Why I Don't Like In Person Coaching

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I want to address a subject that I get asked about all the time, and it's something I don't really think about a ton, but I, I get the question so much that I figure I should probably go into it. And that is why I really don't like doing in-person coaching. Um, I— this is kind of like the default for, for most people, you know, if you have a junior golfer, you want to golf lessons, the default expectation is that you're going to go see a golf coach and you know, it's going to be in person. And I don't really do any of my work with students in person. If I see them in person, it's kind of like a, you know, it's a nice thing that happens every now and then, but it's not really something that I build my coaching model around. And so in today's video, I'm going to be explaining why, um, kind of the drawbacks that I see, um, with that approach. And kind of why I do things the way that I do them. So, um, if you enjoy videos like this and learning about junior golf and preparing to play college golf, um, please go ahead and subscribe to the channel. Um, every subscriber really matters. You're still really new, so really appreciate you guys. And if you enjoyed this video, please leave a like. It helps push it out to more people. So anyway, let's talk about in-person coaching, the pros and cons, and kind of why I like to do the majority of my coaching with, from kind of a virtual, uh, perspective. So for the most part, when we think about, um, golf coaching, like I said, we're thinking about coaching from a, you know, from an in-person perspective. We're saying, hey, you know, my swing's not good, I'm gonna go work with a golf coach on my swing, and, you know, they're gonna fix it, and either I'm gonna be hitting it good at the end of the lesson, or I'm gonna have something I need to go work on, and then Um, if I play good, amazing. And if I don't play good, then I just go get another lesson, right? That's kind of the model. And that, that works well for, for a golf coach business model. Um, you know, like for if you're a golf coach, you know, think about this, right? Like you have people come to you and if you make them feel like they kind of know where they're going and you kind of are a safety blanket for them and, you know, they go out there and play well, congratulations. Um, if they play bad, they come back to you and they're like, hey, when I was with you, I was hitting it good, so let's get this fixed. And you fix it again. You keep doing that until they, you know, quit, or, or, you know, they start playing better. Um, but that's kind of the approach. And for me, in my experience, a lot of the time with junior golfers specifically, it doesn't work as well as it could, or at least it puts the, the junior golfer in a position where they have to be good at a lot of other things that are not their golf swing in order to be successful. And so what ends up happening is you might have a player who has a really, you know, really good golf swing, but they don't have all the other intangibles that go into being able to play college golf. They don't know which tournaments they need to be playing in. They don't know how to practice. They don't know how to track their statistics. Um, they don't have course management. They don't have great mindset. And what ends up happening is either those are just like holes in their approach to the game, right? They don't even have access to that information, or you have to cram all that information into a, you know, 1, 2 hour, or even, even a full day with coach. Um, you have to cram all that information in, and the kid has to retain all of that information, which I think is, is really the biggest hurdle. It's one thing to say, hey, we're gonna hang out for 8 hours, and, um, you know, that's going to be however much it is, and I'm going to tell you all these things. It's another thing for the junior golfer to actually be able to retain that. And so that, that's kind of like the foundational thing for me where I don't actually prefer that model, um, because when I look at junior golf A lot of the time kids can only process so much information. We just, as humans, we can only process so much information at a time. So if I'm a coach, I want to have as much impact the information that I give as possible. And so the way that I'm going to do that is by stretching that out over a longer period of time, but increasing the number of touch points and the ease of the player being able to have those touch points. So, you know, when I'm working with a player, I might not talk to them for like hours at a time, but what I might do is say, okay, cool, here's this first thing that I need you to do, or this, here's this homework that I want you to do. Go do that, apply it. And then let's check back in, you know, next week, let's talk again. And you know, then they have access. They can message me at any time. I do a weekly call with all my students. So they're able to ask questions there as well and continuing kind of learning. but it doesn't have as much of a firehose effect. It can be very streamlined to be able to say, okay, cool, you know, here's what's going on in your game. Here's the main thing we need to fix. Go fix that. Now, if you're like most people, you're probably asking yourself, all right, that sounds cool, I guess, Connor, but like, how do you understand a player's game? You know, how do you understand their game from, you know, from a distance where you're not actually like watching them on the golf course? Don't you have to see them hit