The Complete Guide To Junior Golf Development
Connor Stirling Peterson outlines a data-driven system for developing junior golfers, starting with defining your target level (high school, D3, D1, or pro). He uses scoring differential as the primary metric, recommends tracking at least 10 rounds, and prioritizes easy wins like reducing 3-putts before attempting harder swing changes. His typical improvement rate is about 4 shots per year.
Chapters
All right, in this video I'm going to be going through the complete guide to junior golf development. It's been a while since I've done one of these complete mastery videos, and I figured why don't I just start with just going through the entire thing. So if you guys enjoy this, if you learn something, go ahead and leave it a thumbs up. If I say anything during this that you enjoy, that you want maybe more one-on-one help uh, with— for your child, you want me to directly guide them through this process, there will be an application link below where we can talk about it and obviously make sure that they're a good fit. But let's go ahead and jump into the video here. So number 1, this is often overlooked, right, is getting clear on the target. Where are we trying to get to? Most people just jump all the way to I want to go fast, right? They say, hey, you know, I want to improve my golf swing. I want to hit the ball further. And, you know, those— there's nothing wrong with those individually, but typically when you're watching a video like this, you've gotten to the point where your child has made the transition from— they used to play golf for fun. Not to say they don't play golf for fun anymore, um, but they used to play golf for fun and that was it, right? And so most of golf at that level is just getting comfortable with like the movements. Right? It's incredibly awkward to hold a golf club, to swing a golf club. So they made it through that kind of phase where just, you know, success is contact with the golf ball, right? So now they're getting into a position where they're just like, I want to accomplish something with this. And so we have to get a little bit more precise about where exactly we're trying to go, because if the goal is to play high school golf, that's different than if the goal is to play college golf. And if the goal is to play D3 golf It's different than if they want to play Division 1 golf. For all you watching who maybe have a kid who's like, hey, I want to play professional golf, that's cool. Don't let anybody tell you this thing that's going around. It's like, oh well, actually the way to play professional golf is just to skip out on college golf. That's not true. That's not a thing. You can look it up. People who go on to play professional golf played college golf, in almost all cases Division Division 1 golf, or very high probability. I'm not discounting— there are players that go directly from high school to play professional golf. I'm just saying that's not the norm, and it's really not a model that I would recommend. I think I see more failures in that direction than the other, other side of that. And so this is not a discussion on all the other merits or not merits about college. This is just specifically around if you want to play professional golf, Division 1 college golf is part of that path. Okay, so we, we have to get clear on where we're trying to get to. What is the actual target here? And so my recommendation, the tool that I use to really evaluate this, is called Junior Golf Scoreboard. Are there other ranking indexes? Yes, I see them pitched all the time. And at the point where I find something better than Junior Golf Scoreboard, you better believe that I will start pitching that instead of Junior Golf Scoreboard. So why do I like Junior Golf Scoreboard so much? I like Junior Golf Scoreboard because Junior Golf Scoreboard has a tremendous amount of data on the players who get recruited and which programs they get recruited to and where they had to be. And regardless of what everybody says about, oh, you know, these tournaments, you know, those strength of field and stuff like that, Junior Golf Scoreboard doesn't really care that much about those things, right? There's still an impact of it, obviously, Obviously, um, there's still an impact of, you know, where you finish in your field, but it's almost nothing, right? The majority of it is based off of what you shoot versus the course rating. Okay, are there flaws in the course rating system? Sure, right? Um, but nonetheless, that's how this works. Even if we want to say, oh, everything should be strokes gained based, there's still flaws in strokes gained, right? Because if you can look at a bunker shot, right, well, one player can be in the bunker and have a good lie, another player has a plugged lie. Do we have strokes gained evaluations for the plugged versus the unplugged, right? How do you define what's officially plugged versus not? So it's like there's still flaws in literally every, um, methodology for this stuff, right? And so long story short, Junior Golf Scoreboard's fantastic. I recommend them. Primarily because you can go to here, rankings and honors, college signings, and you can see all the players that recruited back to 2018. And you can see this for both boys and girls. You can see where they were ranked in their class over here on the right-hand side. You can see what their scoring differential was, which I'll talk about a little bit here in a second. And you can see which programs recruited them. So it's not just a crapshoot. It's not just, hey, I want to play at a high level 'Yeah, I gotta go work real hard,' or you get some idiot telling you, 'Oh, well, you just gotta, you know, be good at golf and, you know, work really hard and like coaches will find you.' It's just nonsense. Um, and I would use this as my supporting evidence, right? I'm not just like making this stuff up. Like, I'm literally just going off— this is all public information, okay? And so we want to know where we're trying to get to, right? You can scroll all the way down and be like, okay, cool, you know, what are some of these Division III programs? Disclosure on this: Division III and Division II does not have as much data available as Division I does, right? So typically when I'm working with players, the big goal is Division I golf. I like that goal because it's a nice middle ground, right? You have to be pretty dang good at golf, don't get me wrong, right? It's literally harder than getting into Harvard. So I'm not saying like, hey, by watching this video, all of a sudden your kid's gonna go play Division I golf, or that it's easy by any means. All I'm saying is that's typically where the kids that I'm working with are aimed to. That's, that's usually a good goal, right? Um, professional golf, a little bit too far out there. A lot of stuff can change. High school golf, too small of a goal, certainly for what I do. Um, you know, can I help a kid accomplish that? Absolutely I can, but it's just kind of like, it's just too— you know, you can get on your high school team by like breaking 80, and it's like, do I work with kids who are shooting in the 90s and help them get into the 80s, or you know, even breaking 