The Majors Of Junior Golf

All right, in this video I'm going to be covering the majors of junior golf. Making this video specifically because I see so many parents who get all these marketing emails from all these different tournament organizations who essentially present themselves as like these big events. And not, not to discredit these, obviously I'm not going to talk about the specific events that get pitched out, but honestly they're just kind of nonsense marketing stuff. You know, they'll say stuff like, hey, you know, this is an invitational or whatever, and it's just like an invitation of like whoever we decided to invite, right? It's not like, hey, this is genuinely like a prestigious thing. Um, it's just something that we made up for the sake of marketing purposes, right? And so it is important that we have context of what are the best tournaments and also how do we get there, right? I've done other videos going through Rolex rankings and things like that. You can find that stuff on the channel as well. But I wanted to spend a little bit of time going through this to help you guys understand like You know, obviously we have the US Open, we have, you know, the Masters, we have the Open, um, and we have the PGA, right? It's a little bit different for the girls, but long story short, we know what that is for professional golf. You know, what is it for junior golf, right, which we aspire to be able to play in? So first thing I want to show you guys is we're going to get some clues about this. So let's go ahead and look at Miles over here. So Miles played in the Carlton Woods, the Rolex Tournament of Champions, The Junior Players, the U.S. Junior, Team TaylorMade Invitational, and Sage Valley. Spoiler alert, those are all majors. There's not one of those events that is less than the best that it can possibly be. Okay, let's continue on to Tyler. Tournament of Champions, U.S. Junior, Team TaylorMade, Sage Valley, Dustin Johnson. Dustin Johnson's still pretty dang good. It's the only one that falls out of that major category. Story. Let's look at one more. Let's look at Mason here. Junior PGA, U.S. Junior, Sage Valley, Dustin Johnson. All right, cool. You guys get the picture, right? Let me, let me see if I can find something that's a little bit different. Carlton Woods Tournament of Champions, Ping Invitational, Junior Players, Junior Worlds, Western Junior, and the Wyndham Invitational. A couple variations of some of the majors here. Long story short, you can kind of see these best players, not only are they playing, you know, Bobby Chapman, Junior PGA, Western Junior, Team TaylorMade, Scott Robertson, Sage Valley— not only do we have these low scores, these sub-72 scoring averages, but we're also playing in these major events which are hard, right? I've done some other videos where I look at the actual course ratings here You know, let's look at one of these at 227. We got a course rating of 75.6 for the Western Junior, right? We look at, you know, Carl— or, uh, Team TaylorMade Invitational, we got us a course rating of 74.6, right? We look at Sage Valley here, we got a course rating of 75.75, right? And so they're going out there and shooting scores on golf courses that are that hard. How do we actually find this? Like, how do I actually know what this is? You go to AJGA, go to rankings. This is also part of why I always reference the players who are ranked very highly on Junior Golf Scoreboard will be typically ranked highly on Rolex rankings, right? All the like major events, stuff like that, they're going to be ranked on both. But Junior Golf Scoreboard's a lot broader. That's why I recommend that if your child is younger, that's why they need to be ranked there first, because AJGA is a little bit more difficult Okay, and so what we're going to do is we're going to scroll down here and we're going to look at these 225-point events. Okay, so we're looking at these— these are the majors of junior golf. We can kind of think of that as the 225-point events here. And so we've got, as you guys saw, Carlton Woods, Fortinet, um, Fortinet, Fortinet, I don't know how to say that. Um, Team TaylorMade Invitational, Nelly Invitational, Wyndham Invitational is one of those unique ones that I showed you guys. Rolex Girls, Ralph Lauren— didn't see that one. Junior Players, Ninja Invitational, Hilton Grand Vacations, Anika Invitational, Ping Invitational, Rolex Tournament Champions. Okay, you also got the dates for all these here. Then we've got the non-AJGA events. So these also reference Sage Valley, one of the most prestigious— this is kind of like the Masters of, um, of junior golf here. Very, very difficult to get into this one. Western Junior, U.S. Girls, and the U.S. Junior Boys, Junior PGA Girls, Junior PGA. So those are the majors. That's the top tier. That's the crème de la crème, right? That's the best. Now we've got some other events. These are non-225 events, but they're still really, really good. So you'll see a couple of familiar faces there. Dustin Johnson World Junior, worth 100 points. Jones Cup, didn't see that one. That's a really good one though. You guys can explore this page as well for yourselves, um, just kind of see— you get some ideas of some of the best, best events in the country. Um, now here's what I'll tell you. Some of these events matter, right? Some of these events matter a lot. These events are not worth being overly concerned about unless your child is going into them with essentially the intent to win them. That's— and I have— let me just go ahead and make clear why. So let's see a little, little spreadsheet here. So this is the point values that they earn based off of where they finish in these particular events, right? If they— so I haven't gone over this, but