The D1 Golf Timeline: When Should Your Child Start Preparing?

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be going over the Division 1 recruiting timeline and really going over when you should start seriously preparing for this. If you're new to the channel, this is all we talk about is how to help your child play Division 1 golf. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back in. This is going to be a lot of fun to go through this. So, uh, one of the things you guys will hear me talk about all the time is the importance of rankings. One of the most common questions that I get is, when should my kids start taking this seriously? And to be fair, like, there is a range. You know, some of you guys reach out to me when your child is 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years old. For the most part, you know, it— there's gonna be different variations within that, but for the most part, it's, you know, just make sure that they enjoy the game and love the game. So there's absolutely a point where you can take this, you know, too early. Um, that said, middle school tends to be about the sweet spot, where 12, 13, 14 years old is in a position where your child can really be mentally engaged, um, really implement stuff. but they also have enough time in front of them where, you know, this pacing really becomes very easy to make things work out. As you guys know, I'm always going to go into the details with you guys as far as what this actually takes. I know there's a bunch of clowns out there who will say random stuff, like I just got a comment on Facebook the other day. It was like, oh, you know, you just got to shoot low numbers in tournaments and, you know, email coaches. And, um, you know, it's just like, obviously it's a lot more complex than that. Obviously it's not easy to just go out there and shoot a bunch of red numbers. Everyone's already trying to do that. And so, you know, it's important that you have the right perspective on all this stuff. But let's just go zoom out here with me for a second to say like, where are we trying to get to? Where are we at right now? And how do we map this out? Because your child— I can't just say, hey, you need to start at this age, right? Because it depends on what your child's goals are, depends on where your child is at right now. You have your child's one of the best players in the country and they just have the goal of playing Division 1 golf broadly, and it's like, yeah, it's just like keep doing what you're doing, you know. It's like there's nothing really to like worry about. Um, on the flip side, you know, if, if your child's, you know, in 8th grade or 9th grade and they're shooting, you know, 82, you know, it's an all-hands-on-deck experience to really try and get that over the hump. So it depends on where you're at right now. You got to work with what you got. Um, and I'm going to give you guys the tools in this video to kind of think through that. So, um, this is the first page I want to go to though. Um, this is a page on your golf scoreboard. Junior Golf Scoreboard is the largest ranking index. You guys are going to see me talk about all this all the time. Rankings and Honors College Signings shows us all the players recruited back in 2017. It shows us where they're ranked in their class, what their scoring differential was, and where they got recruited to. And the way that this kind of works is just like, you know, you need a 4.0 to go to Harvard. You want to know where you need to be at as far as golf goes in order to get recruited to play Division 1 golf. You can't just close your eyes and play a bunch of tournaments and hope to God that you shoot a bunch of low numbers. You need to know like objectively where you're trying to get to. And then the next piece of this is knowing objectively where you're actually at. So I'm using an example of one of my— one of the students that I work with. He's got a scoring differential of 5.34. He's in the class of 2029, and so, you know, he's going into his freshman year, and we know objectively this is where his scoring differential is at. We started working together, he has a scoring differential of 8.41. So he's improved by— he was a little over 3 shots over the last you know, 6 months. And that's definitely above average. The average player I work with improves by about 4 shots per year. Um, but all in all, really happy with the progress. We had a little bit of a backslide here, um, just because this recent tournament, you know, that was bound to happen, to be completely honest. You know, it's got a scoring average of 79, we're bound to shoot 81, 82 every now and then. So that's when that happened, so be it. But anyway, we have clarity here now on where we're trying to get to. And, you know, which number you guys decide is like the number you want to target It's going to depend on whatever your goals are. You might want to go to a particular program where— I'll give you guys an example. I had a family recently sign up that they're really interested that I helped a player get recruited to Villanova. And that player got recruited to Villanova with like a -0.8 scoring differential, which in my book, it was not exactly where I'd want to see