Should Your Junior Golfer Play AJGA Events?

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I want to cover should your junior golfer play AJGA events. This is one of the most common questions that I get from people reaching out to me— parents, junior golfers, all the same. This is one of the most common things that they're asking is should we play in AJGA events. So that's what I'm going to be covering today. I'm helping you guys understand not just, you know, whether or not AJGA events are good or not, but if they're right for you in your specific situation, and if they're not, what you need to do in order to get into that position. Or maybe you shouldn't even consider AJGA events to, to begin with based on your goals. Um, so that's what I'll be covering today. If you're new to the channel, um, and you enjoy videos like this, you want to learn more about junior golf, college development, if you're a parent of a junior golfer and you want to learn more about not just, you know, AJGA, but also, you know, what your junior golfer needs to do in order to play college golf, play Division I golf, then go ahead and subscribe to the channel because I'm going to release videos like this every single week. If you enjoy this video, please leave a like below. It helps push the video out to more people and helps more people see the channel. So yeah, first things first, should your junior golfer play AJGA events? Well, the first thing that you guys need to be asking is What are your goals? And so this might seem kind of like an odd place to start, but really, you know, before we do anything, like, we need to sit down and think and say, okay, well, where am I trying to get with this? Because if we don't understand where we're trying to get to, then we're going to have different, um, things we might do, right? And so the first thing is like, are you trying to play Division 1 golf? If your junior golfer is not trying to play Division 1 golf, then I can almost categorically say you don't need to play AJGA events. Um, there's no— like, if you think it's fun, uh, if your junior golfer wants to play in those events because they think that they're fun but they don't really care about the outcome, okay, um, I can't, I can't fault you guys for that. Um, but unless their goal is to play Division 1 golf, honestly, there's no real reason to play AJGA events. If you want to play Division 3, you can play Division 3 without playing AJGA. Um, so that's just first and foremost. But conversely, if you do— if your junior golfer does want to play Division 1 golf, then they almost certainly do need to play in AJGA events. And so that's not an absolute hard and fast rule, but it's going to be the easiest way for them to position themselves, um, to play Division 1 golf. So if you're looking at this and you're like, oh well, I can't get into AJGA events— if that's the issue, if that's the reason that you want to try and like dodge it, then quite frankly, your junior golfer is not good enough to play Division I golf. If they're not good enough to get into an AJGA event, they're not good enough to play Division I golf. Um, so that's just something to keep in mind here. Now, can you get recruited without playing Division, you know, AJGA? Absolutely. You can play in, you know, you could win Junior Worlds, you could win, you know, the US Junior. There's plenty of other events that your junior golfer could play in. Um, but AJGA is really the way to go. And, and I will also say with caveat, this is much, much more the case for boys than it is for girls. Girls, there's a little bit more leeway because of the way, uh, the difficulty of most golf courses for women and the course ratings as compared to, um, the boys. Usually, um, the boys' golf courses are a bit easier. And so that's something AJGA helps out with. They make it a little bit more difficult and that kind of helps the ranking stuff. But That's another video for another time. But the first thing you just want to be able to answer this question: what are your junior golfer's goals? Um, if you don't know this yet, you, you should be talking to them about this. Um, and there's no pressure here. Like, this is just where do we want to go? And if we conceive that we might want to play Division I golf, then we might want to understand AJGA a little bit better. So that's, that's just like first things first. So, and again, I think it's really important to understand big picture here. When we talk about playing Division I golf, what does that really mean? Um, there's a lot of stuff out there. There are agencies that might say like, oh, you know, put your resume out there, we'll send out the easy emails, we will, you know, you need to have like a YouTube video or Instagram video that like showcases your swing, stuff like that. And to be honest, it's just, it doesn't really do that much. That's not what coaches are looking for, you know. you know, does it maybe help you stand out a little bit