The 5 Basic Skills To Shoot 74 On Average

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I'm going to be going over the 5 basic skills that you need to be able to shoot 74 on average. Um, if you're new to the channel and want to learn more about developing to play college golf, maybe you're a junior golfer or you're the parent of a junior golfer, um, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. I come out with videos like this every single week. Um, but today We're going to be going over the 5 basic skills that you need in order to have a scoring average of 74 or better. The reason for that is you'll hear me talk about how on average, in order to play Division I golf, you need to have a scoring average somewhere between 72 and 74, uh, in order to, to be ranked high enough, ranked well enough to be able to reliably get recruited to a Division I program. Are there exceptions to that? Absolutely. But I want to give you guys kind of the basics here. And I want to kind of help you guys understand what it actually takes to do that. Because a lot of the times when I talk to kids, when I talk to parents, they think that they need to do a bunch of stuff that they don't really need to do. And oftentimes they kind of get down these rabbit holes where they think they need to be a whole lot better than, you know, they really need to be. And so in this video, I'm going to go through those 5 major skills. But before I do that, I just wanna kind of caution here. The first step to all of this is having the humility to understand that you're probably not as good as you think that you are. And so don't take that as a negative. Don't take that as something to feel down about yourself. You just wanna go out and see like, okay, knowing these 5 things, how, how can I measure myself on this? How can I see like, where am I at? And then that's going to give you a really clear perspective of what you need to do in your practice. And then I'll go over a little bit on how you can actually track these numbers in your practice, in your, you know, practice rounds and also in your tournaments. So you have a really clear picture when you go to the driving range after you've had a round of golf or, you know, in between rounds of golf. You can really say, where do I need to put my focus? What's the, the one or two things that I really need to focus on in order to fix these particular issues? So hopefully, you know, that kind of makes sense. So first things first, at the end of the day, less is more. Um, so when you're going to hear me talk about these things, a lot of these things are going to sound really basic because they kind of are. And, um, you know, a lot of the times we see, you know, the popular stuff is the stuff that maybe a PGA Tour player is working on. But the reality is, if you're shooting 80 or 77 or 85, the things that you need to work on are not the things that a PGA Tour player needs to work on. The things that are going to help you score significantly better a PGA Tour player already does extremely well, and they can't really improve a whole lot more than they're already at. So it's just important to keep that in mind. We want to try and do less so that we can have more focus on the things we are doing. We'll have more clarity. Then we're measuring, we're going to be able to see that we're improving. We're going to have a lot more confidence around that. So first things first, I've helped— how'd you guys hold on long enough? First one is we need to be able to hit a tee shot in play, and we need to have a predictable ball flight off the tee, and we need to be able to hit it a reasonable distance. Those are kind of like the, the main things, but all kind of comes down into you need to be able to hit a solid tee shot. And so you need to be able to do that with every club in the bag, or at least your kind of, you know, driver, 3-wood, you know, 2-iron, 5-wood, you know, whatever the case may be. You need to be able to hit those clubs really well. Um, the reason for that is we're gonna hit a ton of tee shots, and if you're wayward off the tee, you know, 1, 2, 3, 4 times a hole or around, um, you know, it would be really bad. Um, but if you're struggling like that per round, well, we have to consider like, okay, so we've not hit a good tee shot, and we're going to define not a good tee shot as we don't have an opportunity to hit the green regulation. We've either hit it in the trees, we've hit it out of bounds, we've hit it in a hazard. What one of those things is happening, or we simply can't hit it far enough to have a real shot at hitting the green regulation. So there's kind of two different sides of this, but it all stems from the main thing of we need to have this tee shot down pretty well. If we're hitting a draw, then, you know, assuming we're right-handed, we need to be able to aim down the right side of the fairway, or even down the right rough, or even, you know, down the right out of hazard, and know the ball is going to curve back. You know, and the flip— the flip side would be true if you're hitting a fade, right? We need to be able to aim down the left side, make a good swing, and know that, you know, if we hit it reasonably solid, it's going to be somewhere in play. And so that, that's the first major skill that you want to have in your bag. And if you don't have that skill, that's fine. You know, if you're like, you're watching this video and you're just like, man, I, I can't hit a driver in play, okay, that's totally cool. Um, these other skills you're gonna want to evaluate yourself on as well, because what you might find is maybe my tee shot's bad, but every one of these other skills is actually really good. So maybe the biggest gap between me and being a couple shots better is just figuring out how to tee shot. And