The Biggest Tournament Schedule Mistakes Parents Of Junior Golfers Make

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be talking about the biggest tournament mistake that I see parents of junior golfers making. I'm probably going to cover a couple things related to, um, just general mistakes that I see with, uh, tournament selection for junior golfers in this video, just because I see so much money being wasted and so many parents just don't have a clear idea of, you know, how all this stuff works and how it all fits together. And, you know, at the end of the day, it's not something you should be expected. Now, so that, that's exactly why this video, um, is here. If you guys enjoy, if it's helpful for you, go ahead and leave it a like. Um, and if you want to learn more about, you know, what it takes to help your child play Division 1 golf, um, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. That's all I talk about here. It's all I'm going to talk about here. Um, this channel is really, you know, it's a pretty niche topic, right? I want to make sure I can help you guys as possible. So if you guys could do me the favor, liking it, sharing it, um, subscribing, really helps push it out to more people. So anyway, don't be one of those parents who tries to hide everything and hoard stuff for themselves. I know you guys are out there. Don't do it. Help other people. Um, the whole point of all this is, is to make sure that your child is actually in a position where they can get recruited, not based on knowing special stuff, but actually just how good they are. And that way we have better competition. So anyway, um, what you want to do, number one, the biggest mistake that I see is playing in tournaments that are not ranked or not having any concept of rankings. I remember when I was a kid and I thought, and my parents thought, the rankings were just nonsense, right? They're just BS, it was a political thing, whatever. And that just couldn't be further from the truth. Rankings help you understand where your child is in a very objective way. Now, that said, there's a lot of rankings that are just completely irrelevant, right? There's some like just like random tours that like rank people, and that's not what we're talking about. So what we want to be ranked on is we want to be ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. The reason I talk about Junior Golf Scoreboard as opposed to other stuff— I know that there are other ranking units out there that people are trying to push. The thing is, this one has the most data. It's the most consistent, right? So even though you have some new cooler thing that you think represents your kid in a better light, or, you know, represents the skills of those players based on stroke scan or whatever, I don't care. If it doesn't have the data on who's actually getting recruited, I don't, I don't think that it works quite as well for our purposes. Here. That's one of the reasons why I don't talk about AJGA Rolex rankings quite as much. I worry about them from the perspective of getting into bigger tournaments, but from an overall modeling out where your child needs to be at, not as relevant as Junior Golf Scoreboard. So hopefully I've sold you guys out on that enough. So a lot of times parents think— parents think it's just like, oh, we're playing high school golf. And I just want to like say it up front, high school golf is irrelevant when it comes to playing Division 1 golf. It does not matter. And so that's just, you know, really quick caveat. People get mad at me about this. You can be mad. All I'm here to do is show you guys what it actually takes. When I say there's a lot of data, that's what I mean. We can see all the players that recruited to play Division 1 golf back to 2018. We can see where they ranked in the class, what their scoring differential was in the program they recruited. And so I've got other videos detailing out what scoring differential is, how all that stuff works. Um, hopefully get to the point where I can link that around the video somewhere, but it's definitely on the channel if you just look up, you know, that particular topic here. So anyway, we want to make sure we're playing in ranked events. If we're not able to play in ranked events, we just want to have, you know, the thought process like, hey, well, I need to play in these events so that we can get to the point where we're actually playing in ranked events, right? Um, so, you know, you might be in a spot where just like, hey, we can't play in any ranked events, we got to earn enough points within our point system in order to even, you know, have the opportunity to do that. In which case, guess what you're doing? That's what your town needs to do, right? And so we just need to work toward that as a long-term goal. Now, second biggest mistake— so I told you guys I'm giving you guys a bunch here— we want to play in tournaments that are as close to us as possible, ideally, right? Unless you guys just love vaporizing money and traveling all over the country, which, granted, I'm sure some of you guys enjoy traveling, that's just a fun thing for you to do, good for you, right? Go play wherever you want. Uh, yeah, there's some, there's some relevant stuff for AJGA, but in general, it's like, if you're that type