What Does It Cost To Play College Golf

All right, what's going on? So in this video, I'm going to be covering what does it cost to play college golf. And so you're going to see me referring to my notes a little bit during this video, so it's a little bit, um, detailed here. But I wanted to make sure that those of you who are kind of looking into this, maybe you have a junior golfer who wants to play college golf and kind of wondering what does this all entail, I wanted to actually kind of do a deep dive and help you understand the 3 main things that you're going to be paying for and kind of how to evaluate how much, like, just whether or not the money that you're spending is, is really worth it. And so first and foremost, we got to say this out of the gate, this is going to be a little bit of a reality check. So, you know, some, some of you guys watching this, you might see these numbers and be like, wow, that's a lot. And in part, that's kind of the goal is to help you understand like what this actually requires and how difficult it is to play college golf. Um, you know, golf's the expensive sport. You know, it's, it's not the same thing as like if your child is going out there and playing soccer. Um, you know, if you're looking to do things in the cheapest way possible, um, you're probably going to fail. And that's different than having like limited resources or something like that, um, and then making the most of them. Um, but just have that context. Also, when we think about elite-level golf instruction, we're, we're thinking coaching that, you know, might cost as much as $500 per hour. Um, you know, less than $250 an hour, $200 an hour, really kind of gets into the range of where you're, you're probably working with a golf instructor who's kind of closer to the beginning of their career. And that's just something to kind of be aware of. If you're looking for $75 lessons, that's not going to be an elite level of instruction, and there's not a really great chance that that's going to be the best information that your child could be getting. So that's just kind of like right out the gate for some context here. And it's also important to understand it's not about the quantity of times you see your coach, it's about the quality of instruction and the touch points that you get. So when we look at— when I talk to a lot of parents, you know, they might be having their child see their coach weekly and they might just be teaching the same lesson over and over and over and over again. And that's cool from a golf coach perspective, but, you know, from your child's development, if they're taking the same lesson every single week, that kind of tells you that they're not really learning a whole lot in that lesson, or they're not very impactful. So don't shy away from spending a little bit more money for a more impactful kind of long-term development plan. So anyway, let's go ahead and, and dive into this. So there's 3 main things you're going to spend money on. Um, you're going to spend money on equipment, um, and like golf courses. So that's like golf clubs, golf balls, um, you know, golf course, you know, if you have a country club or you're playing public golf courses, you know, all that type of stuff, you're gonna be paying for that no matter what. You're going to be paying for instruction, so getting golf lessons for your junior golfer or anything else that they might need, whether it's mindset or, you know, what have you. And then you're also gonna have to pay for tournaments. So you're gonna have to, you know, go to different events. There's gonna be registration fees. You're gonna have hotels if you're traveling, all sorts of stuff like that. So that's just kind of like the high level there. And I'm gonna kind of dig through each one of these on their, on their own here. So what does each one of these really cost? I'm going to focus on two of them. Equipment is going to be very variable based on kind of like where exactly you're at. Um, just kind of like high level on that before, without getting too far into the weeds, you know, you might pay, you know, anywhere between $2,000 and $5,000 for like a full, fully fitted golf bag. And that's going to change as your child gets older. When they're just starting out, they don't need the same customization that they do when they get older. but that's, you know, that's a more complex, uh, video for another time. Um, just as far as context with instruction, how much does it usually cost? This is just, um, something I grabbed from, from golf.com. The average, um, family is spending about $10,000 per year, um, on instruction. So that's just kind of like a starting point. How much does it cost? About $10,000 per year in instruction is kind of like standard. Now, uh, another really important thing to kind of take into consideration here is That might sound like a lot, but you need to recognize that it's actually harder to get into and play at a Division 1 program than it is to get into Harvard. The acceptance rate at Harvard is essentially 3.6% versus going on to play Division 1 golf is about 1.6%. So when we think about like, what's, you know, what does that entail, um, you know, what kind of commitment are you making? You would never have, you know, your child be a junior or a sophomore in high school and be like, oh yeah, maybe we'll go to Harvard or like that. You would actually want to be able to say, okay, cool, we've got a plan, we've been executing on this plan for however many years, we're in ourselves in position where we got the GPA, we've got the extracurriculars, we've got all this different stuff that we know is important in order to put ourselves in a good position here. Now, kind of switching gears, what about tournaments? There are kind of 6 stages that your junior golfer is going to go through in, in terms of their development, and this will kind of tie into you know, how you should be picking tournaments. First thing is like, can they go out and can they shoot a score on 9 holes? You know, if they can't play 9 holes for a score, that's where they need to start. That's where most young junior golfers start, you know, 5-year-old, 6-year-old, 7-year-old. That's what they're doing, they're playing 9 holes. They probably, you know, they're elite, they're playing them really well, but that's step 1. Step 2, can they do that for 18 holes, right? Can we put 2 sets of 9 holes together? It's a little bit of an endurance thing. Again, at no point in here do we really need tournaments. Could we have tournaments? Sure, but you don't need them, right? So