better? Sure, maybe. Um, but if you shoot 80, who cares? Like, if you shoot 80 and you got the best looking golf swing in the world, it's just, it's not that appealing. You know, if you got 130 mile an hour clubhead speed and you work with a high-profile coach and you've got a unique story and your parents have a lot of money and, you know, then you shoot 80, it's like, you might be able to figure something out. Um, you might be able to get a spot, but that's not the vast majority. That's not who I'm speaking to. Right now. So it's really just important to understand here, if you want to play Division I golf, what you're saying is you want to be one of the best players in the entire country. Um, cause that's, that's the reality of it. You know, there's maybe, you know, 300-some players that get selected to play Division I golf every year. Um, each program has 1 or 2 spots. And you know, when you actually look at it, it's harder to play Division I golf than it is to get into Harvard. And so just like with that being considered, you know, you don't get into Harvard because you had a really cool looking resume or whatever application you get in Harvard because you're really, really smart. At least by the standard of GPA and SAT scores and stuff like that. And so for, for junior golf and trying to play college golf, how do you play college golf? How do you get recruited? Well, you need to play great golf and you need to compete against the best players. Like, that, that's, that's all it is. You need to, you know, play really good golf against really good players. It really is that simple. Now, it kind of raises the question of like, okay, well, what's the standard of great golf? And also, where are the best players? So that's something I'm going to be covering here, but it's high level. Um, yeah, that, that, that is what you need to do. So what's AJGA? You know, if you're coming to this video and you're like, I don't even know what AJGA is, or I've heard of it but I'm not super familiar with it, I hear people, you know, say it's really great. AJGA is just the largest, um, organization of, you know, tournaments that are national tournaments. Um, essentially it's a tournament circuit that's national and it has pretty much all the best players playing in it. Uh, and it plays a lot of really great golf courses, a lot of really difficult golf courses. Um, it's a very high level of competition. So that's what AJGA is. And really, like, why would you play in it? Well, going back to what I just said, we want to be able to play really great golf and we want to be able to compete against the best players. So this is where the best players are, so it's reasonable to say that we need to go here in order to accomplish our goal, which is playing against the best players, right? So why are we, you know, playing it? Again, like I said, it's just these are the best players in the country, um, they're gonna be playing this for the most part. And so that's why I want to be there. It's pretty simple. So what's the biggest problem? Well, for, for most junior golfers, um, the, the biggest issue here is it's really hard to get into AJGA events. It requires a very high level of golf. Um, you know, the qualifiers are not easy to get through. Um, you have to have stars or you have to earn stars. Earning stars is not easy. And so a lot of parents and families, and you might be watching this video and thinking, well, you know, I'd love to play AJGA, but I can't get into AJGA events. And so this is just like context here. Again, when we look at these Ivy League schools, um, they're really hard to get into, right? You have to be very intelligent to get into these events. Well, in the same sense for Division I, you have to be very, very good to play Division I golf. And so it's not unreasonable to say also you probably have to be very, very good to play AJGA if that's where all the good players are at, right? So that's, that's the way to think about this now. So I mentioned earlier, I want to play great golf. What, what's the standard of great golf? You know, when I grew up, um, I remember my dad saying that he played golf with a 2 handicap, and he was so impressed by his game because, uh, there's 2 handicap. He was not just thinking about the shot that he was trying to hit, he was trying to think about how it was going to set up the next shot that he was gonna hit. And that was like mind blown. My dad was like a 13 or 15 handicap or something like that. No, that was fairly normal. Uh, my grandfather was really good at golf. He was a 6 handicap. And so, you know, growing up, that was kind of like my standard of, you know, really good golf. When I started playing golf, I became a scratch golfer in about a year and a half of playing golf. And so that was, you know, I thought that was outstanding. And my parents also were like, hey, that, that's really good. You know, that, that's really impressive. And, you know, as far as a rate of progress, yeah, that