The Tournament Mistake Costing Parents Thousands

All right, what is going on guys? In today's video I'm going to be talking about tournament selection. It's one of the most important things that you can really consider when you're trying to help your child play Division 1 golf. Not because it's the most complicated or even the most kind of important or difficult or challenging, but because it's literally like ground zero. It's step one. If you screw this up, everything else is not going to go well for you. And so this is one of the biggest mistakes I see parents make, so I want to make a video to go over and, uh, cover this. So if you're new to the channel, welcome in. This is all we talk about specifically is helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. And if you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. This is gonna be a good one. It's gonna be a good reminder for all you guys. So tournaments are really, really important when you wanna help your child play Division 1 golf. And there's a lot of confusion that parents have around which tournaments should my child be playing in? And there is no one straight answer. So I can't just tell you, hey, you should go play AJGA events. Because odds are your child probably doesn't need to play AJGA events unless they do. So let's go through and let's, let's build up this, this kind of framework here. So this starts with a presumption that your child is already competing or wanting to compete in junior golf events, right? If they're just getting started, then obviously a different set of, uh, circumstances, and this probably isn't the channel for you. But presuming your child is 10, 11, 12, 13 years old or maybe they're even older, you know, maybe 15, 16. They're older than 16, they're going to like senior year or anything like that. Another thing I talk about are going to be helpful for you. But anyway, if you're kind of in that sweet spot range, then, you know, it's really important. So the foundation here, the starting point is let's get ranked, because if we're ranked, then we're going to have perspective on where we're trying to get to, right? And so how do we actually go about getting ranked? Well, and where do we want to get ranked? We want to get ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. And so you can go, uh, tournaments and results, search for tournaments, and you can go to literally your state. So let's just, you know, keep it easy, California. And let's just look at tournaments in August. And you're gonna be able to see all the ranked tournaments in your state that you can play in. And you can just pick out the ones that make the most sense for you. There's no magic to this. This is just go through there and pick out the ones that make the most sense. And get a ranking. And so you need to play in 4 at a minimum to be ranked. Playing in more tournaments does not benefit you in any way, aside from obviously more reps for your child, but it doesn't improve their ranking or anything like that. So that's really just step 1, is literally just go to this— go to this page. You guys, this is for free. So go to this page and pick tournaments that are ranked, schedule those out, and before you know it, your child will actually be ranked. Now, you might run into a problem. You might be in a state where all the tournaments that are ranked you have to qualify to get into. And that can be kind of challenging. It can be kind of frustrating, but here's the thing. You just need to move the goalposts back and say, okay, cool. Now we have clarity on what we actually need to do. And if we need to shoot lower scores, we know where we're aspiring to get to in order to be able to track those rounds. Um, so hopefully that makes sense to everyone, but this is like really the foundation. The reason this is so valuable is, you know, let's just go ahead and look at these rankings here and let's, you know, go back a bit and let's say, you're looking at class of 2031, like way off from college golf, right? And let's, you know, go ahead and say let's go find something like, I don't know, toward— not, not toward the middle, like toward the longer end of this. So let's say we're in this like 17 or 16 or 15 scoring differential range, like that's where we're at. Well, why is that valuable? Like why, why would it even matter to, to be, to be ranked? It's because allows you to see where you're at relative to the ultimate goal. So if you guys are watching this, you want to play Division I golf, there's another page here, College Signings, that shows us all the players that were recruited back in 2017. And this is for boys and girls. It shows us where they're ranked in their class, but more importantly, it shows us what their scoring differential was and where they got recruited. So if you want to go to a particular program, it makes a lot of sense to say, hey— or if you just want to play Division I more broadly, you want to say like, hey, What scoring differential would I like to have when I'm getting recruited so that I can go to the program that I want to go to? It's actually, you know, it's pretty dang simple. So then we can say, okay, we need to be there realistically by about junior year. You know, there's no one definitive date where everyone gets recruited. There's obviously June 15th, the sophomore year, where programs start reaching out. There's no definitive date where those, those offers are actually going to be finalized. It's going to be different for every player, but we need to know, okay, we're trying to get there. Where are we at today? How many years do we