What D1 Coaches ACTUALLY Look For (Most Parents Get This Wrong)

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering what Division I coaches actually look for, and most parents get this completely wrong. It's not your fault if you're in this bucket. That's why I wanted to make this video, is because it's really easy to get this wrong. A lot of kind of bad information is out there as far as what coaches are actually looking for, and it's actually not as complicated as you might think. So we're going to go ahead and walk you through that in this video today. If you enjoyed the video today, obviously give it a like, and if you're new to the channel and you want to learn more about how to help your child play Division 1 golf, then go ahead and subscribe to the channel. But without further ado, let's go ahead and jump right into this. So the first thing that I want to address with this is kind of the most common misconceptions, you know, things and kind of like mistakes that a lot of parents make that prevents them from being successful. So the first thing is coaches, you know, thinking that coaches care about, you know, good-looking swing mechanics. Now I want to kind of disclose here, obviously, like if you've got a great-looking golf swing, it's like, sure, you know, coaches are gonna take that into consideration. That looks good. Um, but it's not gonna override the other things that we're gonna talk about in this video. It doesn't, it's not a get outta jail free card. If you don't have the other stuff, it doesn't really matter. So a good, good looking golf swing or good swing mechanics, it's more like icing on the cake than it is really a, you know, hey, I'm gonna go recruit that player cuz their swing looks good. Um, also just, you know, full disclosure here, the odds are that whatever your perspective is, as far as like having a good looking golf swing, it's like, it's from your perspective is most likely not a golf expert. And the reality is what your swing looks like, it just has very little impact on this overall process. You might think a swing looks very good. Uh, another coach might be, you know, maybe more sophisticated and say, hey, I've got, I see all these technical problems going on here. So it's not really something to be too invested in. Uh, the next one is the, this kind of idea that coaches care about potential. Um, they really don't. Coaches, um, coaches don't care about like where you could be in a few years. They're looking at players that can actually contribute on their team right now. You know, they're not looking for, you know, multi-years out. And even if they are, the probability that, you know, it's going to be your child is relatively low. And also beyond all of that, if you're trying to devise a strategy for your child to be successful, don't, don't build that around being the edge case. You want to build that as just what are the fundamentals that coaches are actually going to look for. So here's what they're actually going to look for. Here's kind of like the truth, if you will. Coaches want players that can score. Like, that is fundamentally what they're looking for. If your child cannot score— and I'll show you what that looks like in just a second here— but if they're not able to score at a high level, then they're not going to get recruited. And to the degree that they're able to score at a high level is going to kind of dictate what type of program is going to recruit them. If they're one of the best players in the country, you know, they shoot great scores, really hard tournaments, you know, they might get recruited to like a UCLA or something like that. But if they're not, you know, if they're shooting 80 on average and they're just playing in tournaments, they're not going to get recruited at all. They're not going to play D3 or anything. Um, you know, maybe D3 kind of passes, you know, maybe for girls, um, at that scoring average. But, you know, for the most part, D3 is gonna be like 77 as a scoring average with, you know, decent tournaments. But anyway, I digress. Let's go ahead and jump into this just so you have clarity on what that actually looks like, because this is really, really important. So we're going to go to Junior Golf Scoreboard. Junior Golf Scoreboard is the largest index of rankings for junior golfers. There's other comparables with like, uh, AJGA Rolex rankings and Golfweek. Um, they're just not quite as comprehensive as CoachNow— or sorry, not as CoachNow— as Junior Golf Scoreboard. And they're going to be kind of, um, not, not as helpful. And so, you know, when coaches are looking at, you know, which players are going to recruit, Junior Golf Scoreboard is going to be something they're going to refer back to. If your child is is ranked very, very well on Junior Golf Scoreboard, that's going to be a very good opener for you when you reach out to a potential coach. You can say, hey, you know, my kid's ranked 50th in their class or 25th in their class or 100th in their class. Then, you know, the coach is gonna pay attention to that and they're gonna ask all those other subsequent questions that you might think that they really care about. I also wanna disclose here, they're gonna care about grades, they're gonna care about SAT scores. You wanna make sure that that's in order, but I'm here to help you guys really with golf stuff. So let's look at this page. Everyone can attend this or go to this page. Let's go to rankings and honors on Junior Golf Scoreboard and go to college signings. Once you've got that page, you want to sort by class ranking, and then you can look at all the players have been recruited all the way back to 2017. You can also do the same thing, you know, between boys and girls. So if you've got a boy, you've got a girl, you can just look and say, all right, what is required to play at the programs that we think we'd like to play at? You can also filter by school. So if there's a particular school you guys want to look for, you can find it that way. But here's the kind of thing to understand. You'll see on the right here, it's by class ranking. So it's going to say, all right, here's where this player went this past year and here's where they're ranked in their class, you know. And then you're also going to see this number over here, which is called scoring differential. All scoring differential really is, is the relationship between the player's average score and the difficulty of the tournaments that they played in. So if they played really tough tournaments and they shoot really well on that, they're gonna have a better scoring differential than if they shot the exact same scores but they played on, you know, you know, easier golf courses. Hopefully that's fairly straightforward. Now, for the most part, when we look at the players who are going