80? Yeah, absolutely I do. That's just not the main thing that I, I kind of emphasize here. Um, so I like Division 1 as a goal. Um, also puts you in the wonderful situation of when your child is ranked— I'm getting ahead of myself— but when your child is ranked and they get to that ranking rate age, right, they get June 15th sophomore year and they have the right scoring differential, coaches reach out to them. That is a phenomenal position to be in. Feels amazing comparatively to not being in that position, sending out emails to coaches and just getting crickets, right? But long story short, we just gotta know what we're trying to do, right? If we're trying to play high school golf, there's nothing wrong with that. You're trying to play college golf, there's nothing wrong with that. But we need to know, right? Because we're going to make different decisions based on whatever our goal is, right? If I want to go from, I don't know, San Francisco to LA, I'm going to use a different mode of transportation in all likelihood than I would if I'm trying to go from San Francisco to New York, right? I've got to have different timetables, right? I've got to bring different amounts of stuff. It's going to cost different amounts of money. And so I gotta know where I'm going before I decide, hey, I'm gonna go take this on, right? So this is, is really, really crucial here. Okay, so once we've established what the actual target is, and that's just like from a big picture target perspective, right? Everything else is going to be reverse engineering how do we get there, right? Essentially like, hey, here's where we're trying to go big picture. What are all the sub-steps that end up happening? And when I'm working with a family That's the primary thing that, that I'm helping them do. It's like, okay, here's a big picture goal. And there's a lot of stuff that goes into that. Here's what you need to do today or this week in order to move toward that goal. Right. And just focus on that rather than trying to understand everything about everything. You don't need to be able to do that. You know, it's, I've been doing this for years. And so I have that perspective and students can kind of lean on me for that one. So next question we need to ask here. Is where are we at today? What, what particular position are we at today? I want to go back here actually one second, just on the target here, because this is one of the spreadsheets that I've built for my students. Um, and so I use a lot of spreadsheets because a lot of this is just math. And so going back to this page that I was showing you guys here a second ago, if your child has a particular program that they wanted to go to, then what you would want to do is actually just like find that program. You can sort by school here as well and just notate the scoring differential of those particular programs that— or that program and who they recruited, right? So example here, I've got Auburn, UCLA, and Stanford. And in 2026, they— or I suppose this probably would have been 2025— they recruited players at -6.52, -8.06, -5.16, You know, UCLA, negative 6.69, negative 4.22, Stanford, negative 7.42, negative 3.07, right? And so based on that, we can take the averages and then we can average out the averages. That's another way that we can get really clear about what that particular goal is, right? So if you're just watching that and you're like, oh, I've got a vague concept of where we need to be, we can get very precise about that and say like, okay, cool, here's the averages, or you could say, hey, no, I want to get the absolute top tier, right? When we're looking at all this stuff, we want to think in terms of probabilities, right? So we're not looking at, say, if I get to -7.4, I'm definitely getting recruited by Stanford. It's not necessarily going to be the case, but we can say I have a higher probability of making that happen. And moreover, it would be unreasonable to be at a -2 scoring differential and think that we're going to go to Stanford. As an example, right? So hopefully that makes sense. Now, next piece of this— where are we at today? I am a big advocate of getting your child ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. The main reason for that is because it allows us to see where we're at objectively, right? We get the scoring differential number. So for those of you guys who are still wondering, scoring differential technically is the difference between your scoring average or your child's scoring average and the course rating of a golf course, right? So, and you're going to see if you play a golf course, you're going to see course rating like 72 or 73 or 74 or 69, something like that. It's comparing, hey, what'd you shoot versus what's the course rating? So if you shoot 72 on a course rating of 74, it's a negative to your scoring differential. For Junior Golf Scoreboard, they're looking at the top 75% of your rounds, those scoring differentials. That's what it's actually taking, right? So that's why I don't like handicap as a measurement of where your child's at, because it overrewards good rounds and underpunishes bad rounds, right? So we get into this psychology— again, not to get ahead of myself— we get into the psychology of chasing our best rounds rather than cutting out our worst rounds, which is actually the way we're going to make progress. We don't make progress by saying, ah gee, I hope I can make more birdies. That just doesn't work very well. We can get tactical about saying, like, let's say your child does actually have a scoring average of 71 and literally all they can do is make more birdies. That's, that's just— I mean, in the existential sense. Okay, so we want to establish where we're at, right? And we also obviously want to know how old we are and how much time we have to accomplish that goal, right? Because that's going to change what's realistic, right? So one of the questions that probably floats around in the back of your mind once you've established whatever your goal is, is, is that realistic? And the answer is, it depends on where you're at, right? Coaches sometimes have this thing or like swing coaches, they'll work with a player and they'll like send them to like Stanford or something like that, taking a scrim example. And then they'll have other kids and parents come to them and be like, oh well, you helped that kid, so therefore you can help my kid do the same thing. And that's like, it depends on where your kid's at, right? Which is why when I'm working with players, I like to measure the average improvement on their scoring differential year over year to do that type of forecasting, right? So that way I'm never in a position where it's just like, oh well, you helped so-and-so go to wherever. It's like Yeah, but so-and-so is in a different situation than you're in, right? We want to look at your specific situation and say, what's realistic applying the same methodology to your situation, right? So that's why I like to track things like average improvement, because that tells me how good the methodology is, not anything about like individual starting points, right? It tells me which individual starting points are more probable to play out to particular