The Truth About Junior Golf Development Costs (And Where Most Parents Waste Money)

What's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering the truth about junior golf development costs and where most parents waste a ton of money. If you're new to the channel here, this is all we cover. It's junior golf and how to develop to play Division 1 golf. So if you're new and you enjoy videos about that, maybe you've got a junior golfer who wants to potentially play Division 1 golf, then go ahead and hit the subscribe button to get videos like this every single week. So like I said, in this video I'm going to be talking about the major costs that I see in junior golf, the mistakes that I see parents making, and kind of how to make sure that you avoid those mistakes. So just let's hop right into it. So big picture here, a lot of parents kind of have this relatively straightforward thought process. So like, if you spend more money or things are more expensive, then you're going to get better results. You know, if you play more tournaments, if you get more lessons, those are all kind of things that are going to come up here. So, you know, one of the most common ones is going to be hourly swing lessons. It's pretty standard. And typically, one of the thoughts that a lot of parents are going to have is like, well, if I spend more time with my coach, then we're gonna get better results. And so they'll spend like weekly lessons, maybe they'll do longer weekly lessons, or maybe their coach is out of state. And so they'll travel and they'll do like days with their coach. And that's kind of their thought process of like, okay, well, if we spend more time, we're gonna get better results, right? And usually coaches are pretty decent at being able to get players results, you know, within that time period, or they're going to sell you something along the lines of, hey, you know, you're struggling right now, but it'll be better in the future, that kind of line of logic. And that can be fine. And sometimes, you know, to be clear, like, that is true. But a lot of the time, it's just BS, to be completely frank, and they're just covering their butt and saying, hey, you know, we're changing some stuff. And as long as you have confidence in them, then there's no reason that they're gonna like, really be worried about it. But it's something to avoid, it's something to be cautious of. So I'll show you guys kind of how to be aware of that a little bit later in this presentation here. But that's just like one of the biggest ones that I see is like, you know, more time more money spent equals better results. Not necessarily true. Big tournaments is another one. Not to throw them under the bus, you know, Hurricane Tour can be great, but they're one of the tours that I would say is like, can present itself as kind of like big and important. And, you know, getting your child to play Division 1 golf, odds are probably not. That'd be one example. And again, you know, talk to the guys, they're good people, and it's a great tournament circuit for your child to play in. You know, if they're just getting started, and you know, they need opportunities, they're great at that. But if they're further along in this process, then you might want to steer away from those. But it's just really being— having awareness of like, which tournaments you really want to get into, and which tournaments are not really that important, which again, I'll talk a little bit more about later. But be cautious of tournaments that just present themselves like big and important, if you don't understand kind of like the underlying things going on. Another one is mindset coach, I see this one a lot. Either it ends up being like a sports psychologist, or someone who kind of presents themselves as a mindset coach. I'm personally not a big fan of that. I do coach students on mindset, to be very clear, but a lot of the time the way that mindset is approached is a way that I don't really prefer. It's very difficult to grasp. It's not really measured. It kind of ends up being along the lines of like visualization, breathing, stuff like that. And so to be clear, like there's some really good mindset stuff out there. There's some good stuff in like the neuroscience of it. But in general, you know, if you're just spending money and just being like, hey, you know, it makes sense to have a mindset coach, because I think that's a good idea. It's something I would at least be cautious of, that you don't want to just add more stuff for the sake of having more stuff. Hopefully that makes sense. Camps, another one, college camps, specifically. A lot of the time I'll see parents where they're trying to like go to the college camp that their kid wants to go to. So hey, we want to go to ASU, we're gonna go to ASU's camp, like try and have a relationship with a coach, something like that. To be clear, camps can be a lot of fun. Coaches put a lot of work into them. They try and make them a very positive experience and they can be a really good time. As far as a recruiting methodology, it's not something that I would encourage you guys to do. It's not something I would encourage you guys to spend money on. So again, if you want to have fun, it's a great experience. But as far as like, hey, am I going to get recruited because of this? Almost certainly not. And if