an AJGA Open is worth 40 points. If they win an AJGA Open, they get 40 points. In order to get 40 points at a 225 event, they need to finish 7th or better. That's how good— so if they play in the US Junior, they need to finish 7th or better, have that be worth more than winning an AJGA Open. Think about that, right? Which one of those do you think is harder, right? Some random AJGA Open or top 7 in the US Junior? In my estimation— I could be wrong on this— in my estimation, it's a lot easier to win an AJGA event than it would be to top 7 in the US Junior. Top 7 is, is very, very impressive, right? And so you can kind of see that this balloons here at the top. Right? And so this isn't to discourage you from having your child, you know, aspire to play in these events, but that's just kind of recognition of like the people who are playing in these events, they have the intent of winning these events, and it isn't just something that they made up, right? So when we look at somebody like— let's go back to Miles here— when we look at Miles, he has a scoring average that is better than everybody else's by— let's see how much— By about a shot. And so when Miles goes into a tournament, he can reasonably say, hey, if I just play my game, um, and everyone else plays their game, I, I should have a decent shot at winning this event a decent percentage of the time, right? And so he's won 2 out of 6 events, so he's got whatever, a 33% win rate on his events, you know, over the last 12 months. Um, and so And so you can actually go in there and say that. It's a— I want to make that caveat clear though, because I see junior golfers going to these events, they think, oh, I want to win that. It's like, no, that's something that you earn, right? So I talk about this with the students that I work with as well. When we talk about going into an AJGA event and we have the intention of getting a top 5, ideally we want to be in a position where we've got a scoring average of like 72. Because if we go into the scoring average of 72, we should even par for 3 days. High probability that we're going to get our AJGA exam status, right? And that's happened numerous times for me working with students where we go ahead and we get our AJGA exam status. Like, that's what that looks like. And so oftentimes we get this bad mindset that says, oh, we need to rise to the occasion, right? That's kind of like a collective thing that, you know, we have in our heads. We need to rise to the occasion, that we're able to rise to the occasion. And so I prefer a different saying. I forget exactly where I heard this, but we do not rise to the occasion, we essentially sink to the level of our training, right? We sink to the level that is kind of our minimum acceptable. And so when I'm working with a student, I'm really focused on we need to develop the game's average to the point where we can go into an event and say, I just want to execute on my average, and know that if you do that you've got a reasonable probability of winning the event. And it's like, that's really the key to unlocking this stuff. That's how we actually make progress. We say, here's what my average is, I want to lift my average so that I have a higher and higher probability of winning the tournaments that I'm playing in. So I'm always committed to playing to my average to the best of my ability, knowing that I'm going to have variation, I'm going to have fluctuation on that, but always want to be committed to, to that number. And again, once you get in the position where you're, you know, like, well, or Tyler. Tyler can go into that event and say, hey, if Miles has a couple of bad days and I just happen to have a couple of good days, I can win this event, right? And so you look at the US Junior, finished 3rd. Where did Miles finish? Again, I haven't looked at this ahead of time. So Miles finished 8th. Okay, so when we think about that, technically Tyler won, even though is that because he's better than Miles? I don't know. Yeah, I don't, I don't know these players well enough to actually have an opinion on something like that. They're both amazing players. Um, and so that's really worth thinking about here. But anyway, going back to these, these are really the, the tournaments you want to end up playing in if your child's goal is, I want to be the best player in the country. And so until they get there, um You know, we want to stay focused on whatever is more local to their particular issues. Once you get in that place where they're one of the top-ranked players in their class, makes a lot of sense to start aiming to play in these events and getting invited to these particular events. And I'll cover how to actually get into these events technically in just a second here, but I also want to set up some aspirational events for you if you're watching this. So the Western Junior, your child can absolutely apply for that if they've got a reasonable junior golf scoreboard ranking in their class. Makes all the sense in the world to say, hey, we're gonna go ahead and shoot our shot. Worst case, they say no, right? That one makes a lot of sense, especially if they're in a position where their scores are kind of 72 to 74 on average and you guys want to potentially travel, or maybe it's close to you guys. The US Junior, well worth it to try to qualify for this event. A lot of times it will be counted for their ranking, and then also if they get in, it's well worth it to actually go to the US Junior, right? That's a worthwhile travel event. Right? Same thing for the Junior PGA. There's gonna be a lot of qualifiers that are available, well worth it to try to qualify and to go to that event. And so those two, the U.S. Junior and the Junior PGA, are both ones that I would highly recommend