Should Your Child Play AJGA In 2026

All right, what is going on everyone? So in today's video I'm going to be covering should your child play AJGA events in 2026. Um, I just figured to make this video because I've got so many junior golfers reaching out to me or students that I'm working with asking about playing in AJGA events, what I recommend as far as tournament schedule. And so I want to be super clear, this is a very nuanced subject. There's a lot of details in this, especially if your child is at the higher ends of this. I'm gonna do my best to point everybody in kind of the right direction. Um, but that, that said, there's definitely going to be some stuff that I just won't be able to cover because it becomes extremely niche, and you guys will kind of see what I mean as I go through, um, this video. So if something you guys want more help with, um, there will be a link below to apply to work with me if that's something you want more support with. Um, but anyway, let's go ahead and jump into the video here. So you guys may or may not know that the 2026 schedule just came out for AJGA. So you just go to tournaments schedule and you got all these different types of events. So I want to just kind of knock out the, uh, the first kind of most common questions. Um, number one, you see all these different types of events, right? So we've got the showcase, um, this is a senior showcase here. We got qualifier, preview, open, junior, all-star, invitations. What do all these mean? Easiest way to understand this, assuming your child's never played an AJGA before, is previews are the entry point, right? Previews are the kind of easy AJGA events, if you will. Um, they're an opportunity for your child to earn some stars, um, and they're for you if you've never played AJGA events before. You essentially get an automatic exemption. Um, I'm talking about some other best practices to make sure that you get get that. But for the most part, you're going to get an automatic exemption if you've never played in AJGA before and you play in a preview. That's kind of your entry point. Now, depending on how old your child is, if they are older than 15, then they will need to play in Opens, or they will need to play in qualifiers to get into Opens. If they're under 15, or between 12 and 15— 12 is the youngest you can play AJGA— then they can play the Junior All-Star events. Now, relevant kind of criteria here Opens obviously are more difficult, they're longer golf courses, and so if your child is older, they're going to want to play in those. If your child is just generally more talented, then they're going to want to play in those, especially if you can hit the ball further. So even if they're younger, if they can hit the ball far and they can be competitive in those, it makes a lot of sense to play in some Opens in addition to the Junior All-Star events. One of the big differences between an Open and the Junior All-Star events is an Open, if you top 5, you get exempt status, which which is a really big deal in the AJGA world, versus Junior All-Star events. Even if you win the tournament, you only get stars for that. And there's a tier of AJGA Opens where you essentially need to have exempt status in order to even get into them, right? So, um, just kind of worth understanding how that, that hierarchy works. Qualifiers can apply to Previews, they can qualify, or they can apply for Opens, they can apply for Junior All-Star events, right? Qualifier is just a way that you can get into an event, um, if you're not automatically exempted into it, right? So if you play your preview, you get automatically exempted into it. You want to play another preview, you're probably going to have to do a qualifier in order to get into that preview. So hopefully that makes sense. Senior showcase, I'm not really going to talk about much. Um, obviously it's for seniors for the most part. When I'm coaching, uh, junior golfers, I'm not working with seniors. I'm not super well-versed in kind of the end game, uh, stuff there. Typically I like to see players getting reached out to their sophomore year, their junior year, Latest I've ever worked with a player and helped them get recruited was August of like going into their senior year, right? So be super transparent about that. I'm not super well educated on that one, so I'm just gonna skip over it. Invitationals are kind of the upper echelon, right? So invitationals, you might think of Carlton Woods, um, Team TaylorMade, um, Annika, um, you know, Tournament of Champions obviously. And so this— these are kind of like the higher tier events. The reason that these are all different, obviously, like Opens are more valuable events because they're more difficult fields, more difficult golf courses, etc. Um, the Invitationals, one of the things that's really cool about them is you can play an unlimited number of them. So you can play as many as you get invited to, versus AJGA Opens, we have a hard cap of 5. Junior All-Star events, we have a hard cap of 4. Um, and then Previews, we can play in 1. Um, so you play a Preview, you can play in 5 Opens. Right? And I want to say that you can play in a maximum of 5 Junior All-Star and Opens collectively. Don't quote me on that, but I'm pretty sure you can't play 4 Junior All-Stars and 5 Opens for a total of 9 AJGA events, or 10 if you throw in a preview. So I believe that there's a limit between the two of those, which also just kind of says like, hey, if you're in between those— the way that kind of sets up, if you think about it, it's like if you're playing Junior All-Star, they want you to play in an Open at least once. It's kind of the easiest way to understand it, right? Um, let me go ahead and pull up, uh, rankings here as well, just so you guys can kind of get a little bit of a picture on this. So I'm just going to pick random players so you guys can kind of see how this works. So the, the, uh, minimum number of events they want you to have to kind of optimize a Rolex ranking— I know I'm already getting a little bit into the weeds here, which is kind of where I said at the beginning here, um, you guys will have to bear with me on that. And obviously I can go a lot deeper, but again, that's if you guys need it. I'm trying to be— help