have? And then how many shots per year do we need to improve by in order to get there? That's the foundation of playing Division 1 golf. Like, seriously, like, if you don't have that math, I don't care how much work you put into it. It's like you're working on the wrong stuff. You're not playing the right tournaments. It's just like, dude, you're, you're done. Like, you don't have a starting point here. Um, but once you have that, then you can start to say, is this realistic? Because depending on where you're at, very honestly, like, it might not be realistic. And so I have a link below this video to apply to work with me. I also have a video that kind of goes over my overall process if you want to take a look at that. Um, and you can go through that process. There's an application you can apply, and if your child is not within the scoring average, um, and age where it makes sense that they're probable to play Division 1 golf, I will not, I will not accept them as a student. So I only work with players who have a realistic shot, and that means that there's a, there's an outcome here where you try to play in these events and it doesn't work out for you, or, you know, you're not on pace, your child's not on pace, right? And so, you know, why is that important? Well, it's important from a resource management perspective, like an expectation management perspective. If you've got a child who's a sophomore and they've got a scoring differential of 10 What's the probability they're going to play Division 1 golf? It's basically zero. It's not going to happen. And so I'm not going to be able to help you do that, and nobody else is going to be able to help you do that either. It's just not realistic. Players don't improve by 12 shots in a year. Um, the average player that I work with improves by about 4 shots per year, and that's excessive. Like, that's a lot. That's about how much Charlie Woods has improved over the last 3 years. So when you consider that compared to the average player improving by about a shot per year, because is a lot better. Yeah. And you want to be able to work with a player, especially on the younger end when we're like, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14. It just increases the probability that's gonna work out for them. I can take a player who's, you know, 14 years old with, you know, scoring average in the 80s, be able to help them play Division 1 golf at a pretty high probability just because we've got enough time. If you come to me when they're 16, you wait until the last minute, it's not gonna go very well. You might not even be able to, you know, have the opportunity, right? Um, And some of you guys might be on the kind of like the, the edge. I just talked to a family earlier today where they're going into junior year and he's got a scoring differential of 2.5, right on the edge. Is it possible? Yeah, it's definitely possible. You can get to a negative 1.5 scoring differential, you know, going into senior year. It's not going to get him recruited, most likely. Yeah, but not the same thing as going to Stanford, not the same thing as going to UCLA. So there's different options that are available to you. Based off of, you know, where you end up starting in this process. So that's obviously why I encourage you, especially if you're watching this and your child is 12, 13, 14, go ahead, click the link below and apply so you can get guidance on this. So you know actually what we need to be doing. You need to know which tournaments to be playing and, and where you need to be focused. Because sometimes people, they look at this and they say, hey, we do— we just need to play better tournaments. And it might actually be the case. Sometimes your child actually just needs to shoot better scores. And I've got a million videos on this channel about how to do that. Um, but it's being able to zoom out, look at all the different variables and go from here's where we're trying to get to, here's where we're at right now. Here's how big that gap is. Here's how many shots we need to improve per year. And then zoom into it and say, do the tournaments need to get harder or the scores need to come down? And if the scores need to come down, okay, what part of the scores or what skill is lacking that we can improve? That's gonna be the easiest to improve. That's gonna lower the scores as fast as possible? Or if it's tournaments, which specific tournaments should we be playing in and how should we be thinking about that? And then even going beyond that of like, once we've identified skills that need to improve, what specific practice do we do to improve those skills? How do we measure that it's working in a reasonable time period? So we're not just being like, oh, I'm grinding for 6 months hoping things work out. We have a consistent, um, measurement of whether or not the things that we're doing are actually causing improvement or not. And so hopefully that makes sense. It's just kind of a foundation. So if that's something you guys want help with, don't hesitate on this. Like, just apply, figure it out. And again, I will reject your application if, if it's not possible, so you don't have to worry about that. I'm only going to sell you stuff if I can actually help you. So aside from all that, once we're ranked, we start to have to pull these two things in concert here. We want to play in harder tournaments in general, right? So if we can play longer tournaments, generally that's going to be a good thing. Right? So if your child can hit the ball further, it's generally going to benefit them for playing longer golf