The Math Behind Playing Division 1 Golf

What's going on, guys? Uh, in today's video, I'm going to be going over the big picture of how to get recruited to play Division 1 golf. If you're new to the channel, uh, this is all that we cover on this channel. This is solely dedicated to helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. We don't try, you know, cover all the different things that go into, you know, golf and so on. This is really for people who want the, you know, inside track essentially to play Division 1 golf. So if you found it, you're in the right spot. If you're returning subscriber, welcome back to the channel. Um, this is gonna be a good one for you guys. So, um, if you enjoyed this video, go ahead and leave a like. If you're new to the channel, go ahead and subscribe if you want to see some more stuff like this. I've got a webinar coming up, it's the first live webinar that I've done in like a year where I'm going to be going over a lot of this stuff in more detail. So if you enjoy this video, definitely click below, there will be a link to register for that training. But let's go ahead and jump right into it for you guys. So When we think about recruiting, a lot of the time I think you might be in this position where you are investing in lessons, you're investing in, you know, equipment for your child, you're playing in tournaments, and you know, they might have a goal of playing Division 1 golf, they might have a goal of playing college golf, but you're not really that clear on exactly what they're going to need to do in order to get there. You understand they need to get better. Maybe you think that they need to go get connections with coaches. Maybe you think they need to win tournaments. Maybe they need to get a better coach. Whatever the case may be, you probably have some ideas about it, but it's probably pretty foggy. And so that's the first place that I really like to start when I'm, you know, introducing somebody to this topic. You know, it's like, hey, we're working really hard, but we're not really clear. And in my experience, clarity is the most important thing. If we're not clear what we're trying to do, it's impossible to execute on it. At the same time, if we are clear on it, it becomes a lot easier for us to make decisions about what we should be doing. So that's why I want to kind of start off in this video here. So I am a big advocate of rankings. I'm a big advocate of rankings for a bunch reasons. Um, one of those though, to be clear, is not to see where your child is versus everybody else. That is not a statistic or a piece of information that I really value. Um, so if you're concerned about like, oh hey, I don't want my kid to use, you know, 12 comparing themselves to other 12-year-olds, that is not the headspace you want to be in. Because we'll get into it a little bit in this video, get into it a ton in the webinar. That's not really what we want to be looking at. We just want to understand like where is your child and what are their goals and how big is that gap and are we moving toward it? That— those are really the big things that we want to talk about here. And so I'll use some examples to kind of, um, map this out for you guys. So anyway, Junior Golf Scoreboard gives us an objective measurement of where your child is at with tournaments that are ranked. They can be viewed by college coaches. And so when you go to a coach and you say, hey, you should give my kid a look, or I think my kid should be getting offers, they can compare and be like, okay, well, you think your kid's so special. Like, what about all these other kids? And you can have an understanding of like, where does my kid stack up versus all the other kids? How have they been progressing? Are they on track to reach their goals? So without further ado, let's start off with kind of the first thing here. This handy-dandy page called College Signings, and it is fantastic. When I first learned about this tool, I was, I was blown away. Um, but this is for boys and girls. This goes all the way back to 2017, and so it will show you which players got recruited to Division I programs, and you'll just be able to reverse engineer. Say it's like— and also it'll show you where they're ranked in their class. To be very clear here, neither of those things are super important. What is very valuable is this scoring differential at date of signing information. So you'll see like -6, -5, whatever. On its own doesn't really tell you a ton if you don't know how to use it, but it is our starting point here. So if you say, hey, you know, my kid wants to go to Stanford, we can sort by— you know, I'm using an extreme example here, to be clear, um, but you know, let's take Stanford. My kid wants to go Stanford. Now you've got one player who got recruited this past year at a -7.5 scoring differential and another one who got recruited at -3. All right. So yeah, those are both California kids, you know, kind of take that with a grain of salt here, but we can also do this research over multiple years. So you can kind of develop a profile of what Stanford expects in the same way. If you apply to a particular college, you know what GPA they're expecting. If they expect a 3.75 and you apply with a 3.2, you know what's going to happen, right? Like miracles could happen, right? You could have a really compelling essay, but you don't bet on it. And in the same way, this is true for playing Division I golf. Um, just caveat here, uh, grades are very important for golf. So if you guys aren't already taking that seriously, just a little aside here, take grades seriously. You want to aim for a 4.0. If