was pretty good. But as far as Division I golf goes, it's not very good. And so unfortunately, I didn't have anyone, you know, necessarily telling me that, um, or kind of coaching me through some of this stuff, which is, you know, why I do these videos and why I try and help you guys. Um, I want you guys to know what that standard is. And so realistically, the standard you guys want to shoot for, um, and be looking for and evaluating yourselves and trying to figure out how to get there is about a 72 to 74 scoring average. So for context, a scratch golfer on a let's say a golf course that is, you know, it's a course rating of 72. So a scratch golfer should shoot, you know, even par 20% of the time, roughly. That player is going to have a scoring average probably about 77 like that on that golf course. And so when we think about a player who's got a scoring average 74 or 73 or 72, we're probably looking at somebody who's a competitive +3 or +4 handicap. Going to be somewhere in that range. You're going to see some +5s, um, or maybe they have a scoring average of 71 or 70. Um, but that's what that level of golf looks like. So again, putting these two things together, you know, we've got great golf and we want to be competing at a really high level. So this kind of raises the question, it's like, all right, should your junior golfer play in AJGA events? Well, the first question you really want to ask yourself, and, and you guys need to figure out, um, a way to do this and really be honest with it, is where's the game at? Like, where are they at currently? And, you know, is that close to where they need to be to be competitive? And so in order to play AJGA, I would not say that your junior golfer needs to have a 72 to 74 scoring average, um, in order to play AJGA at all, or a tournament scoring average. But I, I would say, and this is what I tell my students, we want to have at least a 77 scoring average. And the reason that I say that is if we go into an AJGA qualifier and we have a scoring average of, let's say, 82. Well, if we need to probably shoot like 75 to qualify, the probability that we're going to shoot probably 2 or 3 standard deviations above our average is very low. And then you add in the pressure of being in an AJGA event, uh, it's just very unlikely. You know, we're going to this event, we essentially have it maybe a 2% chance of being successful and a very high probability of being unsuccessful and feeling kind of, um, frustrated by that experience. And so that's why I recommend, if we had a 77 scoring average, we don't have to go in AJGA. We could still continue to just say, let's just lower the scoring average and improve our ranking that way by playing local ranked events, which are— I go over in other videos. But if you want to play AJGA events and you have a scoring average 77, and there's some, you know, events that make sense for you to go play in, well, let's say you have to qualify, you know, you have to shoot 75. Well, that's probably within one standard deviation of your scoring average. And so now we can go into a qualifier and say, it's like, well, yeah, I've probably got a 40% chance of qualifying or a 30% chance of qualifying, which again, it's not amazing, um, but at least it, you know, it's better. And we can say something like, well, I— and this is kind of an unrelated thing, but I would never play in just one AJGA qualifier and say, oh well, you know, I'm probably going to be able to do this, right? Well, if you can only do one and you want to do it, fine, but I wouldn't put all your cards on it. It's not like this is the most important event in the world. Um, there's never going to be one most important event. It's going to be the body of work that you put up as a golfer. Um, and that's just a really important mindset thing. But if you play in 3 events or 3 qualifiers, makes it much more probable to say, well, we got a 40% chance of this happening, we're gonna do it 3 times. The probability that happens once is decent. It's kind of like flipping a coin, you know. It's like if you need to have heads, you know, it's a 50% chance. You flip 5 times, you're like, well, I'm probably going to get heads at least once, right? Maybe I get heads twice, maybe I get heads 3 times, right? Probably not going to get heads 5 times, but it'd be cool if I did. It's possible. But that's kind of the mindset you guys want to approach with this, is just like, where, where's your junior golfer at with their game? Now, when we talk about averages and scoring averages, it is absolutely crucial that you and your junior golfer are tracking their statistics. And when I say tracking their statistics, I mean you track every single round, track every practice round, you track every tournament round. And so that should just be habit. If your junior golfer is out there hitting second balls, third balls on the golf course, that's just routine way of practicing, and they're struggling in tournaments or