The 80/20 Rule of Junior Golf Practice What Actually Lowers Scores

What's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering the 80/20 rule of junior golf practice and really covering the statistics that matter and the stuff that really doesn't matter. So that way, when your child is out there trying to improve, you can make sure that they're actually focused on stuff that's really going to move their needle for their scores. If you're new here, all we talk about is helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. And if you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. It's going to be a good one. Um, so let's go ahead and jump into it. So one of the foundational things that I will talk about when it comes to helping junior golfers develop is tracking their statistics. If you are not tracking your child's statistics, I guarantee you're losing shots, like you're leaving shots on the table. And so I've just got one player pulled up as an example. Um, the tool I use is called Draw More Circles. I give all my students a discount for this, so it's a little bit more cost-effective. But anyway, we can segment out tournaments and practice, so that's going to be very, very helpful when we're looking at it. Is what do we even want to focus on? Because at the end of the day, like, the goal is to play better in tournaments, not play better in practice. Like, playing better in practice is like cool as long as it translates to playing better in tournaments, right? And so super, super crucial if you don't know what your tournament stats are compared to your practice stats and how those kind of like flow fluctuate or change, um, you're really gonna struggle. Because if you get better in practice and it doesn't translate, it's like, it doesn't make sense to put a lot of effort into trying to get better in practice. Like, you need to figure out, you know, this tournament-specific problems. But anyway, when we're tracking statistics, any stats tool that you have is gonna give you a bunch of stuff. You know, I mean, like, look at how much stuff Circles gives us as far as like different statistics. And that's before I even like click into any of these. Like, I could go into short game and like, go from, you know, 20 to 60 yards and get all these different statistics. And the reality of this, um, especially if you've got a tool like maybe like Arccos that I think just shows like strokes gained, it doesn't really tell you that much. Um, it's not very helpful. You know, if I told this player, it's like, hey, you're an approach player, we're losing, you know, 1.53 shots, you know, on approach. It's like, it's not really that— it's not that helpful. It doesn't really tell us that much about where this player is at and what they're probable to shoot, more importantly. Um, and so based on this, there's a few statistics that I found really predict what a player is going to shoot pretty well. And so this is a spreadsheet that I built, um, for all my students, and I've got a few different like data sets in here. But the main things that I'm focused on here are penalty rate off the tee, right? Because, you know, if you've been going through any amount of kind of high-end golf instruction, you understand it doesn't really matter that much that you're going to hit see shots in the rough. Like, that's just part of the game. Um, you've been hitting plenty of shots in the fairway. The problems really lie when you are hitting balls out of bounds or you're hitting balls in the penalty areas. The next one we've got is greens regulation. Greens regulation is probably the best statistic you could possibly keep on a player's game, just understand what they're probable to shoot on average. Um, and it's just, it's just massive. Um, greens regulation has a huge impact on scores. Scrambling really just help us understand like what happens when we do miss the green. 3-putting— how many times are we giving away shots once we're on the green? Birdie conversion rate— when we do hit the green, how often are we making birdie? And then what do we actually shoot? And the— there's a final stat that I like to keep that I just call compound errors, which is just, you know, things that aren't included in, you know, these statistics. And so those really fall into 2 categories. Technically you could argue 3, but it's really just 2. When you're out of position off the tee. So let's say you hit in the trees. Did you pitch out and hit your next shot on the green, or did you instead try to like hit a slice around the tree and hit tree trunk and make triple because we just didn't pitch out? That would be one example of why we might have a high compound error number. Another one is going to be, hey, we missed the green on our approach shot and we're chunking and blading our chip shots. It's one of the more common ones that I see, especially among players who are shooting higher scores and potentially in the mid-80s, high 80s, 90s. Um, that's a very common one. Um, and then theoretically you'd have 4 putts. I don't work with a lot of players who are having 4 putts, but in theory that's where that number would come out. So those are the main statistics that we really need to pay attention to. And just to kind of validate this, I got Scottie Scheffler from '24 and '25 here, got Tiger from 2000, 2006, got Rory from this year as well, and then I've got a few of my students. So let's just kind of look at these. Penalty rate, I'm just assuming 0. PGA Tour players don't hit the ball out of bounds. I mean, even when they do get bad shots, they've got like galleries to hit into and they get drops, so it's really a thing that gets factored in their scores. Greens regulation— you'll notice all these players have very high greens regulation. Rory has definitely the worst. And you know, when you kind of reflect on this, like Rory this year