goals, right? That's really the way that I like to look at it, right? So Again, another spreadsheet that I have with my students here. So we've got our goal, whatever that is, doesn't matter, but we want to know what that is. And so we've got our scoring differential here, and so we just want to track the direction of that scoring differential month over month over month over month. And then we can track, hey, how fast is this player progressing, right? How fast are we actually reaching our goals? And then we also want to compare that to like, okay, cool, if we continue to do that, like, where are we gonna end up? Now, in this player's case, this is kind of— this is the actual player, right, that I was just showing you guys. In his case, it's a little bit absurd, right? So we're at a -27 scoring differential. We're not getting there. I don't anticipate him to get there, right? It would be unreasonable for him to be like, oh yeah, I'm gonna get to -27. If he pulls it off, fantastic, but like, that's realistically not gonna happen. And so We want to be able to do the same thing for your child. You want to know, hey, where are we at and how fast do we reasonably want to improve, right? It would be unreasonable for this player to be like, oh, I want to improve even faster than I am right now. It's like, that sounds cool and all, but like, dude, it's just not— it's not realistic, right? So let's just execute on the process to the best of our ability. No, it's like, hey, until we're at like a -7 or -6 or something like that, it's really slowing up. Then we can say, hey, what can we do to like juice this up a little bit? But for the most part, it's like, okay, cool, like we're on a good track, like let's not screw with it, right? I think all of us, we have the temptation to take something that's working and screw with it, right? Um, you know, we all can remember Tiger Woods, how many times he decided he wanted to change his golf swing for whatever justifications that he came up with. And I don't know the ins and outs of all of those things, but you know, there's a lot of people who just kind of say, hey, If you didn't screw around with that, you might have 25 majors. And, you know, obviously, you know, extra stuff going on on the sides between, you know, all sorts of stuff, right? So we can't evaluate that in a vacuum, but long story short, we want to be able to know, hey, when do we need to push and when can we sit on our hands and chill, right? We need to have some check engine lights. Can't just be like, hey, I want to get to New York. How much gas do you have in your car? Like, dude, I don't know. You know, do you have a way of figuring that out? Nope. You're like, so you're just gonna drive and eventually your car's just gonna stop and you just hope you got enough to get there? Yeah, pretty much. It's not gonna work very well, right? So we want to be able to map that out. So where are we at today? We need to be able to define that on Junior Golf Scoreboard, which you can do here. Tournaments and Results, search for tournaments. You can actually find the tournaments in your state that are ranked, right? So if I just wanted to pull up Arizona here— so for Junior Golf Scoreboard, you need to play in a minimum of 4 ranked events, and if you're able to do that, your child will have their ranking. So wherever your state is, just go ahead, find 4 tournaments, and you get ranked. And congratulations, now your child's ranked. Now they have their scoring differential, and you can do that math that I just went over. You can say, okay, Hey, here's our goals, here's where we're at today, and then what do we need to do in order to, to move ourselves forward, right? Obviously there are nuances to which tournaments to play in, and that really just depends on your child's particular situation. Again, that's something I do with my students where I'm guiding them through that process, um, and telling them kind of how to manage that exactly. I want to be super clear, I'm never doing that in a position where it's like, hey, like, here's literally like I'm gonna pick out the specific tournaments for them. I'm gonna give them the right framework so that they understand, hey, here are the ones to do, here are the ones to avoid. If they got questions questions, like, I'll obviously clarify those stuff. There's no one-size-fits-all answer. It's not like there's just the perfect, most optimal tournament schedule. That doesn't exist for anyone. Nobody does that. Um, and if you're trying to like do that, you're kind of shooting yourself in the foot. That's not the main thing. Really big on the 80/20 rule. So 20% of the stuff we do gets 80% of the results. I want to stay focused on that 20% that gets the 80% of the results. I don't want to go into the weeds of, you know, the most optimal subject line for a college coach or absurdities like that. Okay, so we just want to know, hey, here are the tournaments that are best for us. You know, when is AJGA appropriate? When is, you know, all those things appropriate? I've got other videos on the channel that goes through, you know, those kinds of materials. It's a little bit off topic from, from junior golf development specifically. All right, next question here: why are we here today? Right, this is an important question because it's not just, hey, we're here, we're at a 9 scoring differential. Okay, why, right? And so this is why it's so crucial to have this branching here, because we could actually ask that question. There are two variables that cause the scoring differential to be whatever it is: the length of the golf courses, or more, more specifically, the course rating, right? Because in theory you could have a very short golf course that has a very high course rating. So the Western Junior would be an example of that. Um, but in general, if we can play longer golf courses, that's going to be better for us. And we have our scoring average, that's the other side of that coin. And so those two things drive the scoring differential down. Typically what I find to play Division 1 golf, players have a scoring average of about 72 to 74. That's kind of where they end up as a— whatever their number ends up being, right? 