The REAL Reason Your Junior Golfer's Tournament Scores Aren't Improving

What is going on, guys? In today's video, I'm going to be going over the real reason why your junior golfer's tournament scores aren't improving. If you're new to the channel, um, this is what I cover every single day. We go over junior golf development and ultimately how to play Division 1 golf. So if that sounds like something that you're interested in, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. And if you enjoyed this video today, please go ahead and leave a like. So like I said, we're gonna be jumping into the real reason why your junior golfer's tournament scores aren't improving. Now, the reason I wanted to cover this is because there are so many junior golfers who put in so much work in their practice. They are grinding with their coach, they're doing all this stuff. But their tournament scores aren't going down, or their tournament scores aren't improving as much as they could be. Or they're all over the place. One tournament they play really good, the next tournament they play really, really poorly. And it's kind of all over the place. And it kind of feels like this whack-a-mole thing with their game, whereas one, you know, one week they play one week they play bad, they don't really know why it's happening. So I wanted to kind of break that down in this video of why that happens and what you can do to actually fix it. So kind of the foundational thing here, this is kind of the common thing I see, is more lessons don't, don't mean lower scores. They don't equal lower scores. And that's really important to kind of wrap your head around because there's so many parents that they think that the reason that their child isn't improving as much as they could be is because we're not seeing our coach frequently enough. And while, yep, sure, that could be the thing if you're, if you've never seen a coach before, or, you know, something along those lines, that's possible. But that said, I've seen plenty of very, very successful junior golfers who don't even work with a coach. So it's not necessarily logical to say, well, if I could see my coach every single day, that's far superior to weekly, or, you know, monthly, or whatever the case may be. So that's just kind of like the foundational thing that I want to kind of address here. And then I want to kind of like break this down. So improvement requires learning, right? It seems like a relatively like banal like statement here. Obviously improvement requires learning, but let's kind of break down what that actually looks like in practice. Learning requires changed behavior. So I can go and I can, I can consume all this information. But if I do the same thing over and over again, did I really learn? So in the same way, and I see this all the time with junior golfers going to lessons, is I can go out and I can get this lesson, but if my swing doesn't change, if my game doesn't change in any material way, can I really make the, the statement that I have learned something? Odds are, is kind of no, you can't, because you're just doing the same thing. And so yeah, the coach might've said some new stuff, or they might have said stuff differently. But at the end of the day, like, if you're not improving, if you're not changing things, then you're not really learning. And if you're not really learning, you're not really going to improve, right? You might just kind of get this kind of, you know, over time you might just get sharper, you might make better decisions, which is probably closer to what happens for most players. Um, you know, the average player only improves by about 1.18 shots per year, so it makes sense that, you know, you might just be able to increase your, you know, improve your scoring average by about a shot, just purely on higher golf IQ over the course of a year. But just, that's something to consider here. Now, in order to change behavior, it also requires time, right? So if I say, hey, go do this thing, and I give you a piece of input, it takes time for you to be able to understand that, process it, try and do it, fail at doing it, adjust, and figure out what's going to work best for you, figure out how to incorporate that. So as an example, like, you might have a lesson with a coach, or your child might have the lesson with their coach, and in that initial lesson they get them doing something that is technically correct, or they feel like it's kind of the direction they want you to go in, but your child is struggling to execute on that at high level, right? The issue there is they need time in order to implement that change, right? So they've changed this thing and they need time to be able to integrate that. And a lot of the time what I end up seeing is junior golfers get the same lesson over and over and over again. And part of that is because there's so much, there's so many lessons that they're getting and the coach just can't say the same thing over and over and over again. Cause then it'd be like, well, you know, why are we coming back for lessons? And I kind of disagree with the business model of kind of like hourly lessons here. The reality is you probably need to drill on the same thing and you, also probably need to be hearing a lot of the same words over and over and over again. And a lot of coaches just aren't going to have that level of organization for a player to say, hey, same thing, same thing, same thing, same thing. But very often that's the case is what's necessary is we need to be working on the same thing for a long period of time in order to have any meaningful long-term changes. Now, the other thing that I really want to address here is Adding more information is going to slow down the learning process. So what do I mean by that? If you go and you see your coach and they tell you, hey, I want you to turn your hips more in the backswing, right? You might have, you know, to have some time to figure out like, okay, what does that feel like? Maybe give you different tools to be like, okay, I want you to go in front of the mirror and do that. So you come back a week later and I say, I want your trail leg to straighten more in the backswing. Well, even if my objective with that is, hey, I want your hips to turn, if