a player get to as far as going to their junior year. But obviously that player is stoked to go to Villanova. And this family was like very excited about the idea of being able to employ a process that was able to help a player get recruited to Villanova. And so again, for them, that was great. For me, I like to generally see a player get to at least a -1 or better to have a really good shot at getting recruited to play Division I golf at, you know, a program that they might have heard of before. One of the most common ones that I'll throw out there, one of the first players that I helped, um, got recruited to UConn with negative— I want to say it was like a -1.4 or something like that. And so, you know, that's kind of like the range that I like to see players at least get to as a minimum. But anyway, once we got our target, right, we got the scores that we want to get to, and this is going to be different for every player. If you want to get to a best player in the country, you know, aim for -10, you know. Um, if you are just trying to play Division 1 golf more broadly, I'd say aim for -1. So anyway, let's take this player here as kind of an example, and let's go ahead and use this, uh, pacing calculator that I built a little while back. And this is mostly what I use to kind of model out for myself when I'm considering taking on a player. You know, how probable is this to work out? You know, I talk about 4 shots per year as kind of an average improvement target. Um, yeah, obviously it's a little bit of kind of saying like, here's the results to expect if we work together. It's also an expectations tool. You know, when I'm working with players, it's not a small investment, and so I want to make sure that if you guys are transacting with me for that amount of money, that, you know, we have a lot of certainty around, you know, what's probable to happen. And if things go bad, like, I want you to know like what those chances are. You know, it's one of the reasons why I document, you know, how my players perform overall. And you can see all the players that I work with that are ranked and how much they've improved or not improved over this period of time. You can also compare that to the number of golf or rounds of golf that they've tracked in the last 3 months to kind of understand. It's like, hey, you know, if we play more golf on average, we get better results with this program comparatively to if we sign up and we, you know, don't play any golf at all, we don't log any rounds. Obviously it's not probable to go quite as well. for you guys. So anyway, going back to this, the first thing here, we want to set our target. Um, and so if your child isn't ranked, um, we'll do this, we'll do our own variation of this. Um, but it's easiest to do this if they're ranked. So realistically, if you don't know how to get ranked, um, just look up how to get ranked, um, or my name and like how to get ranked, and there'll be other videos that goes through this process. Um, but anyway, what's our target here? The next question is, where are we at right now? So let's just take this, you know, player's example here and use that. Yeah. All right, great. So he's going into his freshman year. So we got freshman, sophomore, junior. We got 3 years ahead of us. And if we wanted to get to a -1 scoring differential, we only need to improve by about 2 shots per year. So in this case, he's, he's very much on pace, so to speak, right? Um, now let's look at his average improvement here. So I can tell you guys right here, I'm not going to show everyone's name because, you know, some Some parents don't necessarily want to have their kids out there being shown. So I'm just going to say we're on pace to improve by about 6 shots per year. Okay. So, you know, is that necessarily going to hold up? I don't know. Yeah, not probable, but you know, maybe it kind of reverts back to the normal. What about -3? We only need to improve by 2.7 shots. What if we want to get to -5? 3.4 shots. -7? 4.1 shots. So for this player, what I can say objectively is if we just kind of hit our average numbers, like, we're going to be in a really good position. And so that's really the way that I like to, to look at this stuff. There's no one-size-fits-all to say like, oh, you need to start by this date. Depends on where you're starting right now, because at the end of the day, like, you guys don't just, you know, exist in a vacuum here. Regardless of what age your child is playing in, you have a certain set of variables that you can optimize around, right? You know, if your kid's 9 obviously they have a lot higher ceiling. There's a lot of things that they can potentially reach. And now you have the problem of how do I keep my kid mentally engaged where they enjoy the game for a long enough period of time to actually get to that end result? Comparatively to, you know, if you've got a kid who's very talented in 8th grade, has a scoring average of, you know, like I said, let's say 82. Well, now you're looking at that and saying, okay, well, they're going into 8th grade, we've got 4 years ahead of us. Let's go ahead and throw up that example here. So let's say we want to get the scoring average of 72 to 74 is kind of the