72, 74. If we're trying to be one of the best players in the country, right, let's say we are you know, maybe top 50 in our class come, you know, junior year, we might have a scoring average under that. We might be in the 71 or, you know, as low as maybe 69.5, I think is about where Miles Russell is at. Um, that's a very elite caliber of, of scoring average though, right? So typically we've already— we're playing in the best tournaments possible, right? We're just continuing to push scoring average because that's literally our only option, right? So when I'm looking at that, there's, there's two variables here. I can make the golf courses longer and harder, which is a good, good one to pull out, especially if your child hits the ball pretty far relative to their peers. I'm sure you guys have all enjoyed the pain of them hitting, you know, bomb drive, having a wedge into the green, and hitting it to the exact same distance they would hit like a 7-iron to, right? So in that case, you might look at that and say, well, you know, they're not really going to be hurt that much by playing a longer golf course scores-wise, and it's going to benefit them from their scoring differential. It makes a lot of sense to play a longer golf course. On the flip side, if you put your child on a longer golf course and they gotta hit 3-wood in every hole, probably want to play shorter golf courses unless they're in a position where it's like, hey, we got a scoring average of 72, you know, then we might lengthen out the golf courses and maybe the scoring average comes up a little bit. So it's a little bit of a— it's a teeter-totter, it's a dance, um, of helping them incrementally. It's like, what can we do to get longer right away, right? Those are some of the things that I do with my students. I've got some drills that work really well for bumping up distance, usually somewhere in the range of like 15 to 20 yards over a pretty short period of time. Um, that's kind of the way that I'm— you know, the benefit of working with as many students as I have is I've just kind of accumulated a bag, so to speak, of just like things that I know are going to hit really quickly, and I can kind of deploy them based on what makes sense for that particular player in their circumstances. So anyway, we want to know why we're at where we're at, right? What's the scoring average? How long are the golf courses? All that stuff. Then we can start to optimize from there. Okay, now this is kind of what I was getting into here. What is the most efficient path to get 1% better? What's the smallest unit, right? Because everyone likes to go at this and they like to say the answer is let's blow up the golf swing, we can go fix our golf swing. And it's like Okay, but I very rarely see the case where somebody's actually done the math to quantify what's going to happen if they actually improve their golf swing, right? It's usually something along the lines of, well, we'll be more consistent. And it's like, that's like a marketing buzzword. Like, that's not even like an actual— like, what does that mean, right? Um, you know, it's like, does that mean that our percentage error from X, you know, a particular distance got smaller? And it's like, if it is the case, then just like say that, right? And then you should be able to measure that, right? We went from 12% error to 10% error. And then we can also have a conversation about, okay, have we already optimized everything else first, right? Because if I take a, a shot pattern, right, and I make it smaller, right— just, just for context on when I say a shot pattern, if you guys aren't familiar with with that term. If I have 20 balls that I hit, I'm gonna have a shot pattern that looks something like this. Okay, just so you guys can see what that looks like, right? I'm not going to have just like a sniper rifle where it's just like over the same target every single time. Like, I'm going to have a dispersion pattern here. And so if I go from this pattern to this pattern, like, that's objectively a tighter dispersion Um, and you can measure that with something like TrackMan or what have you, right? Long story short, if you guys aren't doing that, you're just saying, hey, we're getting more consistent— honestly, usually the people who talk the most about consistency in their golf swings are the most inconsistent golfers that I, uh, you know, I'm around, that I, that I see. Is it— it's usually like we're so hyper-focused on trying to make the golf swing perfect that it's just moving around all the time. Or some players who like never look at it golf swing is just completely fine, right? It just kind of stays the same, and then they get kind of the same consistent outcome, right? Um, but long story short here, we want to look at this and say, okay, what's the most efficient way to get 1% better? Because we're always going to have infinite things that we could do to try to get better at golf. There's always infinite things that we could do, but what we have to do is say, okay, There's two measurements here. What's going to cause us to improve the most, right? What's going to be the most impactful, right? We also have to consider that from how long is it going to take, right? So you could make the argument, well, hey, ball striking is the most important, important part of a player's game. We can prove that mathematically, right? We're hitting the most shots, um, and it's just, it's the biggest difference between the best players and the worst players, right? The best players are extremely good with their irons. They're pretty dang long with their driver, and even if they're a bad putter, they're going to make a bunch of money, right? And so we can say, hey, that, that might be a big one, but how hard is it to take your child from hitting at 220 off the tee to hitting at 320 off the tee? Hard. It's going to take a long time. So it's like, yeah, do we want to get there? Yeah, absolutely. Is that something worth prioritizing over time? Absolutely. It's going to happen tomorrow? No. So we want to know that and say, okay, cool, we're going to do these things to get longer. In the meantime, what's the other easiest thing to do, right? And so we want to prioritize those things that are easy before everything else, and we just want to go through that in order, right? So an example of something that is easy would be let's get better at lag putting, which I see very few junior golfers do. And it's one of the first things that I have the students that I work with start doing on a regular basis is practicing their lag putting in a structured format where we're getting good at the distances they're going to have all the time on the greens, right? And so it's a lot easier to get good at taking a 30-footer and hitting it to 3 feet consistently than it is to make more 12-footers for birdie, for a lot of reasons. You know, when you think about the sheer number of attempts that a player gets per round to hit a putt from 30 feet, it's like every single green that they hit. Versus if I say, hey, I want you to get better from 12 feet, how many 12-footers do we have per round? Like 3, maybe, you know, maybe 4. And it's like, okay, well, if you're a tour player, how many of those are you making? 