of person good for you, right? For the majority of us though, we want to conserve money, you know, if that's at all possible, right? We want to be able to spend money on the right stuff. And so first thing we want to do is we want to play in tournaments that are in your state, ideal, relatively close to you, right? So if you're in California, you know, there's no reason to travel over to Nevada, you know, unless you're like, well, you know, it's closer than Northern California, right? I want to go to Northern California, I want to go to Las Vegas. Okay, fair enough. But for the most part, you know, it's like you probably have just enough options to be ranked just in Southern California. So it's like, if you want to go over to Texas or something, by all means go for it, but you don't have to, right? So that's kind of the next biggest mistake that I see parents make. Um, third biggest one— we're just gonna go through all of these, um, or as many as I can think of right here. Third biggest one that I see often is parents thinking that they need to play in lots of tournaments in order to help their child, and that is just not necessarily the case. There are some times where it makes more sense to play in more tournaments, but it's not a universal thing. So let me help you guys think through this. To be ranked, you need to play in 4 ranked events. Now, odds are your child will play more than 4 ranked events, um, but we don't necessarily need to, right? So the younger your child is, the more likely they're going to play in more events for a few reasons. Number 1, they're in a position where the biggest concern that they have is getting more experience in tournaments, right? So I don't want you to be concerned about winning the tournaments. I don't care where the kid actually finishes. We just want to be looking at— we're at wherever we're at, we're trying to get better, trying to get comfortable in these tournaments. We do not want to do something where we say, oh well, we could shoot these in practice, therefore if we get some magical mindset fairy dust going on us, um, then all of a sudden we're gonna figure everything out. That is not what we want to do. Or just look at it and be like, hey, you know, if I play in tournaments every single weekend, um, eventually I'm going to be kind of desensitized to it. It's just like I'm always going to be competing. Like, for me, it's very difficult for me to take practice as like a practice round very, very seriously, um, just because I'm going to approach it differently, right? I'm going to have particular shots that I want to hit and see if I can do them versus if you put me in a setting where I'm playing for money or something like that, then I'm going to take it just inherently a little bit more seriously and it's a lot more fun for me, right? So I'm just kind of desensitized to that. That's what you want for your child where it's like when they're not competing, they're kind of just like, man, what am I doing this for, right? That's a good position to be in. Typically what I see with better players is that's exactly what happens for them is they are better in tournaments than they are in practice because in tournaments they're taking everything seriously, they know what their game is, versus in practice they're trying to add stuff to their game or they're potentially being a little bit more loose with particular shots, either because they don't take it as seriously or they're still taking it seriously but they're just like, hey, you know, normally I wouldn't hit 2-iron into this par-5 green with trouble over on the right, but I'm trying to hit a fade and, you know, in theory, as long as I don't slice this, I should be okay. Um, you know, let me see if I got the stones to pull this one off, right? No, I didn't. Okay, cool, let's make double bogey there. But, you know, now I know, right? Or if you pull the shot off, you know, fantastic. You might be in a tournament and be like, I've done this a couple times in practice, but I just— I don't think that, yeah, that works here. I think that that's a little bit too challenging, um, and so I'm going to back off, right? So anyway, making sure we're playing in the appropriate amount of tournaments. As we get better, we're going to play in fewer tournaments, right? Because there are going to be fewer good tournaments to play in, number one, right? Um, But also it just becomes less relevant because your child's a little bit more desensitized to it, right? So that's the next big one. Continuing on in this thought process, and just by the way, uh, if this is something you want more detail on, just like specifically how to build out the tournament schedule, how to navigate all AJGA, blah blah blah, all that stuff, got a link below, um, where you can get my entire tournament schedule framework. Um, so if that's something interested in, you can go ahead and grab that below. Or if you want me to just do all this stuff personally for you, um, that's not just tell your child which tournaments to play in, but just like help them develop their game so they can play Division 1 golf, there's a link where you can apply to work with me below. Limited number of spots on that, are really coming up on that, that limit. So if that's something you're interested in, go ahead