trying to qualify for and, you know, trying to get into. Okay, there are some other stuff that's a little bit more local, right? So Jones Cup, is in Georgia. If your child is already— has a scoring average of that 72 to 74, then it makes sense to try to play in this, right? It doesn't make sense if you're in California and the budget's a little bit tighter, right? You don't want to travel across the country. You got plenty of stuff in your backyard. There's no reason to travel all the way across this country just playing something, right? Dustin Johnson World Junior, same thing. If you're in South Carolina, if you're on the East Coast, makes a lot of sense to go there. If you're in California, it doesn't make any sense. right? Again, continuing down, you know, the list here, I want to say we've got, yeah, Junior Worlds for boys and girls. You're in California, boom, this is your event. You want to try and qualify for this. This is one of those big ones here. We want to take what's given to us here. If you guys are in the South, Bubba Conley makes a lot of sense to go there, right? If you're in the, you know, Mid-Atlantic, if you're in, you know, kind of like that Georgia area, right? Makes a lot of sense to try and go to some of these events. Long story short though, you're going to have accessibility to all these events just based on where you're at in the country. You don't need to play in all of them. When I'm showing you guys rankings over here, I'm not showing you players who played in all of these. All right, let's just look at another random one. Carlton Woods, Jones Cup, Tournament of Champions, PING Junior Players, Junior PGA, US Junior, couple— one random AJGA, TaylorMade Invitational, another random AJGA. Looks like they're in his backyard too. right? Fresno, Sacramento, okay? One random World Tour thing, didn't even do good, but maybe he's just looking at it like, hey, you know, let me just like warm up the game. Another random AJGA, another random AJGA, right? Scoring average is about 70, right? Pretty dang good. Obviously he's in a phenomenal spot and, you know, he's getting recruited to Pepperdine, pretty good program there. Um, long story short, hope this helps you guys understand these are the actual big events. If you are ever curious about like, hey, is this event actually a big event? Just go to this page, go to just like rankings, scroll down and look at whether or not there's a point value assigned to it. If there's a point value assigned to an Invitational, odds are it's a real invitation. If there is not, that's just like, am I— doesn't exist, it's just marketing. Okay, hopefully that is helpful. Now last little piece here, AJGA criteria. So I gotta search to get to this page, it's a little bit hard to find. If you're wondering how do you get into those specific events Here's some of the, uh, whatever is this actually. Okay, so we've got to go back. AJGA Invitational criteria. Okay, it has a criteria of what you need to do for each one of these events. So top 64 based on Rolex rankings as of December 2nd will be included for Carlton Woods, and then they have a method for solving the additional spots. Each one of these, they've got whatever their methodology is for picking out these specific events. And then if I scroll all the way down here, yep. Additional spots will be allocated to local supporters. Um, will not accept any requests or relay connections. These spots, directly or indirectly, attempts to solicit are strongly discouraged. All right, cool. So they're going to pick it from local stuff here. Yeah, it's a little bit more squishy here. Um, subsequent invitations will be sent to current revision of AJJ rankings, which will be reflected in this policy, blah blah blah, right? So you can kind of see here what's your path. You need to be ranked really, really good on Rolex rankings, whereas where this stuff starts to make a lot of sense. The caveat here, again, with all this, how do you actually do this? Right, well, you need to play in the events that are local to you, and you need to do as well as possible. Hopefully we're close to winning some of those events, right? That's really the way we want to look at this. And so if we have some of the stuff that's bigger that's local, we want to prioritize that, but we don't need to travel all over the country in order to try and find that stuff. Okay, so hopefully this gives you a little bit clearer perspective on what those actual majors are. If you're getting marketing emails at this point in the year about, hey, you need to sign up for this Invitational, do you actually have an understanding of, hey, this is a real Invitational versus like the This is just marketing, right? Which is just the same as any other ranked event on Junior Golf Scoreboard. That's really the way you guys want to be looking at this. So again, hopefully this clears up the process a little bit. If you want to learn more stuff about what Division 1 recruiting looks like, what AJGA looks like, what the ranking system looks like, all that stuff, there's other videos on the channel. You can go check that out. If you want me to personally guide you through this entire process and work with your child and tell them exactly what they need to do, whether they need to worry about this right now, maybe they need to work about some other stuff based on whatever their goals are, where you guys are at in the country, all that type of stuff. It's application below, you can fill that out, make sure your child's in a good spot, then we'll go ahead and talk it over, make sure it makes sense for them. Um, without further ado though, hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you liked it, leave us a thumbs up, and I'll see you guys in the next one.