not where they want to be, then that's the first place I would look at. Because we're not training for a tournament. We're training to hit multiple balls or just trying to hit shots. And the reality is a lot of tournament golf is never making really catastrophically bad mistakes. And so if you are able to free yourself from the consequences of those mistakes by hitting a second ball 3 times around, that means you had 3 catastrophic mistakes that were a serious problem, and you're giving yourself a false positive about your game. And that's just like, I can't stress this enough. I made this mistake as a junior golfer. Um, I see lots of coaches who think that this is, this is okay. And this is just from my personal experience. I don't see a benefit to, to hitting, you know, multiple balls on the golf course and not keeping a score. I just don't, I don't think that that's a good idea. And so you need to be tracking all of her stuff. I recommend Draw More Circles. If you go to drawmorecircles.com, I don't have a promotion code with them. Um, I'm not getting any money for this. Maybe I should be, but go to, um, they're the best with this. They have practice and tournaments. Their first 5 rounds that you put in there is free, so you can go ahead and try it out. Um, but if you have that, then you can actually see objectively what is your junior golfer scoring average. And you need to put in the bad rounds too, and they won't want to. Your child's gonna be like, uh, I was embarrassed or whatever, but you need to put those in there because that's part of their scores. Like, if we're trying to understand who the player is and what their game is, and you have to put in the bad rounds because you're going to put in all the good rounds, right? So if you have the -3 standard deviation stuff, the really bad stuff, well, it's like you, you have to have both to, to balance this out and to have an appropriate understanding of what they're going to go out there and shoot. And if there's so much volatility in their game, well, then you need to ask yourself the question why. You need to get help from your coach, um, as to understanding why there's so much volatility to tighten that up. And that's also probably going to improve the overall average. Because if we don't shoot a million every now and then, well, then our average goes down, right? And so that's, you know, that's just foundationally here. So if their game is 77 or better, I think you have a decent chance of getting in. You know, if you're— they're at a, you know, 74, it's like probably got 50% plus chance of making it, um, assuming it's, it's a really hard field. So it's like You know, yeah, they might go out there and crap the bed, um, they might go out there and shoot 80, but it's still a decent probability, but they never get 100%. So again, going out there, giving yourself enough opportunities, playing in multiple qualifiers if that's the goal, is really the way that I would approach this. And it's just part of an overall, you know, healthy schedule. It's not a guarantee. So you don't just go overnight and say, I'm just going to fill up my schedule with AJGAs. It's a process. And so something you start sprinkling in. But if you're like, hey, I really want to get into one, then it's like, don't give yourself one, give yourself multiple. So that's that. Now once you've established, hey, we do want to play in AJGA events, it does make sense to play in those AJGA events, then kind of where do we go, um, with that? Like which event should we play in? How does all this stuff work? What are the events that we should be playing in? And so let me go ahead. All right, so I've got the tournament schedule up here, uh, tournaments. Tournament schedule, and they've got this handy-dandy video on how to play AJGA. I think it's, um, over— yeah, how to play AJGA right there. That kind of explains this as well, but I'm just going to explain in my own words. And if you want to hear their words as well, then go for it. So pretty much there's different types of events. So we've got Invitationals, you got Junior All-Star, we've got Opens, we've got Previews, we've got Qualifiers, and we've got Senior Showcase. For the most part, we're going to be concerned with previews, Junior All-Stars, and Opens. And then qualifiers are kind of a function of, of those. We're not going to worry about Senior Showcase because in general the things that I'm going to talk about are not going to be crazy helpful for you if you're a senior and you're kind of like way behind. I know that's a thing, but it's just these don't move the needle very much. And if you're a senior, most likely I prefer that you're playing in Opens and trying to do well on those rather than doing a Senior Showcase. So that's, that's just my opinion here. Invitationals is not going to be relevant to a lot of you guys. I'll do more videos in the future talking about Rolex rankings and how invitationals fit into that. But for the most