compared to, you know, everything else, it's like probably not had the best year out of, out of these, you know, 5 data sets. Scrambling— for tour player, we kind of see an upper limit of somewhere around 65, maybe 70% is about what we're getting to. 3-putt rate. Scottie, excellent, excellent in this. Um, Tiger's pretty good. Rory's, again, you know, not the best on this, but again, he's being compared to like all-time, all-time stuff. Then we have birdie conversion rate. Upper limit around here is probably 36-37%. So once again, we can kind of see that played out there. And so long story short, what this allows us to do is we're able to look at each one of these individual statistics and say, if I changed one of them, what would have the biggest impact? So, um, let me just go ahead and bump this, you know, let's take Rory here. So I'm just going to scoot everyone over because that's one of the cool things with this spreadsheet is I can just change these numbers around and it'll dynamically change what the player should shoot. So, you know, in theory, if Rory just like woke up one day, it was like, I care what Connor has to say, I would just look at— I would go through this exact same process here. So in this case, if he improved his greens regulation closer where Scottie's at— Scottie's at 73, so if he's at 67, if you got it to 72 he'd improve by 0.64 shots. Okay. If he improved his scrambling to 69%, which I'm not even sure is possible, he'd improve by 0.29 shots. Not really that much. If he improved his scrambling down to 2%, doesn't really move the needle that much. And if he improved his birdie conversion rate to 40%, he'd improve by 0.61 shots. So if I'm Rory, if I was working with Rory and I have the impossible task of how do we make Rory McIlroy better, I can say objectively the thing that's going to have the biggest impact on Rory's scores is if he could hit more greens. And I have a lot of data to back that up. When I look at like Scottie these last 2 years, where's he's been at, and I look at, you know, apex Tiger and where was he at, it makes a lot of sense that Rory would spend the most time trying to hit more greens. Now obviously it's a little bit of an extreme, I'm talking about junior golf here. And so let's go ahead and do these players. So I've got 2 players that are shooting essentially par. These are both players who are actively, um, getting offers from Division 1 programs. And then I've got a couple of players who are shooting a little bit higher. One's shooting about 78 on average, one's shooting about 85 on average, just to kind of show you guys how these statistics kind of differ. So between these first 2 players, we have pretty similar— no penalty, no real, no real penalties off the tee. Um, pretty similar up and down rates. Um, the player who's hitting a few more greens, 3-putts a few— a little bit more often, which doesn't— isn't that crazy, um, just because he has more opportunities to 3-putt is really kind of the way to understand that. Um, then we have a very similar birdie conversion rate. So if I'm talking to this player, then I'm saying, hey, I want to see greens and regulation go up because that's going to have the biggest impact on our scores. Now I'll dig into that, like, what that specifically looks like here in just a second, but just at a high level, we can see objectively that has a really big impact on his scores compared to everything else we could possibly do. Um, I like to think in terms of 5% because I find that to be more, let's say, it kind of balances the scales here. If we say, hey, we're going to bump this 3%, we're going to bump this 20%, it's just kind of like throwing in a bunch of randomness here. Versus if I just say, hey, I can boost this by 5%, you know, it's a pretty consistent number. We can kind of say, okay, what's going to have the biggest impact. Um, theoretically, all the numbers would be the same even if you improved it by 1%, but improving by 1% doesn't really get you out of bed when we're thinking like big, big picture strategic stuff. So when I'm working with players, typically we're doing this on at least a quarterly basis. If they're playing more golf, you do it a little bit more frequently. And if that's something you guys want help with, you want me to build out your child's practice and tell them like literally all the stuff to do down to the drills, ball count, all that stuff, I've got a link below where you can apply for coaching. Um, but anyway, getting back to the video here, Moving on to the players, got a scoring average about 78, got about 50% greens regulation, so another drop-off of about 10%. A little bit higher penalty rate, still not too bad. And to be fair to this player, about 18 months ago he was shooting in the 90s, so you know, he's improved substantially. So this is, you know, no diss to any of these players at all. Um, scrambling a little bit worse by about, you know, 10-ish. 3-putts, um, definitely the biggest area for us. and just, uh, again, I'll bump this player over so you guys kind of see this. And let's look at this, these numbers, and say, okay, well, if I brought this to 0, what's that do? 0.39. Okay, cool. If I brought this to 53%, what's that do? 0.7. Better. If I brought this up to 48, what's that do? 0.55. If I brought this down to 5%, 0.9. So you can see objectively, like, Cutting down the 3-putts is going to have the biggest impact on the scores. 