range. So let's call it 74. Let's say they've got a scoring average 83. Let's say they're playing bad at about 6,500 yards, so pretty decent. And let's say they're going into 8th grade, right? So in this case, we need to improve by 2.8 shots per year. Um, and so is that realistic or not? Depends on what you're doing, right? So the average player on Junior Golf Scoreboard improves by little over a shot per year. And the real way to understand that— I'm going to go, go to the weeds for you guys for a second here, if my screen wants to load. All right, cool. So the real way to understand that is we're going to look at classes, and we're going to look at the percentile of the class. The reason we want to look at percentiles, at discounts for the kids coming into the class and leaving the class So obviously there's a number of people, um, in the class. So let's just look up here. So out of all these players, this player is in the top 1.4 percentile, right? And so in this player's case, he improved pretty substantially. It looks like he didn't play— like he was ranked and then he stopped, um, playing. So over that 5-year period of time, he improved by 12 shots, which is pretty dang good. But we can also kind of see here, you know, you got 12, 12 shots divided by 5 years, about 2.4 shots per year. So this is a pretty extreme example, but if you guys compare that to this 2.8 shots, is it realistic? Like, you can make your own judgment, um, about that. But anyway, what we would want to do is go back and say, okay, cool, well, there are— this will actually tell us, and this is probably not going to be information you're necessarily going to be able to look up. This is more on my end, but we can see that there are 3,348 players in the class of 2026 right now. Comparatively to, you know, 5 years ago there are only 270 players in his class, right? So those numbers are going to kind of skew differently. So anyway, we'd want to go to the middle of that and say, okay, cool, year over year at the 50th percentile, you know, where is the average score? And so what we would have to do here— I'm gonna have to go back so many pages, um, so I don't actually want to do that in this video. But long story short, we want to look at like what's the median player and how much is the median player improving on average. That way we're not looking at individual players to bias that number because what we'll have— not to get too nerdy— but you'll have survivorship bias, which is to say the players who are ranked for an extended period of time are going to have better average improvement than the overall average because the players who improve less than that average have a tendency to drop out. So if a player is only improving by half a shot per year, they're more probable to just quit golf because they're going to perceive that they're putting a lot of effort in and they're not improving quickly. It's kind of the easiest way to understand it. And so when I look at this number, I'm just looking at, okay, how probable is it if this player, um, to actually play Division 1 golf? So let's say, for example, this player was scoring average 75 and they were doing that at 6,800 yards and they had 4 years ahead of them. Does this player, you know, is it probable for this player to work that out? Absolutely, 100%. And so then it becomes like is that all the player wants to accomplish, right? Because if a player is already really good and they say, yeah, I just want to play Division 1 golf, like, generally, like, you don't really care about where I go, like, yeah, I guess I could, like, work hard and go to, like, a UCLA or Stanford or whatever, but, you know, honestly, I don't really— I really want to do that. I just want to play Division 1 golf broadly. Then I have no reason to say, hey, you should work with me and I'm going to help you get way better. So that doesn't make any sense, right? It's just like, hey, like, you're getting good enough results there. Um, comparatively though, You know, if you're in a situation like I just described here where, you know, we need to improve by— let's say we've only got 3 years and let's say it's 6,500 yards. Well, now we need to improve by 3.8 shots per year. And for me, I look at that as like, okay, well, if I'm working with a player, it's kind of the difference between, hey, we're going to get recruited and hey, we're not going to get recruited, just on the balance of probabilities. And again, showing my averages here, you guys can kind of see like the sum function that I'm running here where it's like, okay, out of everybody scoring, you know, the average improvement is 3.6 right now. To be fair, when I say 4, it kind of fluctuates from as low as like 3.5 to as high as about 4.5, and that just kind of depends on like a month-to-month fluctuation there. And then we can see for all the players who are tracking at least 13 rounds, so like over here documented on that, it's about 4.4 shots per year. And so the reason I like to look at that is I want players to track at least 1 round of golf per week, you know, keep things pretty simple. And in my mind, that's kind of the minimum, you know. If you're ever considering this and you don't think your child's going to do