I don't make that clear to the student and the student doesn't necessarily understand that, they're going to interpret that as two different pieces of information. I have to turn my hips more and I have to straighten my right leg, right? Which is just even like on a purely like execution basis when they go out there on the golf course trying to do something. Instead of one thought, now they have two thoughts. And when you start layering up You might have a swing lesson where you have like 3 things to think about. Next lesson, we do 3 slightly different things. They could even be the correct thing, but you got to account for how much this player is having to account for more things that they're trying to do. And that is very, very challenging for them. And so this is kind of the reason why I would say that if you are trying to help your child score better in tournaments and they're doing all these lessons, but they're not getting better, this is probably a big part of it is it's, it's more rather than better. So hopefully that makes sense. So what do I actually recommend doing instead of this process? So my biggest thing you guys are probably going to see, if you've seen some of my other videos, you know, this is going to be, you know, one of my main things is data-driven practice. If you want your practice to be effective, you gotta be using data. You gotta actually measure what's going on. And that's kind of like, you know, first bullet here. Your improvement needs to be measured. If we just go out there, we do a bunch of stuff, and we're like, I feel like I'm doing better. It's like, that's great. You don't wanna trust your feelings realistically. This isn't Star Wars. You wanna be able to actually know, like, am I moving toward my goal or not? And this doesn't matter if, you know, if you're 10, if you're 11 or 12, if you're 16, if you have an objective, say I want to get to this scoring level in this period of time, like we got to know, like, are we doing that? Because if we're just going out there and we're working hard and we're like, I feel like I'm flushing on the driving range, it's like, okay, well, you know, you hit 8 balls and, you know, 6 of them are flushed and 2 of them weren't that good and you forgot about them instantly. It's like, depending on how bad those were, like on the golf course, like those 2 shots could be double bogeys. And you know, now you're 4 over, you're probably not too thrilled about being 4 over, over, you know, 8 shots, right? And so it's important to to really just say like, okay, where are we at right now? You know, a real simple way to do this is be like, where are you at in tournaments right now? Where's your child at as a scoring average right now in tournaments? Because if you know that, then you can say, all right, well, we're going to do XYZ in practice. And then we're going to measure our tournament scores improving on a rolling basis, right? Not just like, is the next tournament good? Like, that's not enough data. But is the next series of tournaments that we're playing, is it improving that average? Or is it getting worse? And that's gonna— and then we can drill down subsets, and we'll do other videos specifically on those drill downs. But we can drill down the subset and say, okay, cool, if it's getting better, great. But if it's getting worse, like, what specific area do we need to focus in on? Like, why is it worse? Is it because our 3-putting got worse? Is it because our penalties off the tee got worse? Like, where's the disconnect so that we can design the practice around that? And just to kind of another point here, practice for practice's sake isn't helpful. One of the most common things that I see when I talk to families is, hey, you know, we're practicing, you know, 4 hours a day every single day. And I'm like, okay, like, when are we, when are we playing golf? Oh, I play like 5 holes on the weekend, like, you know, get out and play a few holes. And it's kind of like, all right, the whole point of practice is to shoot lower scores. And ultimately, the whole point of all this, if we're talking about playing Division 1 golf, we're talking about playing competitive golf. For all of you might be like, oh, the main point is like having fun. Yeah, I get that. But fun is actually improving and achieving high goals. So the main point of this is to perform better in tournaments. So if our main point is perform better in tournaments, well, our practice should advance that goal. We can't play in tournaments every single day. So that's not realistic. What's our kind of like next proximate indicator, right? Well, how are we playing? You know, just when we play around golf, like an actual round of golf for a score. And this is super important. If you've got a junior golfer and, you know, they are going out there and they're just playing like 5 holes, hitting like 3 balls on every single shot or something like that, that's not a good indicator for them of how, you know, what level of golf they play. Because the reality is, if I could go back through my rounds and just say, oh, I'm just not going to count a couple of shots. Like, that's going to be a significant amount of shots off my round. It's not just like a couple shots, because usually the way golf goes, for especially for better players, is there's a couple holes you completely screw up and everything else is pretty much fine. It'll be around par. Then there's a couple holes you completely botch and you make a triple or quadruple or something stupid like that. And then, you know, in a tournament, you look back in the round and be like, huh, why'd I shoot 79? And in practice I shoot, you know, 71. It's like, because their 71s are bullshit. Um, excuse my language, but And that's kind of like the reality of it. So when we're talking about practice, we want to be able to say like, okay, I'm going to practice this specific area. My 3-putting is bad, so I'm going to work on my lag putting because that's what my data is telling me that is poor. So I'm going to go out there, I'm going to do that. Now I'm going to go play around a golf and I'm going to see if my lag putting improved. And I'm also going to see how everything else is going because we can't just go in there and say, oh, I'm