shots? And I think that the kind of like segues us nicely into this next place here. So this is just an example of one of the students that I work with, and this is, you know, how I keep track of, of their game. So, you know, this player, he logs every single round that he plays in the stats app that, that we use. And so I can actually see and get notified every single time he plays around and kind of get an idea of like the pulse of his game. Because at the end of the day, I think this really gets overlooked by a lot of players, is if, if I took him out on the golf course, let's say, again, big day, feels like we did something, and I go watch him play golf and I say, oh yeah, this is what I saw, well, I could be looking at kind of a, a biased, um, opinion on that, right? I might have just seen him go out there and shoot something really good because he rose to the occasion or like that. Great. There's not a lot to coach him on, right? Because if you just went out there and shot 69, like, if your scoring average is, let's say, 75, it's like, what am I supposed to push you to shoot 65 and get you in that headspace? No, I want you to keep doing what, you know, what got you there to shoot 69, which is probably you're hitting pretty good, you're hitting a ton of greens, you're not making any dumb mistakes, and you made a few putts. Like, it doesn't really tell me that much. And sure, I can act like it does, I can, I can pretend like it does, but it doesn't tell me that much. In the same way, if you go out there and you're nervous and you play poorly and I can say, oh well, you just don't have it yet, you go work harder and all this other stuff, it's like it's not helpful. I'm getting a skewed sample. And so if you know anything about, you know, statistics and, and patterns, you actually want to see the player, you know, kind of present a little bit of a pattern. You want to see where our score is going, what are kind of the recurring problems, and what's kind of one-off unique stuff. That's super important. And so you can kind of see here You know, his last score he entered, you shot 69 in a tournament, really, really good. But here's another one, he shot 79 in a tournament. So 10-shot gap. Well, if I went to this round or this round, this round I might have said, oh, you know, we've got all these things we need to fix. In this round I might have said, oh, you know, it was super amazing. But what's actually a lot more helpful for me is that I can actually see the difference between these and say, okay, well, what broke down? What was good? What wasn't right? So in this case on this 79, he actually hit the ball pretty well. He actually didn't hit it so good on, you know, strokes gained-wise on the 69. Okay, that's interesting. Um, you know, hit it, drove a little bit better off the tee, didn't drive quite as well here. But the biggest thing that I see is like we've got a 3-shot swing on our putting and on our short game. So what that actually kind of tells me, um, you know, this isn't, you know, the deepest thing in the world, but like, hey, if we let our putting really go or we let our short game really go, that's going to hurt us based on kind of how his game works. As opposed to, you know, maybe our ball striking. Maybe our ball striking could be a little bit, um, we don't have to worry about hitting every shot really, really close. So this is just kind of a high-level perspective on this, but I just kind of want to highlight, like, as a coach, this is much more valuable to me than going out and seeing one round of golf with them. I want to be able to see all the rounds that he plays, and so I can actually say strategically, this is the part of our game that we need to focus on. And so this is what I'll do with students is I'll pull their numbers and say, all right, cool, well, here's where we're starting, here's where we wanna get to, here's what that's worth, right? Like, that's how we're going to, you know, to approach this stuff here. And so that's kind of the approach that I take with the students. And I also do check-ins with them. So I can also actually, you know, document, okay, cool, here's exactly where we're at, here's where we're starting. Here's what our objectives are, here's the things that we're trying to change and improve. And that just kind of allows us a much more streamlined approach to the game. Because, you know, when we look at Junior Golf Scoreboard, you guys might often hear me talk about like pace of improvement, um, with players, you know, say, oh, the average player improves by this amount. And so I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to be pulling this blind, but I'm on Junior Golf Scoreboard right now. Let's go ahead and see if I can get this to pull up. Gotta love it when you log in. Oh, that's obnoxious. Okay. Well, that's loading. I'm just going to kind of come back to this other side of this. For you guys, this is, this is what I'm working off of, right? Our end goal here is to play college golf, right? And so this is available on Junior Golf Scoreboard rankings and honors, college signings. This shows you where every player gets recruited, where their scoring differential was. And this is like, this is your end goal. This is where you're trying to get to, right? And if you know this number, like, that's thing number one, you know. Those of you who might be asking, what do I need to do to play college golf? Well, are you ranked? If you're not ranked, like, that's step number one, right? And I've got other videos that go over it, but, you know, go to tournaments and results, search for tournaments, find