yeah, you could do that in, you know, as few as a few practice sessions of just kind of really knuckling down and saying, okay, what shot do I want to hit? What are the characteristics that I need to have in my swing? What's my pattern? And then going from there. And if you need a little bit of help with that, that's no problem. I'll have a link in the bio where you can get a little bit more support and those kinds of things as well as practice. So second piece, hopefully this is relatively obvious, but The second one is you need to be able to hit your approach shots on the green a reasonable percentage of the time. And, and beyond that, you just need to have a predictable shot shape with your irons, right? So we don't want to be trying to work the ball both ways. We want to have one shot shape we're going to be able to hit really, really well. And so the way you can kind of define that is if you're hitting, you know, again, let's just take the draw example here. We want to be able to hit, you know, a 15-yard draw, a 10-yard draw, a 5-yard draw, and be pretty comfortable with those, you know, drawing it more, drawing it less. But we don't want to be trying to work the ball both ways because that's going to create a lot of confusion and chaos. We also don't want to be trying to hit the ball too straight. Um, I know that might sound a little bit odd, but more often than not, when I talk to players who are trying to hit the ball very straight, what ends up happening is they kind of have a two-way miss. Sometimes they kind of overdraw it, sometimes they overfade it, and when they kind of get psyched out, they don't really have anything they can go back to because their only option is to hit straight versus I'd imagine, you know, for most players, most players that I talk to, if I say, hey, I want you to hit a 30-yard hook, they can pretty much do that on command. Even if they're really struggling, like they can pretty much figure out how to do that. Now it becomes, takes more and more skill to hit the ball straighter and straighter. And so there are going to be some days where you feel more comfortable hitting the ball straighter and that's fine, but you should always be able to go back to, well, I'm not hitting it straight today. I'm not going to be as accurate. I'm not going to be as aggressive. I'm just gonna be a little bit more conservative. I'm gonna play a little bit more curve, and I'm just gonna try and hit this somewhere on the green. And that should generally be, you know, the approach. If you get your approach out on the green, it's a good shot. You know, when we think about, you know, junior golf, we think about golf overall, you know, if we're on the green in 2, the probability that we make par at least is pretty high. Sometimes we're going to make birdie. Every now and then we're going to 3-putt. But the probability to make par is pretty good. And for the most part, making par assuming we've got a scoring average of 74, right? That's gaining shots, right? So if we put these two pieces— first two pieces together, if you can hit the ball in play a reasonable distance and you're able to hit the ball on the green consistently, we've done a lot of the work that we're already going to need to do on the hole. And so again, we want to be more particular about, you know, what each one of those shots are. Maybe we have our driver, we can hit really well. Maybe we hit our 2-iron really well, but we struggle with our 3-wood. Okay, put a little bit more focus there. The same sense, we might be really good with our wedges, but we might struggle with our mid-irons, or vice versa. We might be really good with our mid-irons because we hit a bunch of 7-irons on the driving range, but if you give, you know, a 90-yard wedge shot, maybe you struggle there. So it's being able to identify, you know, within those skills where specifically do you need to focus and kind of where you're at right now, you know, where you need to get to. But that's really fundamentally the second important skill is you're able to hit one ball flight consistently and you're able to hit the green a reasonable percentage of the time. The average green is about 20 yards wide. And so when you think about the average shot shape, like, yeah, every now and then you're gonna hit a 30-yard slice or something like that if you had a fade, but not that often. And so if you can just get really good at, you know, 5, 10-yard fade, well, you're going to be able to hit a ton of greens just by aiming at the left side of the green and seeing the ball fall back. Or, you know, same thing if you're hitting a draw. It allows you to kind of just say like, all right, I've got my swing, I've got my principles. If I make a good swing, it's probably going to fall some amount to the right. Makes golf a lot easier. So that's the second principle. Third, third big skill here is being able to hit the ball reasonably solid around the greens. We don't need to have some crazy wizard short game. We don't need to be Phil Mickelson around the greens. You don't need to hit the crazy flop shot over the bunker, but we need to be able to— and this is twofold, this is both on our approach shots, but this is also around the greens— we need to just be able to hit the ball on the green. And that might sound relatively simple, but The reality is there's going to be times where it's going to be easy for us to get up and down, right? We're going to leave it on the fringe, we're going to 2-putt from there, and it's going to be an up and down, but it's not really. Um, and then there's going to be other times we're going to have relatively straightforward chip shots, and we should be able to get those, you know, on the green. And because they're relatively easy, we're probably gonna be inside, you know, 3 or 4 feet, and