part, you guys are not going to be needing to be worried about invitationals until you have exempt status in AJGA Opens, in which case you're not asking questions, should I play an AJGA Open or AJGA events. So anyway, let's go ahead here and say— so previews, let's pull these up. But previews are a type of event that's meant to be a beginner event. It's meant to be an entry point for your junior golfers. So they've never played in an AJGA event, they apply for a preview, they're pretty much guaranteed to get in, and it's an opportunity for them to earn stars. So there's two different types of previews. There's 12 to 15, and then there's just overall, you know, uh, just anybody can, can go in previews. And so just to kind of show you guys here real quick, let's look at the tournament. These golf courses are not that hard, about 6,500 yards, um, you know, 65, 6,600 yards, um, they're nothing too special, but these, you're going to get decent fields. But if you go out there and shoot 72, 72, you'll probably win the event. These are not very competitive fields, but they're an opportunity again for your junior golfer to earn stars. And so this is just like a really good starting point, whether they're just getting started and they're 12, or if they are you know, just getting started in AJGA events, these are great, especially if they're in that 77 scoring range. Like I said, if they go out there and shoot, I don't know, 74, 77, there's a high probability they're going to get a decent number of stars, right? And so from there, then if they're looking at, let's say they're 15 or younger, now they can look at, uh, probably qualifying into a Junior All-Star event just on stars rather than having to go through the qualifier. Right? Um, 12 to 15, it's going to be a little bit different. So the golf course is going to be a little bit shorter and they're not going to earn quite as many stars. So it's 8 stars, 4 stars, and 1 star as compared to— let's see here— 12 stars, 8 stars, 4 stars, 2 stars, and 1 star. So again, it's just if you have the ability, This is a good first place to start. You're going to get some stars. I want to be clear, in general, you're not going to get into very many Opens, which is another type of the event, just on stars. A lot of times you're going to have to qualify for those events, but this is previews. That's that. Junior All-Star events. This is the next kind of level here. This is for junior golfers between 12 and 15, and this is kind of a good next step. So you played in your preview. Now you're like, hey, I want to play in some of these events. You've got a 12-year-old, 13-year-old, 14-year-old. Um, you know, these are gonna be really good events for them to play in for two reasons. Number one, it's gonna get them comfortable with the AJGA kind of venue. It's a little bit weird. You're gonna go to an event and there's gonna be like nowhere to hit balls, um, because there's gonna be so many kids there. And it's just, you know, there's gonna be signs out there and it's, it's a little bit ridiculous. Um, you're gonna have some, you know, very handsy parents, you know, out there. So it's just, it's a, it's a different experience and it's something to get used to, and it's just a good opportunity to get out there. It's also going to give your junior golfer ranking, um, points. And so they're gonna be playing against pretty good field. That's gonna help them, and it's also gonna put them in a position where they could start to get into some, some invitationals. But anyway, this is, you know, that's what these events are. Now if we look at these events, we're going to see here golf courses that are going to be in about the 6,600, 6,700 yard range. So that's just kind of like is is what it is. So when we're evaluating, okay, your junior golfer, let's say they shoot about 77, um, as a scoring average, you know, in general they will be playing these, these longer golf courses. So if you've got a 13-year-old and they're shooting, you know, good scores but they're playing at 5,500 yards, well, we need to ask, okay, can they play these longer golf courses? Can they play it at, you know, 6,400, 6,500, 6,700 yards and still score about the same? If they can't, well, then you know, and this is getting off topic a little bit, but then you know that you really need to prioritize distance for them. You need to look at, are they, you know, are their mechanics optimal for hitting it as far as possible? Are they going to the gym enough, or do they need to go to talk to like a TPI person? Are their clubs fitted for them? Uh, do they have optimal spin rates on their, their driver? Are they launching it a good angle? All that stuff. You need to consider those things if your junior golfer can't score at the longer distances. But what the Junior All-Star events are going to be really good for is earning more stars. So, you know, if we play well, kind of see stars here. So if they win it, 12 stars, pretty similar