1, 2, maybe, like somewhere in that range. And it's like, okay, cool. Which do you think is going to be more efficient, right? Teaching a player how to lag putt, pretty low, you know, margin there. But if they're 3-putting twice around, that's a shot, a shot and a half right there where it's just like you solve that problem has a massive impact on what they're doing, right? And we could solve out with practice. It's one of the most common, easiest, like, sure thing ones that I'll go to. We can also go ahead and solve that with strategy, right? We can also solve that with mindset. We can also solve that with mechanics. So there's different things that we can do, but we want to look at it from the perspective of like, okay, cool, I could do— I could go down a mechanics rabbit hole and put you on Sam Putt Lab and, you know, do all that stuff. Or I could just be like, well, do you practice it? No. Okay, cool, let's start there, you know. And there's like, we can add all those other things on. And if my goal isn't perfection, it's just I want you to get a little bit better, which is all we can actually do, then we're going to see that consistent improvement. So the average student I work with improves by about 4 shots per year. If you break that down, that's about a shot per quarter, right? So when you think about that, if we can cut down a single 3-putt per round over a 3-month period of time, that's a shot, right? And so, you know, if I'm working with a player who shoots in the 90s, they have a different profile of things they're typically going to struggle with comparatively to a player who shoots in the 70s, right? A player who shoots in the 70s on a regular basis probably doesn't have a crazy high 3-putt rate, versus I've had some students where, you know, they start off or shooting in the mid-90s and we've got like 6 3-putts around, and it's like, well there's 6 shots, you know, 5 shots right there. Let's get rid of those first, right? I don't have to look at the golf swing to know, hey, it's going to be a lot easier to fix this than it will be to fix the golf swing, right? That's a skill they have to develop anyway, right? So I'm going to do the easy thing. Even though I can say, hey, I want to change this golf swing, it's like, well, let's do that when it's the most appropriate, right? Let's get the 6 shots first and then run into a ceiling where we can say, hey, it's definitely your golf swing. Okay, so next piece of this We need to know what our metrics are before we do the thing. Right. And so those of you who are in business will understand this really, really well. Those of you who are in kind of more complex fields are going to understand this really, really well, that there needs to be a North Star or a set of kind of like North Star principles that are going to tell us whether or not we're making progress. Right. And so We need to know what that is ahead of time. We can't just start doing stuff and then be like, oh yeah, I think it went well. Like based on what? You know, it's like the, what's the, I wanna say it's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy or something like that. Or it's just like, you, you like throw the dart and then you draw the circle around wherever the dot landed. Right. We do not wanna be in that game. We wanna say, okay, cool. This is how we're gonna measure our progress. And so for me, I measure scoring differential. On Junior Golf Scoreboard. That's what I look at because that's the most objective in my mind compared to if I relied on students reliably logging their data. Yeah, a little kind of more hit and miss, right? Obviously my students have gotten pretty dang good at it. I try to make it as easy as possible. It's just like we've got some issues that can pop up versus tournament rankings, pretty consistent, right? It's going to consistently log that stuff. Okay, so we want to know what that is for your child. You want to define what that is ahead of time. Now under that, we have supporting metrics, right? So, and you could also— let me back this up just a little bit on this North Star thing. You could say, hey, you know, our main thing on this junior golf scoreboard is a scoring differential. But you could say, well, based on where we're at, we're out of benchmark on the, the distance— or, um, not the distance the scoring average, right? So that becomes your primary thing. It's scoring average in those tournaments. That's your North Star, right? So what are our supporting metrics, right? So when I do this, these are my supporting metrics. Let me go ahead and close that all out. So move my head here. So when I'm doing this, the statistics I like to look at is a spread— another spreadsheet I give all my students. Is penalty rate off the tee, greens regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, birdie conversion rate. That gives me what the player should shoot on average, and I'm able to compare that to what they actually shoot on average to derive out what I call compound errors. So compound errors fall into a few categories. Balls, you know, you hit the ball in the trees and instead of, you know, just pitching it out, your child says, you know what, I can hit on the green, hit a tree trunk, bounce out, and make triple, right? That would be an example of compound error, right? Um, long story short, it's just all the statistics or all the things that could happen that don't fall within the statistics I just labeled out, right? Those tend to be those kind of, again, compounded scenarios where it's like one thing leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. It's not, hey, you missed the green, you chipped it up and on, and you know, you two-putted for your bogey, right? Bogeys don't kill people's rounds, right? Bogeys are much— they're very, very manageable. If you make double and triple, those are disasters, right? But we can't just say, you know, because I love the Tiger 5, um, but we can't just say, oh, I want to get rid of 2 chips. And like, okay, but like, what does that mean you're supposed to do specifically, right? So it's like, hey, are— I need to focus on better contact around the greens. Okay, cool, that's a solution, right? That's something I can actually positively do. If it's like, hey, you need to get better at your carry numbers around the greens, again, I can evaluate whether I'm doing a good job of that. I can also consider, you know, risk, right? So if I've got a tucked pin, I can say, well, I'm right on the margin of how far I need to carry this ball. I need to carry it a little bit deeper into the green. Maybe if I hit it good, it's going to be a little bit further past, but I know for sure I'm not making anything worse than bogey unless I also 3-putt, right? Which is also going to be considered within this data set here. Okay, and so We want to know what those supporting metrics are. I like those— these ones. I recommend that you reference these ones because if you do math, you can project what your child should shoot on average. So if you're comfortable with math, comfortable with spreadsheets, you should be able to understand what I'm saying. Not as comfortable, um, obviously I can make this video all just all about doing math. Um, that's what the application's for. So if you want to work with me and, um, you know, have me give you guys a spreadsheet and then tell you guys what to do in the drills and all that stuff, then again, application below. Okay, so we want to know what those supporting metrics are going to be, right? What are the things that lead into our North Star metrics? Lower scoring average. If we're able to improve greens regulation, see the scores cut down. All right, next question: what tournaments are we going to play in? This matters. Right? Because this is where we're actually going to display and see the movement on our North Star metric, right? If we say, hey, that I'm getting better at golf, or my child's getting better at golf, great. How do you prove that? You have to be able to prove it. Can't just like exist in the ether. You're like, oh, I think they're getting better. Like, okay, like, I guess. But you need to know like what tournaments are we playing in, right? Are we going to play in AJGA? Are we going to play in the local stuff? Um, the, they should also be strategic, right? We should know what we're playing in and why. Right? So for example, I have this one come to me all the time. Let's say we got a scoring average of 80, right? It doesn't make sense playing AJGA events because we're gonna have too hard of a time qualifying. So we need to get the scoring average down, but we need to continue to play ranked events to validate that we're actually getting better, right? So what are we going to do? We're going to play in local ranked events and try to bring the scoring average down to about 77. 