that, definitely don't sign up. Um, but assuming that your child's gonna go out there and do the work, you know, that's kind of where we're seeing it. So it's like, I think 4 is kind of a fair number to say. But a lot— again, we can see like there's variance here. There's some players who play a lot of golf, you know, just quite frankly haven't improved by that number. And that's just, you know, that's a possibility. And so I think it's important for me to be transparent with you guys about that. But anyway, when I'm, when I'm saying like, hey, where are we at right now, I can say Okay, we need to improve by this many shots per year, and that seems reasonable, or that seems unreasonable. So if I get a player who needs to improve by 6 shots per year, you better believe I'm immediately telling them like, hey, we need to overperform my average, which I'm immediately like kind of less comfortable with, right? I'm just gonna say like straight up like, hey, if we do this, just know that I have less certainty than if it was 3 shots per year. And to be fair, not every player is going to improve by 3 shots per year, but I have a lot more certainty that I can say on average it's going to work out for especially the longer we work together, the higher the probability becomes we're going to revert to the mean, we're going to revert to the average. And you guys can see here, as far as like the players that I work with, you know, some of them, they start off where they already had a very low scoring differential and they improve, you know, pretty substantially. You know, this player started at -1.9, he's only— he's already on pace to improve by like almost 4 shots, which is absurd. You know, other players start off with higher numbers and there's a bunch of players that kind of start off in the middle. And so again, It just depends on where the player's at. Um, you know, this player started off lower again. He's in a really great spot. So anyway, that's really the way to understand this. Um, for girls, it's gonna be slightly different. It's just gonna be obviously shorter yardages. And just so you guys are clear on how I'm adjusting this, for every 200 yards, it's about a shot. So we have to adjust that score and then divide that out. Um, so hopefully that makes sense. But we're thinking about like, how do How do you figure out like what the timeline should be? It's really about looking like, where am I at right now and how much time do I have in front of me? How many shots do I need to improve in order to accomplish that? And then is that realistic? And if it is realistic, do I want to aim higher or am I, am I satisfied with that? That's going to dictate the changes that I should or shouldn't make. Um, I like to approach it that way. I like to have a lot of clarity for the families that I'm working with. That way we can look at an objective scoreboard and say, hey, we're on track or not. And that's, you know, that, that's very, very helpful to be able to say like, again, hey, you know, we're 3 years out or 2 years out or a year out, then we're on track or we're not. And then they can make financial decisions about what makes the most sense for them going forward. Versus if you're just going out there and like grinding on lessons and just like hoping stuff works out and playing a bunch of random tournaments, it's like, good luck. I guess that's a way to do it. And I guess that could work, but it just doesn't seem very probable to me. So I like to look at numbers to be able to make intelligent decisions. Decisions. You guys are obviously welcome to do whatever you want to do. I hope this video is at least helpful for you guys to understand, like, if you are asking yourself, like, what is the timeline, you really need to be looking at through the prism of, like, where am I at right now, where's my child at right now, where are we trying to get to, how many shots per year do we need to improve. If you guys want me to help you through this process, you want me to tell your child exactly how to track their statistics, which tournaments to play in, what their practice should look like, and make sure that they're actually on pace and be able to accomplish that, you know, on average 4 shots per year, um, go ahead, follow the link in the description. It's got just application you can fill out. You will not be able to schedule a call unless your child is in a position where I already have a pretty decent confidence that we're gonna be able to make it work for them. Schedule that call, we'll talk, talk it over, make sure that it makes sense for them, that they're gonna be able to do the work, make sure you guys understand like everything that goes into the program, and if you guys want to move forward, then we'll be able to move forward. These You guys are just kind of getting to know me, you're not quite ready to do that yet, that's no problem at all. There's also a link below where you can get on my newsletter and get emails of, you know, videos like this and other emails that I send out educating you guys on what it takes to play division 1 golf. So hopefully you guys enjoyed. If you're new here, go ahead and subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys in the next video.