this is just helping you guys understand there's money that you can spend because you want to, like, I don't know, a TrackMan, um, and then there's money you can spend because you should spend it because you're serious about accomplishing— helping your child accomplish their goals, right? Whether or not you pay for tournaments when they're 7 has nothing to do with whether or not you're serious about helping them accomplish their goals. Um, next one here is, can they shoot scores for 36 holes? Most elite events, all ranked events, especially on Junior Golf Scoreboard, are going to be 36-hole events. So if your junior golfer is not able to string together 2 rounds of, of, you know, golf, well then they're really going to struggle. So that's the next stage there. And again, it's a little bit of an endurance thing. Then from there it's like, okay, cool, can they do that in local tournaments? Right? So now we can actually shoot the scores. You can play 36-hole events. We can start to, you know, stack up a calendar. Then you kind of intuitively can look at that and be like, hmm, well, do we want to be playing 36-hole events every single weekend? That might become a lot. Now we say, okay, maybe it's just 2 events per month or 1 event per month. That's where you kind of start to have these things kind of fill themselves in. And you can also look at the way that your junior golfer is playing and say, okay, we're trending in the right direction with our instruction. Or there are some problems that we need to have filled in with our instruction, right? So all these things fit together. Uh, the fifth stage is can they get their scoring average 72 to 74 in tournaments in their local area? Um, so this one's huge. Um, this is going to really dictate whether they play college golf broadly. If they can have a scoring average of 74, um, you know, in whatever tournaments they're playing in, they're, they're essentially guaranteed to play college golf. The question then becomes, do we play Division 1? Do we play Division 2? Division or do you play, uh, Division 3? And that kind of ties us into the last stage here, um, Stage 6. Can they keep that scoring average in elite tournaments? Another kind of context for the 72-74 scoring average is this is going to make it so that they're able to very easily qualify for any of the bigger events. So again, these are kind of the stages that your junior golfer is going to go through, and a lot of the time people kind of try and leapfrog these different stages and they start worrying about you know, rankings before they have a scoring average that's decent, or they start worrying about trying to get into particular tournaments before that scoring average is taken care of. They kind of mismanage where they put things, and as a result of that, they also end up mismanaging how they go ahead and use their resources. So now let's kind of, you know, switch gears here a little bit and talk about fixed costs versus variable costs, right? Some things are, you know, they're just— they're costs. They're like, they're going to be there no matter what. And there's other things that we can kind of like move around, we can kind of change. So equipment is going to be variable based on kind of what your child needs. Yeah, they might have periods of time where they don't need to update their stuff, and then there's going to be times where they need to get an entire new bag. Um, you know, that could be because of wear, that could be because of, you know, they went through a growth spurt, any number of things, right? But that's going to kind of, you know, move around. You're not going to have one consistent amount to that you need to expect to spend every single year. But that's something to just kind of, you know, expect. Same thing with a golf course, um, there's going to be a monthly cost associated with that. Tournaments, same thing, it's going to be variable based on what your child needs. You know, obviously, probably in December they're not playing as much tournament golf as they are in July or August, right? So that's gonna be somewhat variable. And you can also add or subtract tournaments based on kind of what your child needs and what makes sense to for you guys as a family. So that's the next step there. Instruction is going to be relatively fixed, and it's going to be fixed for a pretty long period of time. Um, and so this is just kind of, you know, how that, that structure ends up working out. Um, but the real question we want to be able to ask is, is an expense worth it? Does it make sense to actually spend that money in that particular area? Well, with tournaments, I already kind of went over that. And so you want to use that rubric to really determine is this tournament worth it, right? So if your child can't shoot, you know, uh, rounds of golf for 36 holes like back-to-back days, then it really makes the most sense to say, okay, maybe we play in a tournament here or there because, you know, let's get some tournament reps or something like that. But at the end of the day, if you didn't do that, it wouldn't really matter that much either, because the main thing that your junior golfer needs to get comfortable with is playing 36 holes. So once they're comfortable with that, they can say, yep, I can do that. Well, Well, then you'd want to strategically say, okay, cool, let's go play 36-hole events and let's start getting some scores. Let's get a ranking and see where we're at. And then we can move on to step 2, which is really double down and say, all right, how do we get these scores down as fast as possible? And so that usually kind of falls back into the instruction category. That's something I do with my students where I say like, okay, cool, this is what our numbers are telling us. Here's where we need to focus. And how do we get those scores down as fast as possible? That, that's going to be the biggest hurdle. And then once we have that, then we can start to be a little bit more strategic about which tournaments we play in. Equipment— we really want to make this decision based on, you know, are— if we're improving the equipment because, like, let's say your child got faster, like they're swinging their driver faster, and now the shaft that they had in their driver was too soft, and, and, you know, now it's better, or, um, and now they need something stiffer, that's almost guaranteed to, to be worthwhile. And you guys will kind of see that a little bit in a second. I'm going to go over another concept, cost per shot. But almost always, improving your child's equipment, if it's