and take advantage of that. Um, those are the two options there. Anyway, back into the video here. So going beyond that, the next kind of big mistake that I see parents making is thinking that you need to play in AJGA as, as a matter of like there's something magical that happens with AJGA, and that's just not the truth. Um, that's not— that's not really the case. I talk about AJGA probably as much or more than anybody on YouTube, um, so far as I can see. But that said, it does— it's not because there's some something magic about AJGA. The thing that's cool about AJGA, and this applies more for boys than it does for girls, the thing that's cool about AJGA is there are longer golf tournaments that are available to you playing in AJGA events, right? So if you play an AJGA Open It's pretty easy to find a 7,000, 7,100-yard golf course. It's pretty reasonable, right? If you go and try and search for like, say, Hurricane Tours or some of the other tours— not to disrespect those other tours— it's just harder to find those longer golf courses because they're not designed for that kind of a player. They're not going to take a 7,200-yard blue monster and have a bunch of kids shoot 100, right? They're trying to say, here's a 6,600-yard golf course, it's reasonably challenging, go out there, shoot 76. And that's cool up until the point until your child needs more difficult golf courses, right? So it's always from the perspective, what does your child need, right? If your child's not ranked, then you're playing ranked tournaments. You don't need to go beyond that. Um, if they're playing in ranked tournaments and they're getting to the point where their scores are getting good enough that they need to play in some of these harder tournaments like the AJGAs, that's when it's appropriate to make that jump. In which case, you do not travel all over the country. You play in your state first, then you play in the adjacent states. Hopefully you can get to your, your target number of tournaments just on that, right? I've got other videos talking about all the details of AJGA. Again, look at my stuff, look up AJGA, you'll be able to find it. Um, but those are the biggest mistakes that I see parents making with tournaments. So kind of just in summary here, not playing in ranked events, that's going to be number 1. Number 2, trying to travel all over the place. Um, that's, that's number 2. Just, you don't need to travel over the place, you need to play in your state. Number 3, thinking you need to play in lots of tournaments. You don't need to play in lots of tournaments, you need to play in the right tournaments, um, and that's going to change, uh, throughout time. Number 4, we're not just playing in AJGA for the sake of it, right? If you're looking at that, you're like, oh, it's hard to get into AJGA events, um, realistically what that means is your child's just not good enough to play in those events, so I need to play in these other events first get comfortable shooting the scores they need to so they don't have any problem qualifying for an event, right? Um, so those are, are really the biggest, um, mistakes that I see from families. So, you know, positively, what should you do? Get your child ranked. It's already ranked. Pay attention to where their scoring average is at, and then start looking at AJJ once your scoring average gets below about 77. That's really kind of like the target spot there. And then from there they'll want to continue to work their way up. They'll start playing in some of the more national events, you know, things like the US Junior, PGA, things of that nature, right? Those qualifiers where you're gonna have to qualify to get into them. When they're just getting started off, it doesn't make sense playing those. Like, you can play in them for fun as a qualifier. That can actually be a really good strategy, just get them comfortable with it, get some free reps. Um, at the same time, it's just not the priority, right? So it's understanding, here's kind of what the landscape looks like, here's the tournaments we should be playing in, and as a result of that, you know, what, what does our timeline look like, you know, playing through all these different events, um, and how does that correlate to our long-term goals? So hopefully this video makes sense, help you understand, just kind of avoid some of the pitfalls, um, not spending crazy amounts of money in tournaments, not spending crazy amounts of money on like travel and stuff like that. Obviously if you're in, say, like Iowa or something like that, you might have to travel a little bit more, right? Um, if you're in California, obviously you don't have to travel as much. And there's an offset in just like the, the relative cost there. If you're annoyed about that in Iowa, Just keep in mind, people in California paying like 50% taxes, they got their own bills as far as like getting around and stuff. Um, so worth noting here, um, obviously there's some places in the country that are better, but pretty much everywhere in the country you're gonna be able to find tournaments where your child can play in those. Just make sure they're playing ranked events if Division 1 golf is a serious priority for you guys. So hope you guys enjoyed this video, guys, and I'll see you guys in the next one.