you're not 4.0, you know, 3.75. If you can't get that, like at least a 3.5. You gotta give yourself the best chance there. Anyway, once you've got this information, you got— and to be clear, you guys can view this webpage. You don't have to, you know, just take my word for it. You can do your own research here. Um, you can say, all right, here's where we want to go. And here's what's going to be required. You know, we need to have this scoring differential. Now, how do we do that? Well, first things first, you want to be able to find your child and have them be ranked. I'll show you how to get ranked in just a second. Let's just say your class of 2029, for example here. And so, you know, let's, let's actually just pull up one of my students. Uh, let's pull up Moses. All right, cool. So Moses, class of 2029. And so Moses, you can see here before I go into that, has a scoring differential of 6.15. Again, still doesn't tell us a ton, but tells us a little bit more. So let's say, for example, um, Moses wanted to go to Stanford. I don't know that that's necessarily where Moses wants to go, but just for example, Moses wants to go to Stanford. And let's say based on what we just looked at, you probably need to have a scoring differential of like -5. That would be a realistic target here. So let's go take our handy-dandy calculator. -5 plus— or whatever it would be, it would actually be 5 plus 6.15. So we need to improve by 11.15 shots over the distance between now and when Moses is getting recruited. So if we just do math again, we're in 2025, that's 20— he's gonna get, um, he's gonna be graduating in 2029. So we got 4 years here, 3 to 4 years depending on how you want to look at that. So let's just say conservative, let's say you've got 3 years. So we got 11.15 shots to get to a -5 scoring differential, and we've got 3 years to do it. So we need to improve by 3.71 shots per year to have a reasonable probability of being able to play at a program like Stanford, assuming we have the 4.0, we have everything else that goes along with that. And I'll just jump back here real quick just so you guys can again see this. Not only because you guys might be saying like, well, you know, it doesn't guarantee you're going to go to Stanford— this is very true, um, but it puts you in the ballpark, just, just to be fair. What it does do though, is if you've got a -5 scoring differential, you're in this universe. You've got UNC, Louisiana, Baylor, Michigan, Texas Tech, Auburn, Iowa, LSU, UNLV, Oklahoma. You've got really good programs. Um, Harvard. You have the opportunity to be able to be recruited by those programs. And there's a decent probability as well you can be in any of these programs if maybe one of these is more appealing to you. Um, so that's, that's really the way to look at this. But long story short, hopefully you guys are kind of tracking with me here. The value in this is being able to say, okay, cool, here's where I want to go and here's where I'm at today, and how big is that gap and how many of these shots do I need to improve? Hopefully you guys are with me so far on that. Now let's dig into How do we improve this number, which is the most important part here? Actually, bar that, before I go there, let me talk about how to get you guys ranked. Because, you know, if you're watching this, you're like, that's cool, my kid's not ranked, I don't understand how to do this. That's gonna be the next important piece. So we're gonna go over here, tournaments and results, search for tournaments. And what we're going to do is you're going to look up your state So let's just say, for example, um, now let's just take an easy one. Do, do, do. I mean, to be honest, it doesn't matter. Let's say you play golf in Oregon. You want to find tournaments, let's say March, April, May. And I always go here. I don't trust when a website or a tournament site says like, oh, we're ranked. You're like, maybe you are, maybe you're not. But if the ranking source says you're ranked, you're probably ranked. So let's go ahead and look at this. We've got Oregon. We want to look at 2025 and search. Beautiful. So what we're going to see here is we've got all the tournaments right now so far that are posted that are ranked in Oregon. And so if we wanted to say, how do we get ranked? You need to play in at least 4 tournaments that are ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard in order to have a ranking. So if your child isn't ranked, you want to go through this process to find like, okay, You know, what, what state are we in? What are the tournaments that are literally right in our backyard that we can play to get ranked? And if you're going to invest money in tournaments, these are the ones you should invest the money in, not just some random thing you heard about or got an email about or whatever. I know everyone— we all get the marketing emails, but this is to help you understand like what's marketing and what's like actually going to move your child closer to their goals. So you want to do this. So again, these are a couple of tournaments that are options here. So this would be like if you're in Portland. I'm from there, so I, I know, um, great situation. Bend, another amazing one. So these are two great options. Um, we've got another couple here, and we've got another couple here. So in this case, we've got three tournaments. I guarantee you there's gonna be more than three ranked tournaments in Portland or in Oregon. But again, this is how you want to start thinking these things through, because you only need to have four over the course of a year. right? So that's kind of like a big picture thing. A