77 is kind of my over-under range. We get to that, then we can start looking at AJGA events. Then it starts to make a little sense. And so you wanted to understand, hey, where are we going to play, right? We can't just be good at our home golf course, right, in our practice round. It's like you got to have an objective standard where your child's at, right? Now I already kind of got to this, but how are we going to track our statistics, right? So I gave you guys the ones that I track. Um, the tool I use is called Draw More Circles. Um, you guys just look that up there. Obviously, are there other tools out there? Yeah, of course there's stuff like Decade, um, Clipt, um, or some other ones that I've, I've seen. Those are the two ones that I see the most. Arko's, um, long story short, with Circles, I've personally been able to have input in some of the statistics that they track, which has been phenomenal for me. And so I recommend them to all my students. I recommend them in all of my videos. I think they're phenomenal. They have all those statistics that I just listed out, and they have these subsets of statistics that I also like to look at. So for example, most things are going to track something like 3-putt rate, right? But Circles— I'll even pop on over here for you guys— Circles allows me to go in here and say, okay, well, within this putting, what's my make rate from these different distances, which is profoundly valuable. What's my second putt average distance on my lag putts? My average leave distance, right? That's profoundly valuable for me to know. And so that's obviously the one that I recommend. I've got a few different tiers. I believe that, um, I don't recall exactly that. I give all my students the highest tier and I give my students a discount code for that. Um, but you want to be able to answer the questions like, how are we going to be able to track our statistics and do that in a consistent way, right? Because if you're just guessing, then those statistics and those supporting metrics up above is just kind of like all vibes based. And, you know, as you guys can imagine, I mean, how stable is the— are the emotions of a 13, 14, or 15-year-old? Not, not tremendously stable, right? And so even if they were, right, it's not reasonable that we are going to be able to remember, you know, extended amounts of data, right? Which kind of gets me to my subsequent points. So we've got the question of which statistics are we going to look at, right? I've already gone over that a little bit with you guys. We've got our North Star, we've got our supporting statistics, and we've got sub-statistics, right? So you could have your North Star be, you know, scoring differential. You could have supporting statistic be, um, scoring average. And then you could have supporting statistics to that, like I described— penalty rate, greens regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, birdie conversion rate. Then you can have sub-statistics to that, right? So you have greens regulation, and then you have on-green percentage from different yardage buckets, right, which is going to influence your greens regulation for different holes, right? So par 3, par 4, and par 5 gives us insight into strategic considerations for those particular holes, because realistically, until you get to the green, all strategy is essentially how do we hit the green regulation. And so if you see, hey, our greens regulation is screwed up on par 5s, that's a different scenario than if it screwed up on par 4s or par 3s, right? And so we want to know what those sub-statistics are for us right now. Is this complicated? Yeah, absolutely. That's why I do this for families, because it's kind of unreasonable for you to do that much, you know, data analysis. And again, for me, this has taken me years, right? This is taking me a lot of trial and error, right? Obviously, the students I work with now have a much more sure thing than, you know, the students I would have worked with at the beginning. You know, and so once we've established that, right, we can know, hey, this is the right data to look at. We also— this is something most people don't think about here, and it shoots parents in the foot. I'll explain that in a second. What's our minimum data set for judgments, right? So what does that mean? What is the minimum amount of information that I need to have in order to make a judgment about something, right? So an example of this: if we were going to flip a coin then we have a 50/50 shot that it comes up heads or tails, right? But if I flip that coin, it comes up tails, do I make a judgment about the 50/50? Well, obviously not, right? Because I only flipped one time. But if I flip it again and it comes up tails again, do I start saying, huh, this coin is, is broken? No, I understand the overall statistics. I'm just like, no, I need a larger sample size. And long story short, there's a particular sample size where it becomes more and more probable that we're getting inaccurate information about the probability of that coin. I don't know what that number is, um, but it becomes more and more profitable as we flip that coin more and more times. What's actually happening, right? So that's what we have to have, a minimum data set to really be able to make this evaluation. My recommendation is 10 rounds of golf. That's 18 whole rounds of golf. That is enough data so that we can actually see what's going on in a pretty stable way. I'm getting started with students, I'll start off with 5 rounds of data, so that's still 18 holes. That's, you know, a total of 90 holes in total. Um, but long term I like to look at 10 ideally, so I'll always be looking at the rolling 10 there. So again, 10 rounds is kind of the minimum that I really like to look at on a long-term basis. And so this is really important because I see parents screw this up when they look at a particular tournament and they make judgments about their child's game based on that particular tournament outcome. And we create this cycle, and it, it has this compounding effect of like, okay, if you have a narrative in your head that your child has a particular issue and then it comes up in a tournament, it's like, see, aha, I got it, you know, there it is, right? And you're making a judgment over too small of a data set. You're saying, yeah, this— I think this coin is you know, it's a little bit tilted, it comes up, you know, tails, and it's like, haha, see, I told you it was going to be tails. And it's unhelpful, right? Versus if we're looking at 10 rounds of tournament data, then