Watch This Before Your Child Plays An AJGA Event

All right, if you're watching this video, then your child might be in the position where they're considering AJGA events. And this is one of probably the biggest jumps as far as tournament play that can happen for several reasons. And you want to make sure that you're making the most of it, because if you screw this part up, you're going to have a bad time with AJGA. One of the things I see all the time is people complaining about how hard it is to get into AJGA events and all that stuff. And this video is going to break down why. Um, if you do not watch this in full, there's a good shot you're going to screw that up. So, you know, disclaimer there. If you're new to the channel, this is all we talk about is all the different ins and outs of junior golf and helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. And so we're going to be breaking it down in this video. If you guys enjoy it, go ahead, leave it a like. That way it pushes out to more people who are interested in this type of stuff. If you're new here, go ahead and subscribe. if you want stuff like this, and publish twice a week. So anyway, back into the video here. So with AJGA, usually we're looking at making this jump sometime between— you know, technically the youngest you can play AJGA is when you're 12 years old, or your child's 12 years old. Usually we start to have that conversation around 13, 14, 15. And based on when we're having that conversation, there's kind of different considerations here that we want to, you know, to pay attention to. But the first things first, let's just establish something. To play AJGA, all the best players in the country are playing AJGA. I'm over here on Junior Golf Scoreboard just picking out random players here. AJGA just littered through best players in the country, right? So can you play Division 1 golf without playing AJGA? Yes, you can. Um, is AJGA one of the easiest ways to find high-quality tournaments? On a consistent basis no matter where you are in the country? Yes, it is. For any of you guys who might think, oh well, it's hard to find tournaments in, I don't know, Iowa or, you know, Utah or places like that, AJG actually does a very good job of having events that are available in those regions, um, as well as essentially other— any other tournament, uh, venue or tournament, uh, kind of sponsor, I guess, does a good job of. So it's like a lot of those times where you don't have a lot of tournament options— we don't have a lot of ranked tournament options in general, right? So AJGA does a phenomenal job there. They do a phenomenal job of having high-level competitive fields, good golf courses. You know, they do a phenomenal job. That said, if you're having this conversation about, hey, do we play AJGA, do we not play AJGA, when do we play AJGA, this is a really important question. So Before you do that, the first thing we need to do is we need to be ranked. We want to get ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard. So I've got other videos that go into the details and the tournaments, um, playlist specifically on AJGA, um, and specifically on getting ranked, um, playing in ranked tournaments. So we need to play in a minimum of 4 ranked events in order to have a ranking on Junior Golf Scoreboard. But that's step number 1. Does not make any sense to play AJGA if we are not already ranked. And the reason for that is when we are ranked, we're going to have a very objective sense what our actual scoring average is. So if I tap on any of these players, this is not going to be public information, but you're going to be able to see it for your, for your own child. What is our scoring average? I talk to parents all the time. We have all sorts of ideas about what the scoring average is. Um, a lot of times we're not tracking this in any type of meticulous way. We have an idea of the better scores that our child shoots, but we don't necessarily have a hard and fast, like, yes, they have a scoring average of 81.3. It's like, well, you know, sometimes they play good, you know, sometimes they don't play good. I don't know what exactly it is, right? And so it's just absolutely crucial. Obviously, you'll see my other videos, I talk a lot about statistics and tracking statistics, and that stuff is really, really important to be clear because it helps us not only get clarity on what the scoring average is but also why we're shooting those scores. But that's a topic for time. We just want to have objective clarity on what are— what's our scoring average, right? The reason we want to have clarity on that is to play in AJGA events, in most cases we are going to need to qualify. We have to actually kind of earn our keep for AJGA, and I'll kind of go through the hierarchy of events here in a second. But if we go into our first AJGA event and just absolutely crap the bed, it's going to be harder to get into the next AJGA event. It's not saying it's impossible, right? But it's just, you know, we kind of shot one of our bullets and we missed, right? And so what we want to do is have an understanding of what it's going to take to be successful in that AJGA event. And we also need to see this in context of where we need to get to on junior golf scoreboard. So assume you're watching this, assume your child wants to play Division 1 golf, um, we need to have a scoring average of 72 to 74 on average. That's, that's about where we need to get to. Okay, and so the place where AJGA or more difficult tournaments in general makes sense is if you see your child getting to a scoring average of 75, 74, 73, but our scoring differential is still over zero, you know, because realistically -1 and better is where we're going to want to see Division 1. So like -7, obviously really, really good. Division 2, Division 3 kind of hangs out in that 0, 1, 2, 3 scoring differential range. And you don't need to play AJGA events to play Division 2 and Division 3, right? So if that's the question, this isn't— you know, it doesn't really matter. But if we're looking at AJGA and we're saying, hey, we want to play in this, again, technically we can't play Division 1 golf