lot of the time you might think, oh, we need to play more events. And, you know, to be fair, a player like Moses, he's playing in a lot of events. But look at this other player, he's only played in 8 events. And technically, you know, fair enough, he's a year older, but he's got a better scoring differential. Um, if we just look at like boys overall, the same thing is true for girls, to be clear. A lot of these players, they only got 6, you know, 6 tournaments they played in. Let's just go 2020 6, so it's maybe a little bit more fair. Um, you know, once again, you know, 10, 10 tournaments, 5 tournaments— that, to be fair, that kid's out of the country— um, 7 tournaments, 9 tournaments. So you don't need to play in tons of tournaments in order to get ranked. You only need to play in 4. So if you're not sure how to get ranked though, you do this process. You want to figure out like what those are. Any tournaments you're playing in that are not ranked Why are you doing it like that? And there are legitimate reasons to do it, but you need to seriously ask yourself that question. Because if you're at all serious about playing college golf, like, you need to know where you're at. Like, hopefully that at least makes this clear to you. Because let's imagine you say, Connor, I'm not gonna listen to you here. I'm just gonna go play in whatever tournaments because I think that that's better. That's great. But what happens when you say, okay, well, now we're 15 or 16, we finally have to take what Connor said seriously, and we go play in our tournaments, we get ranked, and we have scoring differential 2. You didn't know that scoring differential 2 might be pretty damn good, you know, relatively speaking. Like, you might be a scratch golfer, you might be a +1 handicap, have a scoring differential of 2, like, what? And now you just shot yourself in the foot because you didn't have an objective metric, and now you have a short runway of like, how do I bring the scores down? It's not a good place to be in. I'm not saying you can't fix that. I'm not saying that I haven't helped players do that. But if you gave me the option of like Player A in like Moses's situation where you're in like 7th grade, 8th grade, and we've got a long runway versus a player who, you know, is a junior and they have a scoring differential of 3, one's a lot easier than the other to accomplish. And like I said, to be fair, I've done both, but I want to make things easy as possible for you guys. So hopefully that's clear. If you're not sure, you know, just go find within your state, go do that. Um, continuing here, let's go back to tracking and like measuring this stuff. So we've got a scoring differential of 6. Everyone can see that. I'm not 100% sure if you just having— I believe just by having a membership to Junior Golf Scoreboard, you're going to be able to see the scoring average, um, and the tournaments. I don't think you're gonna be able to see other players and stuff, just, just to be clear here. Anyway, You've got your scoring average, which is part of this equation, and you've got the difficulty of the tournaments played. That's your scoring average. It's that simple. I can get into like the nitty-gritty technical stuff, but this is what you guys need to understand. Um, so what you want to be looking at here is in general, the players who are going to get recruited to play Division 1 golf tend to have a scoring average around 72 to 74. Coincidentally, that also tends to be where you're going to be able to qualify for most events, and you're going to be able to do things like get top 5s in AJGA events. Because if you have a scoring average of, let's say, 73, you're probably going to have a variance on that. For all you math nerds, standard deviation. You're probably gonna have a variance on that of maybe like 3 or 4 shots, probably 4 realistically. So if you've got a scoring average of 73, it means we're shooting 69 or better at least 20% of the time— I'm trying to do this off top of my head— at least 20% of the time, we're going to be, you know, very successful doing that. Um, that, that's kind of like the context here. So, you know, Moses being at 76.9, there's a lever that I can pull which says like make tournaments harder. And you guys will notice here, sort of working with Moses, I want to say it was in July, and you can see we jumped up in distance on tournaments. Didn't really hurt scores too much though. So that's part of this improvement. He's improved by like 2 shots since we started working together, 2, 2.5, something like that. Um, but you can see shorter golf course, longer golf course, game held up. There's a few things that we worked on in order to do that. Um, but nonetheless, that's one of the levers you can pull— harder tournaments. Now the other place you can be in is lower scores. That's definitely another lever that I want to see happen here. You know, I want to see this 76.9 come down to 74, 73, 72. Because that's really the sweet spot that we want to go for. Because check this, if you've got that scoring average 73, then I know I can plop you in an AJGA event and you're going to qualify no problem. So when you're thinking to yourself, well, how do I qualify for an AJGA event? You have good scores, you shoot low scores. If you have a scoring average of 77, that's kind of like my minimum to try and qualify. But if you have a scoring average of 81, you don't have a high probability of qualifying for an AJGA event. It's like, it could happen, but you're gonna put a lot of pressure on yourself, and it's just— it's low probability. You're gonna have to shoot like 75, 74, 73, especially if it's