to get recruited, you'll notice here, the better the scoring differential, the better the program is that's recruiting them, and the better they're ranked overall in their class. That's how this works. So again, you know, if your child is, you know, has a very high scoring differential, you know, kind of like these players here, it's gonna be harder to get recruited. And, you know, if we go all the way up, It's like, sure, you can probably find a placement company that'll get you somewhere. Most of the time, and really the point of this channel is to help you guys play the program you would like to play at, or help your child get to the program that they would like to play at, and reverse engineer what is going to be required in order to do that. So hopefully that makes sense. Now let's dig into what actually the scoring differential is made up of. The scoring differential is made up of the scoring average here and the difficulty of the tournaments. So you guys can see here, these are the tournaments that this player has played in that are ranked, and I'll show you guys how to find that in just a second here. And this is a scoring average, right? And so that's kind of what we can see for this player. That's why his scoring differential is -6.77. It's not like he's shooting, you know, 7 under par or something like that, but, you know, he's playing golf courses that are about 7,000 yards. They're really difficult, and you've got the junior players The Junior PGA, Rolex Tournament of Champions. I mean, this is a stacked schedule here. And as a result of that, he's going to Texas, right? The other thing that is worth kind of noticing here, for those of you who are kind of wondering like, okay, like how long does this take to really accomplish this? This is this player's kind of trend report here. It looks like they changed up the backend here. It actually, it's a little bit more useful. But this is where he was at December 17th as of recording this video. Now, if we go back a year and say, where was he last December? Well, he's only improved by about 0.6, 0.7 shots. So when you hear me talk about the average player improves by 1.18 shots per year, this is kind of how that works out. Let's look at the prior year. He might have had a jump in there. Let's see. Okay, cool. So it was a decent jump from, you know, just under 4 shots to, you know, 6 point— you know, where are we at— 6.19 shots, right? So he's improved maybe about 2 shots, maybe 2.5 shots there. Um, prior to that one, I didn't look at these ahead of time either. Um, let's say 2.7, 3.7. Go all the way back to around here. 0.89, somewhere in that ballpark. So, you know, he had a decent jump here. He improved by about 3 shots, you know, that prior year. And let's go back again from December to that prior December here. 1.95, jumped up to— yeah, so here you improve about 2 shots. So you guys can kind of see here, if you're trying to help your child improve It's not very real. I mean, this is one of the best players in the country. Like, if they're improving, you know, by an average amount, they're gonna improve by about a shot, maybe 2 shots per year. But if you have this information, you can actually reverse engineer what they'll need to do to accomplish their goals. So you just do the math and be like, all right, cool. If they're ranked, where are they ranked? What's their scoring differential right now? And how much do they need to improve to be able to play at whichever one of these programs they want to play at and give themselves a high probability of that happening. So hopefully that makes sense. Once you have that number, then you can just divide that by the number of years between where they're at right now and essentially the end of their junior year. So you can count their junior year as a year, but let's say that they were, you know, a freshman in high school, or let's just say a little bit more realistic here. Let's say they're a 7th grader, right? So we've got 7th grade, 8th grade, 9th grade, 10th grade, 11th grade, we've got 5 years, you've got whatever that gap is. And you can just do the math. And if you're getting a number that's like 2, 3, you know, 4 shots per year, that should kind of tell you, hey, if we're going to do this, we better get on our horse. You know, if you're in a situation where you're just like, yeah, we only have to improve by half a shot a year, congratulations, you're in a good spot. But if you're not in that spot, then yeah, that's something to be aware of. And just kind of understand that if you're going to accomplish the goals, you're probably gonna have to approach things a little bit differently than, than other kids might have to. So hopefully, hopefully this is making sense of where you can simply just reverse engineer this process to achieve whatever goals you want to achieve. The last piece here that I'll show you guys is if you're saying, hey, you know, my kid's not ranked yet, what do I need to do in order to make that happen? You go to tournament results, tournaments and results, go to search tournaments. And then you'll be able to find, you know, any tournaments that you want to play in, in your particular area. So you just pull up your state, filter down to the months you want to look at, filter down to the year you want to look at, and then you'll just see all the different tournaments that are ranked. And you just pick from that as far as being the most efficient with your, your schedule as possible. So hopefully all of this is making sense. Hopefully this is helping some of these things click together. Now, if you want help in this process, just so you know, the average student that I work with improves by about 3.93 shots per year. So if you're looking at that math, and you're like, hey, you know, we need to improve by 2 shots, 3 shots. Well, you know, that's something that, you know, when I work with students, I'm very comfortable with, you know, we're going to have a high probability of success on accomplishing whatever their goals are. And, you know, as comparatively, if you're doing that math, and it's somewhere around 1, then you probably don't need to do anything, you can keep on doing whatever you're doing. So that is, that was what I would encourage you guys, if you're in that spot, we're looking at 2, 3 shots, and you want to make sure that child has a high probability of playing Division 1 golf, then I encourage you to go into the description, click the link below this video, you'll be able to learn more about my program. And if it sounds like something you'd be interested in, you can apply on that page. So that's all I got for you. If you guys enjoyed this video, go ahead, leave a like. And if you want to see more videos like this, go ahead and hit the subscribe button. I'll see you guys in the next one.