necessary, is almost always a good investment. There's pretty much no way you can really overdo this. The way, the way you could overdo it is like get a Trackman. That's going to kind of blow out your math. Aside from that, like, if your child needs a better driver it, you know, go ahead and do that. Same deal with like, you know, if they have a putter that's causing them a real problem, it's worth it to just get another one. Now, instruction. Instruction is a little bit harder to kind of grasp because when we go and get a golf lesson, every golf lesson sounds the same, especially if you're not already an expert in it, which you're not, um, because you're going and getting a golf lesson, or your child's going and getting a golf lesson. It's really hard to kind of determine, all right, what are we getting here? And I kind of alluded to this at the beginning, Price is a good way to kind of understand what you're getting. Now, it's not 100% the thing, you know, there, there are some questionable golf lessons out there, but for the most part, if you're paying $400 for an hour for a golf lesson, that's going to be a higher quality lesson than a $75 an hour golf lesson. But we want to be able to have a little bit more clarity on that as well, because we don't want to just be looking for a deal and we don't want to just be looking to spend the maximum amount of my own instruction either. We want to have a ratio in here. And that's, that's what I call cost per shot. We want to be able to look at, um, how much are we spending and how much improvement is that purchasing for us? Because if we were to kind of like step back and look at all everything that's going on here, what we really have is where are we playing, right? That's the tournaments that we're playing in. How are we getting seen? How are we getting out there? And then the rest of it is just how do we lower our our scores as fast as possible, how do we spend money to cause that to happen? And so that's why I said with the equipment, if you go and let's say you need to replace a driver shaft and it costs $500 to replace the driver shaft, well, if your child goes out there and now they hit 4 more fairways or 1 fewer ball out of bounds, or they, you know, hit a little bit further off the tee, well, the probability that that all adds up to about a shot is is pretty dang high. And as you'll see in a second here, if you're paying $500 per shot, that's incredible. Like, that's a, that's a great deal. You want to do that as many times as you can. So that's why with the equipment, if you need to pull that trigger, pull that trigger. So like I said, average cost of instruction is about $10,000 per year. And that's just going off of golf.com. The average improvement, and this is my own research here, but based on Junior Golf Scoreboard, the average player improves by about 1.18 shots per year. So a lot of the time when I talk about, talk to junior golfers, they're looking at how do I improve by, you know, 3, 5, 10 shots in a year. And that just doesn't happen. Um, you don't have your junior golfer going from, to, from shooting 90 to 80 in a year. Typically, um, you don't see them going from 80 to 70 in a year. Um, you don't really see them going 80 to 75 in a year. The, the progressions in golf are much more incremental and it's important to kind of have that context because we can kind of get patients oh, we need to improve really, really fast, and we can kind of miss out on stuff. My other videos go over that a little bit more, but for this context, just say, all right, cool, we're spending $10,000 per year, that's normal. So if we're not comfortable doing that, just recognize you're at a disadvantage. Like, you, you're already kind of behind the 8 ball if you're not comfortable with that. And that's, that's a big part of this video, just helping you guys understand what to be comfortable with. This is the average improvement. So if you just kind of go to, you know, Joe Schmo golf instructor, just kind of doing your best to find a good golf instructor, but kind of standard, do the standard thing, maybe see him weekly, you know, biweekly, quarterly, monthly, something along those lines, pretty normal stuff. You go and see them. This is about how much you should expect to improve. So the cost per shot is about $8,500, right? So if you have that context and you can say, okay, cool, you know, if I can buy a shot for better than $8,500, you know, for $5,000 or $2,000 or whatever, that, that's a great deal. Which is why I kind of said, you know, with the driver example, that's a really good decision to make with the resources that you have available to you. Now, you know, with golf instruction, again, that's kind of the evaluation you want to have because you might have instruction that seemingly costs more but it causes your child to improve faster. You know, for example, when I work with players, they improve by about 2.7 one-shots per year. right, as opposed to 1.18 shots. So when we're doing math and saying, okay, cool, you know, your child is, you know, a freshman and we've got 3 years ahead of us to get their scores down as fast as possible, well, we're not looking at saying, okay, well, I hope we're already within 3 or 4 shots of our target. We can say, okay, well, I hope we're, you know, within like 7 to 9 shots of our target, right? We're able to have a little bit more wiggle room though. Um, so that's kind of the way to be looking at all this stuff, and that's really the way to evaluate what things cost. So you're going to have your, your, uh, equipment, you're going to have your golf course stuff that's going to be somewhat variable. Um, and you can be kind of flexible with that. Tournaments, you can be super flexible with that. You can move that around. You don't need to play tons and tons of tournaments. You only need like 4 tournaments, um, that are ranked to actually stay ranked. So it's not really that big of a bar. The major thing you're going to be spending money on is golf instruction. And that's across the board on everything. And that's the thing you want to be really shrewd with, to say, okay, cool, where— what is going to cause us to improve as much as possible? And, and really view it through that lens. So I hope this video is helpful for you guys and just kind of understanding what it entails in order to, to go and help your child play college golf, um, and kind of what you should expect in terms of the the different expenses that go into it. So like I said, hope this video was helpful for you guys, and I'll see you in the next one.