we can see averages across the board, right? We can have some good rounds and some bad rounds. We're going to have a whole bunch of stuff in the middle, right? And those of you who are familiar with something like a standard deviation curve would understand this, right? So we've got our average in the middle, right? Then we have our standard deviation on either side, or I guess it would be a normal distribution curve. Um, long story short, we've got 70% of our rounds that are going to be plus or minus whatever our standard deviation is on our average, right? So we play 10 rounds, we should get 7 that are kind of in that middle range, right? Then we might get a couple on either side, right? If we play 20 rounds, we've got even, you know, more clarity of an extreme on one side or the other, right? So if your child plays enough golf, technically they're going to shoot a couple really good rounds and a couple horrible rounds. And so we just want to be aware of that ahead of time, right? We don't want to make judgments because it's just like, you don't know when that horrible round's going to come out. Could be the first tournament of the year. You don't know, right? Now I will say, and I might be getting ahead of myself here, that cutting out those worst-case scenarios, those worst-case rounds, the particular skills that hurt them in those rounds, that is going to be the way to shoot— have them shoot lower scores on average, right? Because we chop the bottom end, It's very doable, right? And it shifts the overall average in a more positive direction. Typically, players who have lower scoring averages also have tighter standard deviations and end up also shooting those lower scores more frequently because they've cleaned up the actual underlying skill that causes them to have those bad rounds, right? So let's say we got penalty shots out of bounds is the thing that's going to cause us to shoot 90 when we should be shooting 78. If we clean that up, well, now that round that we shot 71, that we still had a ball out of bounds, I would shoot 69. Right, so everything gets shifted up because the underlying skills— but long story short, we want to make sure we're making these judgments with enough data, right? So if we're looking at— not looking at one tournament, two tournaments, we're looking at like four or five tournaments to really make a decision. Just like, here's where we're at, and then we can start to say, hey, the main thing we need to focus on is we need to get range regulation up, or we need to get penalties down, right? But then we go to the next tournament round and say, hey, I don't really care where I finish on all these other things. I know I'm kind of going to be wherever I'm at. My main concern is this, this major statistic that I've identified that's going to help my overall scores, right? So it allows the player to zone in more specifically on what they can actually accomplish. All right. Now, what are we going to do to change that data set? Kind of just went into this, but it's like, okay, we've got our data set. We've got enough data. Right, what do we do with that information? We have to do something with the information, right? We can't just collect it for the sake of collecting it. Otherwise you're just going to annoy your child with just busy work to go do. And this is the average thing that I see with kids who track their actual data— they just don't do anything with it, or they just come up with random things, or the coach comes up with random things about like, hey, I think you should be able to reach this benchmark. It's like, but where did you get that? Like, based on what? Um, so we want to be able to say, okay, our greens regulation isn't where we want it to be. Um, you know, it's at 50%, we think you can get to 70%. Okay, well, why is it at 50% and what can we do realistically to get it up? And what's the easiest thing to do, right? So one of my favorite go-tos is look at par 5 greens regulation, because par 5 greens regulation, pretty much everybody should be able to get to the green in 3 shots by hitting a wedge on the green. So the question is Well, what's our on-green percentage and how does that— or what's our greens regulation percentage on par 5s? How does that compare to our on-green percentage with a wedge, right? Because if we see a gap there, then it's like, oh, we'll just lay up to that number, and then they are going to be able to, to increase their overall greens and regulation just by a strategic decision in that case, right? So sometimes people ask me, they're like, hey, how can you make strategic, you know, advice based off statistics? And it's exactly scenarios like that. It's like, okay, cool, if you just get to this number, then you're going to be able to bump up your greens regulation. If you go from 50% to 80%, that's another green per round, that's another shot per round. And again, for me, that's where, you know, when I start working with a new student, there's just a lot of stuff in the bag where it's just like, boom, here's a shot, here's a shot, here's a shot, um, where we're, you know, as efficient as possible, right? And so we want to be able to say, here's what we're going to do specifically And we want to document that, right? We don't just have that as a concept that exists in the ether because it's really hard to do stuff when you don't have an actual plan written down of what you're going to do. So when I'm working with students, number one, I have a document where I track everything that I have that student doing. I have explanations on how to do all the drills. I'm tracking all their major statistics that I want to pay attention to. In addition to that though, you guys kind of briefly saw this, I've also this is one of the reasons why I love Circles here— also got to the point where we can actually track the results of these particular drills in the app and see how that's impacting the player statistics over time, right? And so that is absolutely crucial, right? So we want to be able to say, okay, I've got this data set, I want to change something in it. What specifically am I going to do? What are the drills? How many balls I'm going to hit? How hard are those drills going to be? What's my measurement on that stuff? And I'm going to go out and play more golf until I have another data set that is enough, right? And then I'm going to make an evaluation of whether or not the stuff that I'm doing actually worked, right? That kind of gets into the next part. When are we going to evaluate whether it worked? Well, if we've answered what's our minimum data for judgment, so we can answer the next piece of this. When are we going to evaluate what's working? Right? Once we have another data set that is that size, right? So when I'm doing this with students, I'm updating the plan every month. And I'm doing that based off the rolling 10-round average, right? That way we're consistently up to date, but we also have enough data, right? The minimum that I want to see from students is I want them to be playing 1 round of golf per week and having at least 1 practice session. If we're able to do that, that works out really well statistically. What I've seen, that gets us that 4-shot