0.44 if we made more birdies. So this is like one of the most common things I see for players, is just like, oh, I need to make more birdies. And it's like, odds are you probably don't. Odds are you probably make too many bogeys. And odds are you make too many bogeys because you get balls out of bounds, you don't hit enough greens, or you 3-putt. Um, that's the other one a lot of people go to, is they think that it's like, oh, it's my scrambling's not good enough. And it's like, no, your scrambling is probably fine. Uh, most of whether or not you get up and down has to do with where you missed it. And so all those shots you get like right around like on the collar or, you know, on fringe that kind of feel like you're putting anyway. Um, those are realistically where you're getting up and down from more often than not. You're not getting up and down from flop shot out of the rough over a bunker. That's just not how it works. So when you see the guys on tour, a big part of why this number is so high— obviously, you know, their short game is quite good, but a lot of it's just they miss it in the right spots. And you're also going to see this number highly correlated with the number of greens the player is hitting, at least, you know, among better players. Obviously, I'm sure you could find edge cases on this. That's just typically what I see is when a player improves their overall ball striking, I also see an improvement in their scrambling because they have more control over where they're leaving the ball. So hopefully that makes sense. Anyway, continuing on here, we've got this— the last player here, mid-80s. And so again, we don't see a major difference in greens regulation. It's about 5%, you know, difference, but not too crazy. Exact same penalty rate. See about a 20% drop-off in scrambling, which again kind of indicates to me we've had a little bit less control over our golf ball. We see a 5% higher putt or a 3-putt rate, and we see a lower birdie conversion rate. What we'll also see though is we have— I think I got this scrambled around here. Yes, I did. All right, cool. So this needs to be there and this needs to be there just to, just to make sure that we've got these all organized correctly. So we don't really have a high compound number, um, compound error number. For this last player though, we do. And so that's kind of a hallmark of, you know, kind of the mid-80s scoring that I typically see is 3 puttings and have a big impact, and compound errors are going to have a big impact. And so this is just so crucial because if a player goes in and they think, oh, I need to get better at my ball striking, they don't have this data to really understand this, they're going to put a bunch of work in and they're not going to get better, or they're not going to get very much better whereas comparatively they could have spent that time on dialing in, you know, why are they 3-putting, or dialing in their chipping, or dialing in their course management when they get out of position, and understanding that like, hey, if you can do this effectively, you're going to improve by 3 shots in potentially a very short period of time. Because if you need to learn how to chip, I mean, how hard is it to learn how to chip? Not very. And you know, if your child's struggling to like learn how to chip, I mean, it's like you get a new coach, realistically, because it's just not a challenging thing to teach a player. Um, but anyway, that's really the high level of this, is you want to understand which parts of their game are going to have the biggest impact on their scores. Now, to go a bit deeper here, let's just say, for example, that we want to look in at, you know, let's say in this player's let's just say, where do we want to do this here? Let's, let's go ahead and take Camden here. We're going to go ahead and say, okay, 3-putting rate is higher than we would like. Now let's ask why, right? Because you can't just say, hey, I need to putt more. It's like, what if you go out there and just work on, you know, hitting a bunch of 8-footers? That doesn't make any sense. You have to make sure that you understand why you're 3-putting and where specifically you need to focus. And so let's go ahead and look at this. So I'm presuming these stats have improved a little bit. Okay, cool. So last time that I looked at these statistics, let's see. No, okay, so this hasn't improved because we haven't played any tournaments yet, so all good. Makes things really easy. So let's look at this. So we want to look at the leave distance, and so this doesn't surprise me at all. So from 25 to 30 feet, we'd want to see that inside 10%. In this case, this player is about 16%. So I would want to see the second putt distance at about 2.5 or 2.2, somewhere in that range, as a second putt, which would indicate to me, hey, if I give you a 27-footer, we're going to be inside 3 feet. And that's really, really important because, you know, we're going to make a lot more 2.5-footers than we are going to make 4.5-footers, right? So in this case, for this player, we need to improve the lag putting, right? We need to make sure that we're, um, you know, improving that particular category. Now let's look at the shorter putts as well. Okay, so in his case, at least in tournaments so far, he's not really missing any of those putts. So again, I told you guys, hey, we need to improve our 3-putt rate. And for him, it's, it's exclusively by getting better at lag putting. And so hopefully you guys can kind of see here, it's like, yes, you know, if you have a scoring average of 78, um, you want to improve your scores, you probably want to improve your ball striking, you probably think you're just like, oh, I could probably make more birdies, and so on and so forth. But if you're actually able to dig into this and you really know what you're looking at, you can do something as simple as saying, hey, I want to improve all this stuff. But realistically, if I say the same in everything and I just got better at lag putting, that's worth a shot per round, which is insane. And that's a big part of, you know, why when I'm able to work with players, they're able to improve by about a shot a quarter or about 4 shots per year, because we're able to find this strategic low-hanging fruit that they're