only going to work on putting. It's like, all right, what if you get really good at putting and then your tee shot falls apart? You gotta have all of it going all the time. But again, we want practice to fit in there to say, okay, cool. We're keeping the things sharp that need to stay sharp. And we're also making sure that we're improving the areas that need to be improved. Now, the other thing that is so important here is data-driven practice can be optimized. Like I just kind of described here, if we go out there and we're doing a particular set of drills, you know, we're saying, hey, we're working on this lag putting drill. We go out there, we play around golf. And it, you know, we play several rounds of golf and our lag putting is not improving. Then we could say objectively, hey, that, that lag putting drill is not working or something's wrong here. We just go out there and be like, I'm working really hard, but it's not, I'm not getting results. It's like, what are we supposed to do? You know, we don't have any measurement going on. We don't know what we were trying to do. Or like, I want to get better putting. Right. So it's so important that if we're able to say, hey, you know, this is the metric, this is how we're measuring to see if it works. If it's not working, we can really dig in and be like, alright, what's going on here? Especially if we have performance metrics to know, it's like, hey, here's the kind of standard that we should be expecting in practice based on where you're at. And here's how it should correlate to the performance, you know, on the golf course and in tournaments, we can actually really dial in that and say, okay, what do we need to adjust and improve? The next piece here is data-driven practice often takes less time. Because if you just go out there and you're like, I'm just gonna work hard, you know, Tiger Woods method of just go out there and grind, right? Again, I would put 4-hour, 5-hour, 6-hour practice sessions in this bucket. If we're practicing every single day, I'd put it in this bucket. Most junior golfers, most human beings cannot focus for that long. You can't do something for 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 hours and do really good work. That's just not really possible. And I'm sure you guys understand that there's a limit to how much focus that we can put into things. And so the same thing is true for practice and for golf. And so when we actually consider that, there's a lot of other things that go into learning as well. And I'm not going to get into a digression over like the neuroscience behind this stuff. But the reality is, a big part of learning is actually takes place during rest, Right? So if you're going to sleep, that's really, really important. So if you're just grinding all the time, you're working really hard, but you're neglecting your sleep or you're neglecting the other things that cause you to learn. Well, we're kind of short-circuiting ourselves. An example that I would give is if you want to get really strong in the gym, you wouldn't want to go to the gym every single day, 6 hours a day. You'd probably, like, there's a decent chance that you would hurt yourself and you'd also probably not really be able to grow that much muscle because in order to grow muscle, you have to tear the muscle. And then allow the muscle to regrow by giving it the right food. In the same sense, when you go out and practice, you need to go out there, actually focus on the thing that needs to be improved. So let's just stick with the lag putting as an example. We need to do enough of that where we can stay focused, probably closer to like 20 minutes of lag putting, and then be able to say, okay, I'm going to take a break now. I'm going to go home, I'm going to rest, I'm going to sleep, and then I'm going to come back and go out there and play. That's going to facilitate that learning process a lot better. And you're going to be able to see the long-term progress in the data, say, hey, my lag putting is improving. So we don't have to have this like existential anxiety every time we go out there of like, am I getting better? I don't know. It's like you can actually just see objectively, be like, hey, you're getting better. Be like, doesn't feel like that. Be like, okay, cool. Good to know. You're still getting better. Like, it doesn't matter how it feels. You know, maybe we can, you know, tweak some other stuff, or we can kind of like interrogate that, that feeling. But at the end of the day, we can say objectively like, hey, you're trying to achieve this goal and you're improving by this much. And, you know, based on kind of what you're doing right now, you should get there. So hopefully this makes sense and helps you guys kind of understand a little bit better that a lot of the time, if your child is struggling with their performance, they're grinding really hard, they're going to tons and tons of lessons. That's not really the issue. The issue is the way that the— you're approaching the game, the way that you're practicing. Isn't as effective as it could be. So I'd really encourage you guys, watch my other videos, but really go into the data-driven stuff. Start tracking your rounds, start tracking your stats, and then build a practice around the areas that need to improve the most. So hopefully that makes sense. Now, that said, if you guys want help— isn't a super long pitch, but if you guys want help, there's a link below where you can learn a little bit more about what I do with my junior golfers that I work with. And how I can help your junior golfer if you guys are a good fit, kind of depending on where you're at. I can't work with everyone. If you're watching this and you're just like, um, you're not a junior golfer, won't be a good fit for you. But anyway, if you do have a junior golfer between 10 and 16 who wants to play Division 1 golf, then really encourage you to check out the link below. Like I said, I'll tell you a little more about the program and how I'm able to get kids results. But hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. If you did, go ahead and leave a like, and if you're new to the channel, go ahead and subscribe. I hope you guys enjoyed it, and I'll see you guys in the next one.