your first one. Good luck. You want to have that, that scar tissue built up from like when you're younger. So you can start earlier, the better. Give yourself a longer runway, and you have clarity for a longer period of time. So now, if you guys needed to take an extreme example, you know, if you need to do something crazy, you need to save the world, you want more time to do it or less time? I'd rather have more time. I'd rather have more time where I actually know what the hell is going on, as opposed to a very short period of time where things are kind of confusing and now I'm kind of figuring stuff out and I've got all these emotions about it. So I can sit back, look, and say, okay, let's plan this out and be intelligent about it. I'd much rather do that. Anyway, those are your two levers. You can play harder tournaments, and to be clear, harder tournaments means a better course rating. So harder— so this number here, if you guys are looking at a scorecard, usually it's gonna be like 72, 73, 74. You don't want to play in the ones that are like course rating 69. You know, if your kid's 10, then like that's a different story. But you know, if you're 13, 14, 15, you want to play Division 1 golf, you ought to be looking for, you know, tournaments with a scoring, you know, right, at least 72, ideally 73, 74, 75. Some of those are harder to get into, um, and you're going to progressively work through those. You know, a lot of the tournaments that, you know, players are playing in, like the, um, junior players course rating 75, 76, 77. It's ridiculous, right? You can't just say, I want to go play that golf course. You gotta, you gotta do this at the same time. You can't have people ask me, they're like, hey, what tournament, you know, how do I get the best tournaments in the country? It's like, you play your way into them. So it's, it's not just scoring average or tournaments, it's both. And it's incrementally making the tournaments difficult, more difficult as the scoring average goes down, and understanding, okay, we made the golf course longer What did that do to us? What did that do for us, right? Because we can have different scenarios here. Let's say you already hit the ball really far. Well, you can sustain golf scores on a longer golf course, no problem, because you probably hit your— you know, let's say we go from hitting kind of awkward 60-yard shots that you're kind of making a mess of, so now you're hitting 100-yard shots. You might actually play better, you know, statistically speaking, versus you might have another player where they don't hit it very far off the tee but they're still pretty accurate on their approach shots and it doesn't hurt them. Like there's all sorts of scenarios here, and this is not a stats video, um, as, as far as like going into the weeds of that, I've got other videos that do that. Um, but that, that's just one way that you can kind of like model this out. The other side of this is bringing the scores down, uh, bringing the scoring average down, tracking this number and seeing it go down. And the reason I like tracking this is because this, this number doesn't have anything to do with excuses. You know, you might be in a situation where you say, oh, we're going through a swing change. Oh, it justifies the poor scores. Oh, we're going through X, Y, or Z. It's like, why are you playing tournaments then if you're not going to score? Why are you actually, you know, why are you competing if you're not trying to solve for that problem? What are you doing? Why are you doing that? That— those are like serious questions you need to ask. And, you know, if you've got a coach saying, hey, you just got to go out there and, you know, shoot 85 a bunch of times and just try and like work through it, it's like, why would you do that in practice? Why wouldn't you do that in unranked tournaments? Like, that's the way to think through these problems here, because you might have a scenario where it's like justifiable. Be like, hey, I need to work through this, I need to get under the gun. Do it, do it in the Friday gambling game, do it in a one-day event, don't do it in ranked events. So you want to be strategic about how you're moving through this stuff, uh, and that's what I help kids do. Like, when I, when I'm coaching them, it's, it's like really game planning. Like, what do we do specifically? Looking into this and looking at the statistics behind this is like Is this a 3-putting issue? Is this a greens and regulation issue? Is this we hit too many penalty balls off the tee? And within those issues, like, okay, we hit too many penalties off the tee. Why do we miss it left? Do we miss it right? What tendencies do we have in our swing? Are we practicing that area effectively? All right, now what do we need to be doing differently? What tweaks do we need to make week over week over week over week? So that's what I do with my students. There'll be an application below this video if you want to check that out, or if you're interested in potentially getting coaching like that. Otherwise, like I said, I'm gonna be going in much more detail in all this stuff on a live webinar they'll be hosting this month. So if you're interested in that, there'll also be a link below this video to register for that if you wanted to check that out. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. Hope you guys learned something about how to help your child position themselves to play Division 1 golf. Um, go ahead and leave any questions you have in the, the comments section. I always get back to those. And leave a like if you enjoyed the video. All right, talk to you guys soon.