this player that I'm throwing out as an example. Um, January 1st, 2025, he had a scoring differential of 8.41. Now he's down to a scoring differential of 4.49. So as you guys can see, also had a lot of consistent progress in that. So it's not anything crazy that happens overnight. It's really just using math to consistently improve and, and focus on the right things. just from a data-driven perspective. So hopefully this video gives you some clarity here. Just to summarize again, make sure your child's playing in ranked events. Got a link below to help you guys out with that if that's something you want support on. And then make sure that they are tracking their statistics. Then you can actually see, like, are we on track? You know, it's like you should be able to model out, be like, hey, we started here, the scoring differential this, and it's 3 months later, where are we at now, right? Um, that's really a way to be thinking about that. And if it's going slowly and you can just do the math and say, hey, we need to get here and we're on pace for that, once again, application below, um, and I'll take a look at your situation, make sure I can help your child out. We can, we'll go over next steps. All right, cool guys, hope this is helpful for you guys. Go watch some of the other videos on the channel going through how to practice more effectively, um, I got more tournaments going in depth on tournaments, you know, etc., etc. So, um, go check out some of the other videos and I'll see you guys in the next one.