we'll talk about those in a second. But that's a pretty good shot. Now, if we miss the green and we've got a, you know, crazy bunker shot, like just get it on the green. Because you get on the green, 2-putt, go to the next hole. It's like, okay, you missed the green, you made bogey, like, so what? Like, that's, that's to be expected. That's completely normal. The place where you can hurt yourself, and that's true with all these, is when you try and do too much. You try and say, oh, I want to get this really close, I still want to make par. You leave it in the bunker, you make double. Or you blade it over the green, make triple, or end up in a bush or something stupid. And so I just can't stress this enough. It's like, a lot of the times I see players trying to hit all these different shots for the short game, like, really don't need to. You need to have kind of one stock standard shot, probably like a medium flight, um, and you just need to be able to hit those reasonably solid. And if you have a good technique, you should be able to do that. Um, so that's the third skill, right? And I also want to be clear, not— I'm not saying any of these are easy to do, but they're relatively simple. And you can kind of look at your game objectively and say, well, am I going around the greens and am I flubbing my chip shots? If you are, okay, cool. Now you know, and you know that that's important because if you miss the green, you should be able to say, okay, well, I'm going to make bogey at worst, right? And you can look back on a round and be like, well, I hit 9 greens, I missed 9 greens. Okay, well, did I make bogey every single time? Probably not. So at that point, we're already probably shooting in the 70s even if we have a pretty mediocre short game, right? So that's kind of the way to think through, um, you know, the stuff. So fourth skill that we need to have is we need to be pretty dang good at lag putting. I don't see a lot of players working on this. The best players I always see are working on this. You look at the PGA Tour, the guys who are the best putters are always working on their speed. But this is a massive, massively important skill because if we take these kind of first principles here, we need to hit a lot of greens, right? Just kind of went over that in skill number 2. Well, we're going to have a lot of 20-footers, 30-footers, 40-footers, 50-footers. That's going to be pretty standard because we're not going to hit every ball in, you know, in range where we're trying to make the putt. We're going to hit a lot of, you know, 35, 40-foot putts. And if we're not comfortable from that distance, if we can't lag it up there within 10% of that, then we're really going to struggle. And so that, that's the next skill we really need to, to be successful, is to be able to lag putt within 10% of our total distance. So again, if you have a 40-footer lagging into 4 feet, that's kind of our goal. We're not going to be worried too much about making a bunch of 15-footers because You know, let's just say you're one of the best putters in the world. Maybe you're making 30% of those. Okay, but how many times are you hitting it to 15 feet? Probably not that often. But a lot of times I talk to kids, they're like, oh, I need to hit it closer to 15 feet, then I have to make more of those 15-footers in order to score. And it's like, well, you need to be able to do that, shoot 65, you know, on a more regular basis, but you don't need to be able to do that to shoot 74 on a regular basis. And that's kind of what we want to be optimizing for. And I see that as kind of a common misconception um, where a player out there working on their, you know, 10-footers and they're frustrated that they don't make more of those and they don't hit their wedges closer and, you know, they just kind of screw up basic shots. And so that's kind of what I want to help you guys through. So, um, lag putting, it's huge. And then the last piece, hopefully you guys can guess this, is you need to be able to make your short putts. I would say inside 5 feet needs to be essentially automatic. Um, I know it's not 100%, that's not what it's going to be, but you need to be pretty dang high. You You need to be pretty comfortable making, you know, going, you know, hitting your tee shot somewhere in play, hit your approach shot on the green, you got a 40-foot putt, you roll to 4 feet, you make the 4-footer, you go to the next hole. That can't be a stressful hole. That's got to be kind of like kind of boring. Um, and, and that's, that's the way that you kind of want to look at, at golf. And so this is gonna— if you're able to master each one of these skills, you're going to be able to shoot pretty close to par most of the time because we got to consider here sometimes we're accidentally going to hit it close, right? Sometimes we're going to hit it really close on our approach shot. Sometimes we're going to make long bombs, you know. Sometimes we're going to make a 35-footer. Sometimes we're going to chip in. We're going to have par 5s. Some of those you might be able to get 2-and-2, or you might be able to chip up on and, and make birdie there. We're going to have good things happen for us. But if we're able to approach the game like this, what's happening is we're probably hitting a decent number of greens. And when we miss the green well, we're at least making bogey, so we've kind of limited our danger there. We're not really 3-putting that often, if ever. And we're just kind of putting ourselves in a position where if you have that day where you score really, really well on a few holes, you make a few birdies, you get lucky a few times, well, now you can look up and be like, oh, well, I kind of played a pretty clean round and I had 5 birdies, I shot 67, right? And, and that's really