you guys understand how this stuff all fits together, and it's a lot. Um, hopefully if you guys are ever spending time on the AJGA website, you already know that. So hopefully this was helpful. Um, anyway, each one of these events is a cert— worth a certain number of points. Um, it's probably a subject for another time, but long story short, the value of AJGA events compared to Junior All-Star events really based in the point system, right? So bigger events worth more points. If you finish better, you get more points. Basic idea, right? So for this player, um, he has played in 7 events, and so he has his total points as the average of these events divided by the number of events he played in, which is 7, right? He also has 80 bonus points. Why? Because he won the US Junior, so that gets you special points. I believe that there's another one that also gives you special points, but yeah, US Junior, that's kind of an exception. But long story short, that's how many points he gets. Right? This is just taking all these out and then dividing them out by 6, I believe, to give him the average points. And that's how we get his ranking, right? So it's 80 factors in on top of these, divided by 7, 62 points. Okay, the minimum— or let me be fair, no matter what, you will have a divisor of 6. So if you're playing 3 AJGA events, you'll have a divisor of 6. So there is an incentive to play in at least 5 AJGA Opens. And if you do not have any of the Invitationals that you can go into and you don't have a preview, you need to play in a non-AJGA event. So in this player's case, he's played multiple, right? He played in the US Junior, which is not an AJGA event but is ranked by AJGA. Sage Valley Invitational, really, really good tournament, hard to get into. But not an AJGA event. Dustin Johnson World Junior, really good event over in South Carolina. And then these other ones are AJGA events, and a number of these are invitationals. So one of the other things you'll notice here is that there's kind of tiers within AJGA even, right? So it's like you have the invitationals where it's like, for this player, I mean, he didn't play in a single AJGA Open. He only played in AJGA invitationals and he played in some of the bigger national tournaments that are not AJGA. So US Junior, Sage Valley, and the Dustin Johnson. This is by far the weakest tournament that he played in, but by no means am I calling the Dustin Johnson a weak tournament. It's just comparatively to all these other ones. Now if I wanted to go ahead and look him up on Junior Golf Scoreboard, it should be relatively easy to find. Boom. All right, cool. So he's ranked 31st on Junior Golf Scoreboard, but he's ranked 6th on AJGA. Long story short, this kind of also goes to show that— and you can see the exact same events here— all the events that are ranked on AJGA will also be ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. Junior Golf Scoreboard is a slightly different algorithm though for how it ranks a player. So it's not based on points, it's based on where they finish in, in their, um, specifically what they shot relative to the course rating is kind of the main thing that matters. At this echelon, it really becomes largely irrelevant, right? So it's like the difference between a player who's ranked 30th, um, or in this case 19th in his class, was a kid who's ranked 5th. It's almost irrelevant, you know? It's like, you know, is Miles Russell a bit of a unicorn? Sure. But it's like, for the most part, these are pretty much the same, um, same players, right? And so yeah, just to be clear on how all that stuff works together. So long story short, again, as I can— as you can see, there's a lot in this. Um, you can see that's why I do this for families. Um, anyway, so we've got these— you're just getting started previews. Um, if your child is over 15, opens— or if they're 15 or older, opens— they're going to be able to play a maximum of 5. Realistically, once you're getting into them our goal should be top 5, right? And we want to figure out, you know, how to do that. It's obviously something players do, blah, blah, blah. Um, junior all-star, after just getting started, really good opportunity to get reps. Not quite as difficult of golf courses, not quite as competitive, but I will say it is quite competitive. Um, all in all, the way they want— you want to map these out for your child, if you're going to do these, uh, is you want to go by state. So whatever state you're in You want to pick that state and pick all the relevant events, so preview, blah blah blah, um, that you might consider playing in. All of them, right? So a lot of people do this thing where they're just like, Connor, I can't get into any AJGA events, what should I do? And the reality is you need to play the numbers game, right? If you apply for one event, don't get in, you don't want to whine and say, oh well, you know, it didn't work out for me. It's like you want to have 10 and then be like, oh, I applied for all of them and I got into 3. Okay, cool. Like, that seems you know, like it's going to work out for you, right? Now I'm not saying it's a 30% success rate. All I'm saying is if you give yourself more opportunities, the better. And if we're trying to max out AJGA events, you can only play in the ones you can get into, right? So just apply for as many as possible, right? If you're not playing them, it's not going to cost you really any money. Um, and odds are if you're applying for enough, like you're going to get into a few of them, and your child's going to have the opportunity to be able to develop some experience, earn some stars, and it gets easier and easier to get into those events. Now this all presumes your child has a skill level to be able to play in AJGA. That's a really big if. Now I want to be super clear, for a lot of junior golfers, probably even the majority on Junior Golf Scoreboard— certainly the majority on Junior Golf Scoreboard— are not good enough to play in AJGA events and have a lot of success. I want to see a player have a competitive scoring average of 77 or lower to even like think about playing AJGA. Before that, their main concern needs to be playing tournaments, get the scoring average under 77. I'm going to when I say playing