you do get recruited by that program, it won't be because you went to the camp. It'll be because you're actually really good at golf. That's kind of how that ends up looking. So what should you guys actually do? Um, what I would call, you know, a targeted investment. Um, that's really what is going to drive improvement. Um, that, that's where you want to think about this stuff. And so there's kind of two camps that we're going to end up being in. We're going to have the expenses dedicated to being able to score better, and we're going to have the expenses dedicated to making sure that those scores get seen. So just, just to be clear, at the outset of this, every dollar you spend should realistically have a purpose. You should be able to say, hey, I've spent this dollar with an expected outcome. And realistically, there's two expected outcomes. You should have lower scores, which you have to measure. And I've got other videos on like how to measure that and all that stuff. It should be lower scores, right? That would be instruction, right? Or it's with the goal of getting exposure. And we want to define exactly what exposure is going to look like. And so if you watch some of my other videos, you guys will know that junior golf scoreboard is generally where we're going to want to be looking at that exposure. If you're a little bit further along, maybe we're looking at Rolex rankings, but we want to have that kind of perspective on it. You know, playing in 20 tournaments does not give you more exposure than playing in 10. If those 20 tournaments are crap, or even if they're equivalent value to the 10, you might be in a situation and often would be if you simply played better golf in the 10 tournaments rather than the 20, then you're going to get, you know, you're going to be seen more favorably in the eyes of coaches recruiting and so on and so forth. Um, my favorite way to be able to define what you're spending on golf is to look at it through the lens of cost per shot. So this requires you to do a couple of things. Number 1, it requires you to define what money you've spent on coaching and just anything improvement related. So this would be swing lessons, this would be mindset coach, this would be anything in that kind of ballpark. You could adjacently say, you know, if you say, hey, I want to buy, you know, a new set of clubs, you know, for my child, or we're gonna do a club fitting. To some degree, that would be evaluated by, you know, we're gonna spend this amount of money and this is going to shave off this many shots. Now I'm not here saying, hey, you know, we should, um, you know, be playing a child, you know, junior flex shaft all the way into, you know, swinging 120 miles an hour. But realistically, if you go from swinging a junior flex shaft and you get them into, you know, let's say a stiff shaft or an extra stiff shaft depending on how fast they're swinging, you're probably going to have a significant amount of shots that drop off simply by that investment. And, you know, maybe that'll cost $800 or $1,000 to get the right driver in place. Um, but if you kind of do the math on that and say, well, you know, we saved 1 penalty shot per round Well, you guys will kind of see here in a second. It's like, that's not really that— like, that's a pretty good investment. You know, $1,000 to drop one shot, pretty good. I don't have this particular slide up here, but if you guys look it up on like Junior— or, I'm sorry, on golf.com, the average family spends about $10,000 per year on golf instruction, and the average player improves by about 1.18 shots per year on Junior Golf Scoreboard. And that's just kind of looking at averages year over year. That's about how much the average player is improving. And so if you consider that the average family spends about $8,500 per shot. Now, the other side of this equation I said you guys can figure out is how many shots has your child improved over the last year. If you guys are ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard and you knew where you were a year ago and you know where you're at now, congratulations, this will be really easy. Then you just look back and be like, what did we spend? How much did we improve? And then just divide those two numbers and that'll give you, you know, here's how much we paid per shot of improvement. And in general, if you want to be more efficient with your dollar, you want to get more shots per dollar spent. Um, it's really the simplest way to look at that. You know, when I work with my students, that's one of the ways that I like to measure what I do. Um, right now my program costs $5,000 per year. Uh, the average player improves by about 3.93 shots per year. So we're looking at about a cost per shot of about $1,200 or so. And so when I'm looking at, you know, family and saying, hey, you know, how are you going to invest your, your money? It's like, if you can do better than that, it's like, then you probably shouldn't invest, you know, in what I'm selling, you know. Um, but at the same time, it gives you a way to kind of look at things and be like, maybe something's cheaper, right? Like, you can go get a cheaper service, but does it result in more shots? Because if it does, like, fantastic, good for you. But if it doesn't, then you can kind of look at that and be like, even though it appears