what high-level golf looks like. If you had the opportunity to ever play with someone who shoots low scores What you'll often find is it's not that they hit every shot perfect, it's that they don't really ever put themselves in that much trouble. And so it gives them the opportunity that when they do hit a good shot, then they're able to really capitalize on it. I see this all the time with players where they might have 8 birdies on their card, but then they have 8 bogeys or doubles or triples or stuff like that. And you don't want to be that player. Um, you know, it's fine if that happens for you on a particular round, but you don't want to build your game around that. You don't want to identify with that. And so if you just follow these 5 basic principles then you're going to be able to be very successful in your game. And not just that, you're going to be able to look at every single round and be like, well, was I hitting my tee shots in play? Well, you know, there are 3 of them that I didn't. Okay, well, that probably cost me a few shots. What about my approach shots? I'm really struggling from this specific distance. Okay, better hit those next time I'm on the driving range. So I don't have to hit balls for 3 hours, I can hit balls for 30 minutes and just figure out like, why am I not hitting my distance wedges well? What's the field that I have to go to? Okay, that's going to be my field now. Okay, let's go on the golf course and try that around the greens. Am I chipping solid? Okay, I am. Great. How's my lag putting? How's my short putting? If you're always getting reps in on those specific skills, you can forget the rest of it. You don't have to really worry about the, you know, 15-footers, the 10-footers, um, you know, shaping it both ways, trying to do all this stuff off the tee. If you just keep it really simple, they're gonna have really concise practices, and you're also just gonna see a lot more consistent, you know, improvement. And once you get to that point where you got a 74, 73 scoring average, then sure, you know, you're not really making some of the mistakes you might have been making earlier, and you can really kind of dial in and say, I want to hit my wedges closer, I want to make these middle distance putts. But keep the main thing the main thing first, um, tackle these 5 issues and then go from there. Now I did promise you guys that I was also going to go over how to track this stuff, so that's what I'm going to show you guys now. So these are just my statistics from a little while ago, um, playing some tournament golf. And you'll see the stroke gained over here. I don't really pay that much mind. Um, it can be useful sometimes, but it doesn't really tell you, here's the skill that you're really deficient in. It just kind of says like, hey, this is bad relative to this arbitrary field, which I don't find super helpful, um, in building our practice. So I talked about number 1, tee shot. So This app is called Circles. Look up Draw More Circles. Excellent app, great guys. Um, if we go down here, this is, this is the stuff you want to look at: the penalty rate and recovery rate. You don't need to worry about fairways hit because if you're in the rough and you still got a line at the hole, it's still pretty much you got a line in the hole, you should be able to figure out how to get on the green. Versus if we're in the trees, that's off the table. Right, where it's pitching out. Um, you know, same thing with penalty. If we hit it in the hazard, that's a problem, right? And so these are the first kind of two things that I would want to measure. So if I were looking at my game in tournaments, I'd want to see these numbers trending closer and closer to, you know, zero. Um, that's pretty close to where a PGA Tour player is going to be. You know, they're going to be at like a fraction of a percent of like balls out of bounds. And so that's something to kind of like model, um, off of. So that's the first one you want to track. Any stats tracking app that you're using, if it's it's not showing you that, um, your penalty rate off the tee, it's not really doing you a great service, um, and just helping understand your game off the tee. Same thing with distance. If it's not collecting distance, it's kind of useless. All right, approach shots. Let's see if this can load reasonably. Okay, cool. So, all right, they made this adjustment. So I'm just going to click into one of these just so you guys can see this. But, you know, from 100 to 150 yards, because these are broken into buckets, how often am I hitting the ball on the green? So if this is my whole data sample, which it's not, but let's just say that it was, well, which one should I really, you know, kind of work on here? Should I work on the 70%, 71%? I mean, these are both pretty solid, so I also want to have context for, for everything else. And you guys also saw at the beginning here I'm not really losing that many strokes versus a Division 1 player on my approach shots. Actually, I think I'm gaining a few in this tournament sample. So this isn't really the main thing that I need to work on. And that would be kind of a cue to me as a player to say, as much as I want to get better, as much as I want to like tweak stuff in my golf swing, get even better, um, it's just not really worth the effort. And there's more risk than reward in that case. So again, 66% here. 61% here. Like, if I were to really focus on something, it's like probably, you know, 150, 175 yards is the number. Um, but again, it's like there's not that much to, to adjust there. So that's your, your second skill, your approach shots. You want to have a pulse on kind of where, where that's at. Um, the next one here is short game. And you want to kind of break these into, into two different buckets