to, to the preview, um, again. So if they go in a preview and they're competitive, um, they go into a Junior All-Star event, they're competitive, that, that's going to go up well for them. They can earn enough stars where they might be able to get in some of the lower level open events. And again, it's just going to get them more comfortable. Now my recommendation is when you start to have them be, you know, 14, 13, 14, 15, they're long enough where they can play some of the open distances. I recommend starting to play in some of those events. Again, you know, assuming we're scoring reasonably well. So that's kind of the next, next level of this. And just again, so we can see that, you can see here, you know, this is a 7,000-yard golf course, so it's a little bit longer here. Let's see if I can find another one. 6,400 yards. So again, you know, they're not always crazy, crazy long. And so that might be a good golf course to play if your junior golfer is younger and they're not quite ready for a 7,000-yard golf course. Um, but these are kind of the things you want to be mindful of here. Now, if your junior golfer is really, really good, um, they can hit really far, then you definitely want to prefer some of these longer golf courses. Now, you don't need to play 3D chess with this. Um, you need to play in the stuff that's local to you. Um, the as close to as possible. Um, but that's kind of the way to, you know, be looking at this. And looks like some of these events are actually live right now, so let's go ahead and look at the leaderboard. All right, so I guess not, it's in a couple days. So let's see if there's anything. Yeah, everything— well, there's one that starts today. So where are we at? It's just— let's go in here, poke our head in. No, it still doesn't happen. Okay, beautiful. So this is kind of like— these are the three-tiered system here. So you start off in the previews, you get some stars, um, you can play in one, uh, essentially. Otherwise you have to qualify to get in subsequent ones. They're not the highest quality events, but it's a good starting point. And again, this is if you have a 77 or better scoring average, it's going to put you in a really good spot. If you don't have that, then you just need to double down on saying, okay, how do we get there as fast as possible? That's something that I help students do, is look at where they're at and figure out what they need to do with the time that they have where they can improve as fast as possible. Not just— you don't want to just go out there and grind in your swing mechanics and be like, one day I'm just gonna go out there and shoot 65 all the time because my swing's gonna be so good. That doesn't happen to anyone. And so you want to be strategic about what you're doing. Even if you're changing stuff in your swing, which a lot of players are going to have to do, you want to know why you're doing it. You want to be saying, okay, cool, this is how my swing works, this is what I need to do differently, these are the feels, and these are the trends in my game that show that I'm improving consistently. Right? But anyway, once you're there, you're you do your preview. After that, if you're under 15, probably want to look at some Junior All-Stars in your areas, in your state or adjacent states. And that's also assuming that we are able to play these longer golf courses. Once you've got that, you're comfortable in those, then you want to start picking off a few Open qualifiers to try and get into some of those Open events. Because if you top 5, you can get exempt status, or if you If you're a girl, you can top 3 and get exempt status. And so that's kind of like the hierarchy. Now, once you have exempt status, you can kind of a new realm. But my goal with this video is just to help you guys understand, should your junior golfer play in AJGA events? And so my answer to that is, if they want to play Division 1 golf, yes, but they also need to have a scoring average of 77 or better that you're actually measuring. It's not just something you think, but actually measure this. You need to know that. If they're there, then they should play in AJGA events if those are their goals and that's where their game is at. If they're not there, then they need to focus on getting their scores lower as fast as possible. And then once they are there, they'd start with preview, then they would go into Junior All-Star events, and then they would go into Open qualifiers. That would be the, the kind of path forward that I recommend. Um, so hopefully this helps you guys. And once again, if you guys enjoyed this video and you want to, you know, see more stuff like this, then go ahead, leave a like, and also subscribe to the channel. It really helps us grow. A new channel, so I want to make really great stuff for you guys, and it just, um, it makes it a little bit easier. So like I said, hopefully you guys enjoyed this and it was helpful, and I'll, uh, talk to you guys soon.