cheaper today, it actually cost me more over a long period of time. Or it just simply costs your child the opportunity to play want golf, or you're just kind of, you know, making things more difficult for them. The same sense, like, you could go and cheap out on like how you're going to fix your car. That doesn't mean it's not going to be a problem for you in like 2 or 3 months, just because you decided to not spend money on something. Sometimes, you know, we need to spend money upfront in order to bring those costs down overall. And so that's kind of the way to look at that is just the cost per shot concept. The next other side of this coin is really define why each tournament is being intended. So if you're just going in and playing a bunch of tournaments because like more tournaments is a good idea, we've already talked about that, not a good idea. But you want to know like, why are we playing the stuff that we're playing in? You know, some people think AJGA is expensive, and I kind of look at that as like, well, it depends on how many tournaments you're playing in, and it depends on like where you're at in your game. You know, AJGA might be, you know, fairly reasonable. You're probably going to go to a tournament, it's probably going to cost you, you know, the tournament's probably going to cost $300 or $400 to get into. You're gonna have the hotel rooms that are, you're probably going to be you know, $150, $200. Plus, if you have to fly, ideally, you're being intelligent about the way that you're picking out those tournaments. So hopefully, you can drive to some of those events. But realistically, you're probably walking away from that with a cost somewhere in the range of, you know, maybe $1,500 for a particular tournament. And that might seem like a lot. But you also have to consider like, how many tournaments are we going to play in? And let's say you played in a bunch of easy to get to non-hotel based tournaments. And they're all $400. Which I would say is very reasonable from like a, like a Hurricane Tour perspective. Let's say you're just going to play at those and you can only drive to them. Well, you know, you could load up 20 of those and you guys can do the math. I think that'd be about $8,000. Or you could have a few AJGA's, you may be playing 4 AJGA's, and that'd be about $6,000. So again, and that depends on how that travel works out. But it's important to have a perspective of like, what is going to have more impact for your child and based on where they're at. Because they might be in a situation that might be— have a scoring average of like, you know, 84. And they might hit it, you know, 220 off the tee, in which case, like, it doesn't make sense to go and try to qualify for an AJGA event. It makes sense to say, let's bring down the scores. And let's try and hit it further. So that when we do go play in an AJGA event, we know we have a high probability of being able to qualify and being able to actually compete at a high level. So that's really the way that you want to be looking through these different expenses you could, you could potentially incur. So look at it and be like, well, What is our long-term goal? And what is the most efficient use of our dollars in order to get us to that long-term goal? And so hopefully this makes sense. It's just kind of a perspective on how you should be evaluating the expenses that you choose to incur. I'll give you guys an example. One of the students that I was working with, he wanted to upgrade his clubs. And it was like, okay, cool. You know, I don't have a problem with you guys upgrading your clubs. But I was like, what specifically is going to change in your statistics as a result of doing that? It was like, well, you know, I just feel like we should. I'm just like, okay, and like maybe we do that, but let's just be clear about like, you know, if we're going to replace, let's say, a hybrid, you get a stiffer shaft, it's like in theory we should be saying, okay, I want this ball to go higher so that I can hit more greens from this particular distance, right? That's going to give us a much clearer perspective on is that investment worthwhile, because they're just asking me like, should we do it? And I was like, well, here's the perspective on it, here's how you should be looking at that. And you know, this can be universally true, you know, this doesn't have to necessarily be isolated to cost, you know, this could be looked at as time as well. It's like, okay, if I'm gonna spend this much time, how many shots is that gonna yield me for that amount of time spent on that drill? So on and so forth. Um, but again, hopefully this gives you an idea of the perspective you want to use when you say, I have these resources and here is how I want to allocate those resources. So like I said, hopefully this makes sense to you guys. If you want help doing this, if you want me to coach your junior golfer through this process personally, there'll be a link below this video where you can apply, um, to get coaching. And if you're in a situation that makes sense, then you'll be able to, to book a time to talk to me. You can look at your specific situation and actually see if it makes sense to get you guys onboarded. But hopefully this video was helpful. Hopefully this gives you guys a clearer perspective, and I'll see you in the next one.