here because, you know, under 20 yards is kind of where you should be for a lot of your misses. If you have a lot of 30, 40-yard, you know, pitch shots, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck to say, let me just get better at my approach play and not worry too much about that, rather than trying to get really good at 40-yard pitch shots. Because 40-yard pitch shots are kind of an awkward spot to be in, and as long as you're not hitting it fat or something really dumb. If you're just hitting it somewhere on the green, that's totally fine. And so this is the area that I would really look at, is the under 20 yards, to evaluate how solid your short game is. Um, so you're going to want to look mainly at two different things. Scrambling is going to be the easiest one to look at because then you can also say to yourself and be like, hey, well, if I'm diligent about, you know, where I'm missing this ball ball. If I'm inside 10 yards, I'm still getting it up and down. So that kind of even expands kind of where you can miss it in your mind. But that's, that's the next place you'd want to be evaluating. And then lastly, we're going to go over to putting. Also, just go honorable mention here, greens regulation is just a really great metric to know for your game. If it's if it can be 66%, 70%, north of 70%, that's going to be really good. If it's under that, just know that it's going to be difficult to consistently shoot close to that kind of 74 mark. You're going to have to have kind of an overperforming short game, and in general, you're just going to get a lot more yield for solving the ball striking problems that are going to help you get to that higher greens regulation. Um, but yeah, putting's the last one. You can kind of see for this tournament sample, my, my short putting was not very good. So I'll show you guys that. And that's really the thing to understand with this is like I can look at this data set and say, okay, well, my tee shots needed to be a little bit tighter, my short game was pretty sharp, my approach play was really good, and my, you know, short putting was, was not so good. So yeah, I mean, 66% from 2 feet, I mean, that's— this is terrible. Um, and so like this is kind of, you know, and this was for me— red flag here. Okay, we need to look at what we're doing putting here. We need to do something differently because this doesn't work, right? And so that's the, the time to say, let's put a different putter in the bag, let's change the grip, let's look at how our setup is, let's go through all those checkpoints to say like, what do we need to do to be able to perform better here? And I'll show you guys the lag putting last. Let's pull this up again. That's what I like about Circles too, is they do a really great job with the lag putting data. Not every tool will tell you exactly what your second putt distance is, but that's really the best way to evaluate your lag putting, not so much your, uh, um, just overall 3-putt rate. Because 3-putts could be because you miss short putts or because you're bad at lag putting. But if you don't know, it's not super helpful, or it's not as helpful as it could be. So for me, when I look at this, I'm like, okay, for over 50 feet, my average, my proximity was inside 10%. Amazing. Same thing for 45 to 50 feet. Wonderful. Same thing for 40 to 45 feet. Roughly same thing for 35 to 40 feet. Roughly same. Yep, really good from 30 to 35 feet. 25 to 30 feet, really good. Um, and then 20 to 25, really good. So you can kind of see here that yes, I have this high 3-putt rate, but it's not because my, my lag putting— my lag putting is actually really, really good, um, in this data set. It was actually just my, my short putting. And so like I said kind of at the beginning of this, if you have these 5 skills, if you understand them, then it's very easy to plot out what should you be doing in practice and how should you be measuring those things as you go through time, right? If you have a lesson with your coach, you can say, well, here's the main things that are really important that, that we get solved And you know, then we're able to say we're able to be a lot more efficient with that time. And so I just can't stress enough how important it is. If you can stay focused on the right stuff, you're gonna improve so much faster than if you're always trying to change stuff and improve stuff, improve stuff. Because you can often go down kind of problematic rabbit holes. You can say, well, this looks better on camera, but it doesn't perform as well, right? So it's always important to let the performance guide where you need to change stuff and then use, you know, the camera or whatever to give you insight into, okay, I think this is going to perform better because it looks better, and you're going to be able to go out and test and validate that hypothesis. That's the way you want to be going through, um, through your game. So hopefully this is helpful for you guys, anyone who wants to take a little bit more of a data-driven approach to things. If you want help, um, for your junior golfer kind of organizing this type of practice, and then also all the other stuff that goes into this, you know, picking the right tournaments, so on and so forth, and understanding how to solve these problems in a really effective and efficient way and staying focused, I've got some links below. Um, you can learn a little bit more about kind of my approach to this stuff and go a little bit more in detail with that. But hopefully this video was helpful. If it was, please leave it a like, it helps push it out to more people. And again, if you're new to the channel, please subscribe. Um, still pretty new here, so every subscriber, um, is very much appreciated. So thanks so much, guys, and I'll see you in the next one.