just— you don't have unless you actually go through the data. Um, where we can go all the way down from like high level— I want to shoot better scores, or ultimately I want to play college golf— but high level, you know, I want to shoot better scores. Where in my game do I have those shots available for me? It's not just putting, it's a specific skill, it's lag putting. And then we go obviously go into— I want you to do a specific drill. And then if we're doing that specific drill, we're still running into problems, the feedback there is, okay, we either need to change the drill or we need to add in a new variable in an effort to try and improve that. And I think a lot of coaches kind of leave this out and they just say, hey, go work on it, go work harder. I don't know why it's not working. Instead of looking at themselves and saying, hey, if I'm telling a player to do something and they're not getting better, there's a, there's an information gap, or they're just not doing what I told them to do. And so it's like, how can we do our best to help the player do what we're telling them to do to the best of their ability? And how can we make it easier for them? And how can we make them extremely clear on like, here's what I need to do, and then be able to evaluate like, okay, cool, is that working? That's one of the benefits that I have of being able to work with as many players as I do, is I'm able to see this across so many different players and say like, okay, cool, lag putting is a problem. Here's the thing that's going to solve it 9 times out of 10. And if it doesn't get solved, it's usually going to be these reasons. So I kind of have like almost like a decision tree of like, okay, here's what's going to have the biggest impact. And so one of the questions that I get all, all the time is like, oh, well, do you do any swing coaching? Because a lot of times kind of people's first initial reaction is like, okay, well, I've got this practice plan that you give me. Connor, but you know, I also need to go see my swing coach. And a lot of the time I, I kind of discourage that, not because I'm anti-swing coach, but just if your default position is like, let me screw around with my golf swing as like a primary method of getting better, I just don't see that getting consistently great results. You know, cuz we're doing a bunch of random stuff, it doesn't necessarily move us forward versus if we can be strategic and say, hey, this is gonna have the biggest impact, let's put our focus here. It's more probable we're gonna be able to do it. Um, you know, it's just very, very important that we're able to center our time over the things that are going to have the biggest impact. That's why I said 80/20 of this. Um, the other kind of like thing that I want to leave you guys with is you might see your junior golfer and say like, okay, cool, they're out on the golf course for X number of hours. Um, my kind of upper limit for this, I don't like players to be practicing more than like 90 minutes, 2 hours tops. Once we go over that, even if they can do it physically, there's a limitation on how much focus they're actually able to bring to that practice. And so when you think about like where the highest rep, highest quality rep is going to be, it's probably going to be at like minute 30, maybe minute 45, where they're like, they're already kind of like mentally warmed up, they're going through their process and they're getting really good reps. By the time we get to, you know, minute 110 or 120, it's like, you know, there's still high quality reps, which is why I program players to, you know, spend that much time practicing. But it really starts to kind of like diminish after that point. You get to like hour 3, hour 4, hour 5, it's just like, yeah, you can throw in a bunch of time, but it's like, it's not gonna have that big of an impact. And a big chunk of the time it's gonna make you worse because it's gonna give you more opportunities to kind of screw around with the stuff that you're trying to do, and you're not getting any feedback. Um, that's one of the things that I kind of like preach about all the time is the importance of having a feedback loop. If I tell a player, hey, I want you to practice this based on your data, I have the feedback of being able to see the scores come in. I'm the feedback of being able to see the data change and be able to say, okay, here's the adjustments that I want to make strategically. When a player goes out there and practices, I want them to play golf so they have the feedback of, hey, I had that feel and it either worked or it didn't. I need to adjust accordingly. It's just so, so crucial to understand the concept of feedback loops. But, um, hopefully this video makes sense to just help you guys understand, like, where should the focus be going in practice to get the most out of it. And, you know, to be fair, it does require some thought. Um, if this is something you guys want my personal help with, once again, there's a link below this video where you can apply for coaching and you guys can just see like what it would look like for me to work with your child. And not only just like playing out their practice, but just, you know, big picture, like help them develop to play Division I golf. There's an application. Like I said, it's not for everyone. Not everyone's going to be accepted, but if you're curious, just go ahead, fill it out. Worst case, it's not for you. Best case, it's got a really big impact on your child's future and being able to play college golf. So hopefully this video is helpful for you guys. Um, if you're new here, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. We come out with videos like this every single week. And if you enjoyed it, go ahead and leave a like, helps push it out to more people in the algorithm. So talk to you guys soon.