kind of average improvement. Again, average, right? Some people could be below it, some could be above it. Average. That puts us in a really good spot. If they do way more than that, jury's out on, on how much that, that really impacts them. I highly doubt in most cases that by doing way more than that it's going to have a huge impact. Um, you know, that, that said, I've got some students right now who do a phenomenal amount of golf, and, you know, so far they're, they're technically improving by like a shot per month. Is that a standard that I would expect if, you know, if you're watching this, you decide you want to sign up? No. 4 shots per year is my number, right? Charlie Woods improved by about 4.7 shots over the last 3 years. You know, if I'm in a position where I'm like 70% of Tiger Woods and all the stuff that goes along with being Tiger Woods, um, I'll take it. Yeah. So that, that's really the way that, that I look at that. Now, once we've done that, we want to systematically repeat what we've already done and then evaluate the pace, right? So this is, this is really the last step. This ties it all together, right? We've got all the frameworks here. We know the steps. We got to go all the way back up. You're like, all right, because of this, you know, within the context of our North Star, do we have to change the tournaments? Right? Obviously we're going to be looking at the same statistics, right? There's no reason to jump all over the place in statistics, right? Then we also have to say, Let's see if I can get all the way down here. Again, what are we going to change based off this new data set, right? Do we change the tournaments? Do we, you know, change the drills? Do we change the difficulty of those drills, right? There's all sorts of different things that we could do, but it's systematically repeating that process. Now here's the challenge, and here's, you know, why I think I've been able to have some success doing this with the students that I work with, is The framework that I've laid out for you applies to your child if they shoot in the 90s or if they shoot in the 60s, because the framework is just math, right? It's just math and scientific method, right? So if they're shooting in the 90s, we technically have easier things that we can do. We can cut down 3-pucks, we can cut down penalty shots, we can cut down compound errors. Those are all easy things to do. If we have a player who's shooting in the low 70s, then I pretty much only get to talk to them about making more birdies, which is mostly green reading, maybe a little bit of speed control, things along those lines, right? We're already hitting a maximum number of greens in most cases, right? We don't have scrambling issues. Well, I barely talk about scrambling anyway, just because it's not a very impactful statistic, right? We're not 3-putting, right? We're not hitting balls out of bounds, right? So our only options are make more birdies. Right? So it narrows down the things that we're going to do, but it's still within the context of the same framework here, right? And so if your child goes from shooting in the mid-90s to the mid-80s, right, the reason that feels easier is because they technically had to do things that were a little bit easier to do, right? Now obviously, if you're more inside, you know, you're not fumbling through it just on like brute force, you know exactly what to do, obviously that's going to go faster. But, um, that, that's really how this stuff ends up working out, right? It's just systematically going through and be like, oh, No more penalties, move on to the next thing, right? Maybe that thing's a little bit more difficult, but now we know we continue to move. And last piece here, evaluate the pace. Like, this stuff all has to tie together, right? It's not just, hey, here's one, you know, quick fix or whatever, because at the end of the day, we set out with what's our goal, right? We got to know what that is, and we got to evaluate, are we on pace for that goal? This tethers us to saying, hey, I'm doing the appropriate amount of effort, right? I'm not trying to go do extra stuff because I'm already way ahead of my goal. I'm consistent with the process. Or if I'm behind, I can say, okay, cool, here's what I would need to do in order to get back on track, right? If you're evaluating this every single month, it's really easy to stay on track, right? If you have a bad month over a 3-year goal, you know, 36 months, it's like, it's not really that big of a deal, right? Um, and it also gives you data on what specifically didn't work, right? And so that really is this process. And So again, for me with my students, that's why the school pacing is so helpful, because it allows us to see, okay, cool, are we actually on track, right? Also built another calculator my head was hiding to be able to say like, hey, what's our average pace? What's our current spot? What's our projection? You know, as far as like if we want to say, hey, in 7 months where would I be on this pace? Well, you'd be here, right? Just based on whatever our average numbers are. And so it allows us to calculate all this stuff and have some degree of certainty just by again doing math here. So that was a lot. Um, hopefully you enjoyed it. Hopefully you learned something. Hopefully you appreciate the perspective of just looking at this from a high conceptual level, because the, the nitty-gritty about the drills is like, that stuff's obviously valuable, but if you don't have this overarching perspective, then I can give you all the drills in the world, you're just not gonna— you're not gonna make progress because it's the wrong thing to optimize around. You got know how to ask the right questions in order to get the right answers, right? And so again, if this is something that you want help with for your child, there's a link below in the description where you can learn a little bit more about the specific details of how the program I have works. And then it looks like something that you guys want to learn more about, you'll fill out an application, make sure your child's in a spot where they're going to be successful with this, schedule a call, We'll go over it all together, make sure everything makes sense to you guys. I'm very transparent about everything that I do, so it's mostly just making sure you guys have the information that you need so you guys can make an informed decision about this process. And so again, hopefully this is valuable for you. If it was, go ahead, leave a thumbs up here. If you want to go through more of my content, I've got other playlists on the channel. Um, you subscribe to the channel, this is the type of content that I create. I try to come out with 2 videos per week here. You can do the little bell icon to get notified when those videos come out, right? And so yeah, again, hopefully this was helpful. Go check out some other videos on the channel and learn about whatever you want help learning about, whether it's tournaments, practice, data analysis, some case studies, whatever you want to see, got it for you here. And once again, if you want more, you know, direct help, again, application link is below. I'll see you in the other videos.