without playing AJGA. It's just a little bit more challenging, um, not so much because AJGA is tough, but because AJGA does a really good job of having high-level tournaments, and the better you get, the harder it is to find tournaments that are appropriate, right? If your child shoots 85, then pretty much any tournament that's ranked is a great tournament to play in because the main problem that they have is lowering their scores. On the flip side, if your child has a scoring average of 73, they go out and play a golf course at 6,300 yards and they're a boy, well, they're just going to shoot themselves in the foot. That's not going to help their scoring average unless they go out there and shoot like you know, 69 or 71 or something like that. Or I should say their scoring differential, not the scoring average, because this stuff gets adjusted, right? So when I'm working with students, one of the things that I'm telling them typically is, hey, if we can play these longer golf courses, especially if we have these lower scoring averages— so that brings me back to this main point— 72, 74 kind of gets to be the range where it's like, yeah, we probably need to be playing AJGA if we're not able to find generally long golf courses on average, right? So That's, that's kind of like the big picture framework. So in theory, you could push this off as long as you want. That said, if you're watching a video like this, you probably are like, hey, we want to do it, we want to get the experience. And valid, that makes sense. Here's what I recommend: you want to have a scoring average of about 77 or better before playing any AJGA, and you want to be able to have that scoring average at the length of the golf courses that they're going to have you playing. So if your child is 12, 13, 14, they're looking at Junior All-Star events, they need to have a scoring average of 77 or better at roughly 6,500 yards. That's for boys. For girls, probably closer to 5,800, somewhere in that ballpark. You might be able to tolerate it with about a shot worse for, for girls there. AJGA for girls in general is a lot less necessary, still can be beneficial, it's just not nearly as hard for girls to find difficult golf courses. So Scoring average is 77 or better at the distance we're talking about, right? If we're talking about AJGA Opens, let's say your child is 15 or 16 and they can't play in Junior All-Star events anymore, then we need to consider, okay, we're probably playing at 68 to 7,000 yards. They need to be able to have that scoring average of at least 77. Now, why is that the case? When we're new to AJGA, there are a few scenarios. We've got two main places we're going to live. Number 1, everyone— going back to AJGA homepage, actually have this little juniors how to play AJGA. This video is actually very helpful. Um, the main thing that they've got though— let's go over the tournament schedule so you guys can see the different kinds of these events. Okay, the main thing we've got is we've got Junior All-Stars, we have Opens, and we have Previews, and then we have qualifiers to get into each one of these types of events. And so you might be familiar with things like stars or exempt status or maybe AJGA Rolex rankings. And again, got other videos on the channel going through all that stuff. But here, we're primarily gonna think in terms of a preview as our starting point. So previews are really cool. You can see just all the previews that exist. Usually they're toward the beginning of the year. The purpose of a preview is to give your child an opportunity to play in an AJGA event where they don't have to qualify for it. They just automatically get exempted in if they've never played an AJGA event. As you can see right here, that's exactly what they say. Um, this is for new people, and it's based on the idea that we want to give them an opportunity to get some stars before they have these AJGA Opens and Junior All-Star events. So if your child is, you know, 13, you know, 12, 13, 14, these are great events to get ahead of the curve because the stars concept is going to help them a lot more, um, in Junior All-Star events than it will in AJGA Opens. But getting my head of myself here. So when we look at this event, what do we see right away? Course rating 73, solid, right? What we see for yardage 67, 75 yards longer, right? Now when we go into this event, looks like this event's going to happen in just a second here. How many points do we get? So we get 12 stars if we win this event. It's a 2-day event, typically is a weaker field. We get a lot of stars. It's like, relatively speaking, when people talk about like, um, performance-based, uh, merit stuff for other tournaments, usually their maximum is like 4 stars for a win on just like a non-AJGA event that gives, gives stars. So this is really good. Um, so considering that, that's the first place that we live. Why do I say, hey, we should hold off until we have that scoring average? So that we have a decent shot of winning this thing, right? So we can go into the tournament, if you got a scoring average of 76, we can overperform our average a little bit, right? We're gonna have variance on our scores, like 3 or 4 shots. So it's like, hey, if we go out there, we have a good day or a good couple of days, we could shoot 72, 74, and potentially win this event. We have 12 stars right there, boom. We're exempted into, you know, our Junior All-Star events going forward. That's a phenomenal place to be in, right? Or same thing if you want to get into AJGA Opens. Not going to help you quite as much, to be fair, but you get an auto exemption into an AJGA event. You get that on the books, you get that, you know, kind of opportunity. Doesn't make any sense to go out there and shoot 84 just for the experience as like what you expect, right? It's like you want to go in with at least a chance to shoot good. If you shoot 84, okay, fine, so be it. But we want to have the opportunity and the probability that we could at least play decent or get something for it if we overperform our average a little bit, right? So first thing we want to be looking at is previews. Do not skip ahead to playing