tournaments, I mean ranked tournaments, which I'll talk about here in a second. But it doesn't even make sense until we're there, because realistically, to a lot of qualifying to these, we're going to be needing to shoot 75 on probably the high end or lower, right? If we have a scoring average 77, we probably have a better than 40% chance of shooting some number in that category. And if we have, let's say, 5 qualifiers, the probability that we qualify at least a few times, you know, if we have a 40% success rate, that says we qualify probably 2, 2.5 times, you know, which is decent odds, right? You know, it's essentially flipping a coin, which, you know, again, if you flipped a coin and it came up tails 3 times in a row, you'd be like, all right, well, let's keep flipping until I get heads, right? So it's important to have that kind of dispassionate, um, attitude toward this, which can be very, very difficult for a lot of families, a lot of junior golfers. And so it's really important to keep that perspective. We're in a reps game, right? Anyway, that's really the way to be thinking about AJGA. So the question is Are, you know, do they have a tournament scoring average of 77 or better in 36-hole events? Because realistically, all these events are going to be like 72 holes worth of golf, you know. It's like, assuming you make the cut, right? You've got a qualifier, you got 2 rounds of golf, and you have a cut, and then you have a 3rd day, right? So it's a substantial amount of golf. So it goes as a prerequisite, we need to already be playing a lot of golf. Like, if your child just grinds on the driving range and plays like 9 holes, um, they need to get that up. They need to play golf a lot more. All the kids that I see play at a very high level, they play a ton of golf. A ton, right? So it's super, super important. Anyway, what if you're watching this video and you're like, well darn, I thought I was ready for AJGA, but actually I'm not? Well, here's the thing. AJGA is cool and all, um, AJGA definitely has its value, but it's not something to like chase for the sake of it. There's nothing like inherently special about it. And so it's really just meeting your kid where they're at, getting them what they need. So if your child is in a position where it's like maybe they're not even ranked, maybe you don't know what their scoring average is, and maybe you're just kind of getting started on this, my recommendation would be go to Junior Golf Scoreboard, tournaments and results, search for tournaments, look up your state, assuming you're in the US, look at 2026. Um, so I'll just see if they even post these. I'm not a robot. And let's just go ahead and say California. Everyone who's not from California is gonna hate me. All right, cool. So we're gonna see all the events that are ranked right now that are on the calendar, right? So if you're in California and in theory, just go down this list, right, and say, okay, cool, like, these are the tournaments that make sense for us to get to. You need to play in 4 as a minimum to actually be ranked. Um, this is probably going to trend down over time, right? The number of tournaments you're going to play in is going to trend down as your child gets better, right? The same way you get on the PGA Tour, play every single event. If you're really, really good, maybe you play in like 20 events, right? So there's a big difference there. And so again, this is really the map you want to be using going into 2026, right? So we want to be looking at where's your child at objectively in their scores, right? Then we want to be asking ourselves, okay, are they prepared to play AJGA? If so, what are the events in our state and, you know, adjacent to our state that we're going to have the highest priority for and appropriate to where they're at? So if they were playing AJGA Preview, they're playing, you know, if they're older, Open, they're younger, Junior All-Star, right? We want to do the appropriate thing. And then we want to backfill that with ranked events in our state that are easy to get to so we don't have this ridiculous financial strain, right? If you guys want to go blow a bunch of money, that's fine. I know, you know, some of you guys are in that position, um, but also know a decent chunk of you guys are not in that position, right? We need to be efficient with the money that we're spending, or at least we want to be efficient with the money that we're spending. And so that's the meat and potatoes to that. Um, I've got other videos where I go into more of the weeds as far as some of the non-AJGA events, which of those make sense. Um, you guys can kind of do that research here. I'm not going to go into this, that, because I just want to speak specifically about AJGA and whether or not that makes sense, what you should do if it doesn't make sense. Um, so hopefully this video was helpful. If it was, go ahead and leave a like. It really does help push it out to more people in the YouTube algorithm. If you want to see videos like this every single week, go ahead and subscribe. And if you want more personalized help for your child, so instead of having to watch a bunch of videos with, you know, maybe you have infinite time, but like, odds are you probably don't, and you want more help with just me telling you, hey, here's the tournaments to play in, here's a way to look at this, make really streamlined and easy for you. Once again, I've got a link below where you can apply to work with me and just have me do all this stuff for you, and more importantly, give you a guide on how to accomplish whatever your child's goals are. You know, if they want to play Division 1, if they want to play at, you know, Stanford or UCLA, they just want to barely play Division 1 golf, they want to play Division 3 golf, those are all things I'm going to be able to help them with because it all comes down to the same fundamentals. It's all about lowering the scores, playing in the right events, and being able to manage the resources while we're doing that. So hopefully all this makes sense. Hopefully this is helpful, gives you a little bit clearer picture of what AJGA really looks like and whether it's right for your child. Hope you enjoyed it, and I'll see you guys in the next video.