courses. Um, the other side of this coin though is knowing, do we need to really be concerned about the tournament difficulty and making that harder, or do we need scores to come down? What's going to have the biggest impact on the scoring differential? And so it's not always, uh, tournaments or scoring average. Sometimes it's both. Most of the times I'm working with players, to be fair, like we're doing both at the same time. Um, that's mostly because with tournaments they don't have to think. I can just tell you guys which tournaments to play in. Um, but we need to be able to see that because if we're in a situation where we say, hey, you know, we feel like the golf courses are pretty hard, but we got a scoring average of, let's say, 85. Well, our biggest concern is let's just bring the scoring average down because that's going to be very easy to do. Um, versus if we got a scoring average of 72 and, you know, we've got a scoring differential of, I don't know, zero, well then it makes a lot more sense to say let's make the tournaments harder because it's hard to go from a 72 to a 71 scoring average. And even if we go from 72 to 71, it doesn't really do that much for your overall ranking, right? It's not going to improve that much if we go from a 0 to a -1. Like, that's not that much improvement, and that's not that different. But like, going from a 72 to a 71 is a big scoring average jump. And so we don't want to be in that game. But most of the time, most of you guys watching this video, your child might be shooting somewhere between like 84 and like 78, most likely. Maybe if they're good, they're shooting like 76 or 75. So you just need to know what that is, and you need to be able to use that strategically to say, okay, where do we need to put our focus? Because, you know, odds are they're probably in a situation where it's not that they need to play more tournaments or harder tournaments, they just need to practice more effectively, and they need to get more out of their time, and they need to see more consistent improvement. Um, you know, is oftentimes the easiest thing. That's also like the easiest thing for, for you from a resource perspective, because if you're traveling all over the country, it's extremely stressful, right? Um, versus If you're in a position where, you know, it's just like, hey, we just need to shoot lower scores, and in order to do that, we need to cut down 3-putts. In order to do that, our lag putting needs to be sharper. And in order to do that, we're doing these specific drills, and we're measuring it, we're tracking our statistics, and, you know, that's trending down. Okay, cool. Like, that keeps life really, really easy. And so it doesn't even have to be this, like, crazy thing for your child either. It's like they know exactly what they need to do. Aside from that though, there eventually gets to be a range where you do have to start thinking about this. You start having to be a little bit more deliberate about tournaments. And this does not mean you start thinking about college golf recruiting later. You still want to be preparing for this even your child is shooting 90 or 85 or whatever, if that's realistically the goal. But the range that we really need to start thinking about is about 77. 77 is kind of like the sweet spot. The reason I say 77 is because once we're in a scoring average of 77, the average junior golfer has a standard deviation on their scores of roughly 4, so plus or minus 4 shots, which means if you shoot 77 on average you could in theory shoot 73 or better about 28% of the time. And so when we consider that— is that actually math? So we got— no, so about 14% of the time, but we're going to shoot better than 77 about 50% of the time. So anyway, apologies for the math problems here, but once we consider that, it's like, okay, if we go into an AJGA event, it's at least possible that we're going to be able to qualify. It's not that crazy if you have a scoring average of 77 that we could shoot 74. Not that insane, especially if you give yourself opportunities at multiple AJGA events. This is one of the common mistakes I see with AJGA events, is the parents think like, oh, my child tried to get into one, we didn't get in, and like, that was frustrating. It's like, okay, well, try and get in through like 8, and then you'll get into like 3. And make sure that you're applying for the right events, because if you're playing for events across the country, like, you're not gonna have the same privilege that if you're there like in your state. right, or close to you, right? Like, that's just part of like how the AJGA priority works, and I've got other videos to go over that stuff. Um, but again, 77 is kind of the range you want to be in. You want to have that as an objective measurement, not like an opinion, but you want to be able to see on Junior Golf Scoreboard, get a scoring average about 77. And then from there, be able to say, okay, cool, we're gonna start playing some AJGA events. Hopefully, if you start young enough— 12, 13, 14— you're gonna be able to play in Junior All-Star events. It kind of gets you a little bit more comfortable with that rather than have to go straight into the Opens. A lot easier to qualify for those events, a lot easier to have enough stars to be able to get into those events. But if you end up in the AJJ Open, same thing's going to be reasonable though. You know, if you shoot 73, 74, you should be able to qualify for a lot of those. Sometimes you'll need to shoot 72, but I've seen scores as bad as like 77 or 78 qualify as well. So, um, anyway, that's, that's