Junior All-Star events. Do not skip ahead to playing AJJ Opens unless that's what you're forced to do, right? Let's see, no previews you can get to, it is what it is, right? But if you have the opportunity, don't shoot yourself in the foot on this one. Um, all right, cool. So continuing back here So we've got our previews taken care of. So it's like, that applies for everyone. That applies for 12 to 15-year-olds. That applies for older than 15. Everyone, first AJGA event you play in, you play in a preview. Okay, now other side of this coin, we got our qualifiers. So if your child is 15 or older, right, they can't play in the Junior All-Star events. They're gonna have to play in some qualifiers for these AJGA Opens. They might also be in a position where maybe they don't do well in the preview for the Junior All-Star category. We also have to play in a qualifier potentially. Now qualifiers don't— they aren't bad, right? Let's talk about some good things and bad things about qualifiers. So good thing, if we win it on a 1-day event, we get 4 stars. That's pretty good. You know, for most events, like, you get nothing. Right? Maybe you get ranked. Um, but, you know, 4 stars is pretty good for a single day event as far as the value of that. So that's great. Top 20% gets 2 stars. That's pretty dang good. Most of the time, these other events that are going to give you, uh, stars, they're only going to give you like 1 star for being in the top 10% for these non-HGA events that still give you HGA stars. Okay, so all in all, great ROI here. Again, you know, it looks like this one is a qualifier for this preview here. We can have scenarios where somebody doesn't get into the preview and they want to play in it, or automatically exempted and they want to play in it, that can make some sense. Um, but just as far as qualifiers go, that's what it is. It is not a ranked event though, um, so that can be a pro and a con, right? So if you have a great round, it doesn't go on your ranking. If you have a terrible round, it also doesn't go on your ranking. So it's an opportunity to earn stars and there's no real cost to it, right? So aside from obviously the financial cost, but there's no real risk in playing it. So that's kind of nice. Now You're also going to have these qualifiers again for, you know, Junior All-Star events, AJGA Opens, stuff like that, right? You can see Junior All-Star event, a little bit shorter, um, not quite as many points for how— or stars for how we finish there, but, you know, top 10%, 2 stars, it's okay. We can also go ahead here to— this is an Open, a little bit longer golf course. This is a situation again where, yeah, 4 stars. This is a situation also where, you know, in this case this is an open, but the golf course technically isn't as good as the preview we just looked at. So, you know, that, that's kind of an interesting little nuance there. But that aside, there's all sorts of other reasons where you want to play in a particular event. So we got our qualifiers, long story short. And so when we're going into those events, there's a good shot your child's going to need to shoot 75 on the high end, you know, 74, 73, 72, 71 to qualify. So if they've got a scoring average at 80 or 81, they go into that event where they're going to have to overperform their average by like 10 shots. That's not setting them up for success. I would rather see you spend the time getting them comfortable in tournaments, playing at a higher level, shooting more consistent scores. That way when they go into the event, they have a probability that they do better. Right? So that's really the way we want to be thinking about this stuff, is going into this with probabilities in mind. We're looking at this event and saying, okay, cool, how do I set myself up for success? Now, after we've got that set up, right, we've got our preview, we've got our, you know, wherever our qualifier is, at that point we're going to be eligible. We're going to be able to go into either a Junior All-Stars or Opens or some combination of the two. And both of those, to be competitive at all, you're going to need to have a scoring average that's sub-77 on average, right, to be able to make the cuts and all that stuff. So once again, it doesn't make sense to play AJGA until your child has that scoring average of better than 77. Ideally, you can push this out further, but that's what you want to have. So tying it all together here, if your child wants to play AJGA, 77 or better should be the scoring average that you're aiming 4. It can be a little bit better than that, but it starts to make a lot of sense, especially if they got a really low scoring average. You're not seeing that scoring differential move the way it should. AJGA might be a good bet as far as you're trying to get more competitive, more difficult tournaments. Um, if they have a higher scoring average than that, you just need to focus on developing their game in those ranked events, and then once they get there, then you can make that jump. Hopefully that makes sense. If this sounds complicated, this is something that you want help with, you want more specific direction, you want to be able to ask me questions like, hey, which tournament should my child play in I'm looking at these ones, which ones make more sense, how do we make sure we don't blowtorch a bunch of money? That's something you want help with. I've got a link below where you can learn a little bit more about my program, how it works, and then if you feel like you'd be a good fit for it, you can apply. Um, it'll ask you some questions, just make sure your child again is a good fit, uh, to work with me because I work with every student directly. Um, and then if you are, then you'll be able to schedule a call on my calendar, we'll be able to discuss it. So hopefully this video is at least helpful though. If you want to learn more about tournament stuff, again, I've got a playlist on this channel going through all the stuff related to play— or, uh, to tournaments. So if you want to learn more about rankings, UGA Scoreboard, all that stuff, go ahead, check that one out, and I'll see you in the next video.