when it becomes worth it to start considering those things. Now once you are in the AJGAs. And once you're playing in these better tournaments, once you're playing in longer yardages, um, that's the point where, you know, we have like the next level of the game open up, right? And this— from this point on, you know, it's like if you're playing in good AJGA events, if you're playing in some solid, you know, tournaments locally, you know, if you've got a boy, you know, maybe they're playing at 68, 7,000 yards, 7,200 yards on average, um You know, for girls, probably closer to 5,800, 6,000 yards. Girls, this is definitely a little bit easier for. Then the, the question becomes like, how do we become one of the best players in the country? Like, what are those players doing? What are the top 50, you know, top 100 players doing? And we start to look at, okay, how do we get AJGA exam status? And how do we play in some of these invitationals? You see stuff like the Team TaylorMade Invitational or, um, You know, Sage Valley is kind of an extreme example. Um, you know, but all, all these different educational events. And so that really comes down to you're gonna have to be able to shoot, or your child's gonna have to be able to shoot really good scores in tournaments in general. And so they're gonna be able to go into an AJGA event or need to go into an AJGA event and you'll be able to shoot par on average, you know, for 3 days and have a decent probability of— if you do that 5 different times on average, you might be able to come out with exempt status. Once, you know, that, that's kind of the way to look at it. Rather than saying I need to go into this event top 5, you don't have any control over that. But if you give yourself, you know, low enough scores on average and enough attempts, it's prob— becomes probable that that's going to work out for you. You're in top 5 or top 3 for girls. And so that's really the way to look at all these things. So it's, it's saying how do we make sure that we're fishing in the right spots? Because like high school golf, totally irrelevant, doesn't, doesn't matter whatsoever. Um, so we need to get ranked We need to lower the scoring average. Once the scoring average is low enough, we need to play AJGA, or we need to play some of these other bigger events. And I'm not going to list out every single one of those, um, you know, obviously I'm going to be a lot more detailed for all the students that I'm working with and literally tell you guys here's which events make sense for you. But within the context of a free YouTube video, it doesn't make a lot of sense to do that. But I'll just, you know, just give you guys a few examples, like Junior Amateur, qualifying for that. Junior PGA is another one. Um, you know, beyond that, you know, if you're East Coasters, you know, Scott Robertson Memorial is a great one. Um, long, long list of different events, but it's like we start to play in some of those like bigger events, and again, while we're playing those bigger events, golf courses got harder. We need to make sure that our scores hold or realistically continue to lower. We got to know what, you know, what we need to be working on. And at the end of the day, and let's tie this whole thing up, we want to go back to the North Star of where is the scoring differential, which direction is it moving? Because if it's improving consistently, we know we're doing the right stuff. And if it's improving really fast consistently, we know we're doing really the right stuff. And so, like I said, when I'm working with players, I see that number improve by about 4 shots per year. So that's a combination of making the golf courses harder and helping the player lower their scores. It's— those two things have to go together. So when you guys are watching this video, Yes, tournaments are important. Yes, playing the right ones matter. Don't go and think, you know, one-day tournaments or high school golf matters. I know everyone loves like US Kids. If it's not ranked, who cares? Um, like, to be fair, like, some of those events are fun, but like, at the end of the day, if the goal is Division 1, that's what I'm helping you guys do. Get ranked so you know where you're at versus whatever the target is, and then map out, okay, how much do we need to improve year over year, and is that realistic? And then what do you need to do specifically? So once again, I've got several resource links below this video where you can apply if you want to work with me directly and have me do all this stuff for your child so you guys don't have to think. You don't have to go through and consume a million YouTube videos from me. I can just look at your situation and tell you literally what to do. Otherwise, you can hop on my newsletter and, you know, learn from me in a slower way, um, where again, I'll still get these videos out every single week, but it's just going to be slower. And so it just depends on, on the level of result you guys want to get and how fast you want to get it. A lot of the times though, you guys don't have a ton of time, and so the better you can get support earlier the better. So hopefully this video is helpful for you guys. Just understand where you should be looking for tournaments, which tournaments you should be playing in, and when you need to kind of start leveling up. And, um, yeah, hopefully it helps you guys have a little bit more clarity about what it actually takes to play Division 1 golf. So if you're new here, go ahead and subscribe, leave a like if you enjoyed the video, and I'll see you guys in the next one.