some in your state that are ranked. You need to play at least 4 per year, and boom, then you'll have a starting point. But this is like, this is where we're going here. So let's see if I can get this to actually pull up. Okay, there we go. So, you know, this player, just like randomly picked here But you guys hear me talk about rate of improvement, right? So we've improved by a certain amount over a period of time. I'm pulling this completely blind, so I don't know how much background this player has, but okay, cool. So this is August, right? This is where he's at right now. He's one of the best players in the country, -7 scoring differential, really, really good. Where was he last August? He's improved by 0.3 shots. Hopefully you guys can see that. You know, let's go to the August before that. He improved by essentially 5 into 7. So he improved by, let's see here, I'm just gonna pull out my handy-dandy calculator. Uh, if you guys are faster at decimal math than I am, then you can knock it out quicker. So he improved by 2.19 shots. Now, if you took those and averaged those out, over the last 2 years, he's improved by an average of 1.25 shots. Now, this is one of the best players in the country. You could obviously say, hey, um, you know, it's a lot harder to improve, you know, at this higher level. But again, let's continue and go backwards on this, and we can say the year before that he improved by 3.57 shots. Okay, cool. So you can kind of see here that he had a really big spurt between these two, um, between these two years. It's probably his freshman year. That's typically where I see a lot of, you know, big improvement here. And then the year before that, we see he improved by about 2.25 shots. So again, guys, like, when I talk about this that this is— these are very small, um, increments of progress. This is not a very fast thing that's, that's happening here. And so when we're looking at like, how much does your junior golfer have to improve, it's like they need to improve by very small increments over the course of months and years. And you need to have a way to measure that, because you just go out there and do it on feelings, you're going to have a lot of chaos. And even if you talk to your junior golfer and kind of ask them, how much do you want to improve over over this next year? I bet you they're gonna say like 5 shots, 7 shots, 10 shots. What do you think you should be able to shoot? They're going to give you some ridiculous number. And it's really important that we stay grounded in reality, because if we don't stay grounded in reality, we're going to make really poor decisions about what we should be doing or shouldn't be doing. You know, the example would be if you think that you need to make par or birdie on every single hole, well, when you hit it in the trees Well, you're going to try and hit that crazy sling, you know, hook or slice out of the trees from a bad lie because you think that that's what you need to do in order to score. First, if you understand, once I've hit in the trees, like, making bogeys a good score, well, then you just pitch out into the middle of the fairway and know you're gonna hit the green probably, you know, whatever percentage of the time you're going to hit it from wherever you lay up to, probably like 100 yards, something like that. You're gonna hit the green 70, 80% of the time. You're gonna make bogey a decent chunk of the time. then when you make bogey, you feel good about it rather than being all frustrated that you made bogey because you hit the trees, right? And so that, that's why it's so important to understand like, where are we trying to get to? What's reasonable to expect of ourselves? And when it comes to coaching a junior golfer and saying, okay, cool, where do we need to put our focus? Are we improving at the rate that we need to? What do we need to change? What do we need to improve? It's a lot more effective to actually be able to sit back and not be in person, not have to deal with the logistics of that. And just make sure that they can get constant feedback, um, so that they can improve consistently. And so that's, that's really the approach that I take. And so you might be asking something like, oh well, Connor, um, don't we have to look at, you know, the golf swing, or don't we have to do these different, you know, different parts of the game that we might have to look at? And yeah, we do, but we want to be able to see that in kind of an overall trend, you know. Like, for this player right now, like, I would say, you know, we're on a generally positive trend here. But let's say one of these was negative. Well, then I wouldn't want to just go blow up his whole game. I'd want to go into that specific area and say, okay, cool, like, why are we struggling here? We want to look into that, right? And that might be an information gap. He might not know something. We just need to actually just have a new piece of information. He might not be thinking about something the right way there. He might not be practicing it, right? He might have just gone off vacation. And, you know, just hasn't, you know, found his, um, his footing quite yet, or he's been grinding on it for a long time, he's not getting better. Well, then we know that there's a technical thing, right? And so you might be saying, okay, cool, well, you know, that's a time frame person, right? Maybe sometimes, yeah. But, you know, for me, a lot of the times, like, it's pretty easy to get a player swaying up on, on analyzer, and you can kind of outline a lot of what's going on just by looking at the golf swing from a distance. And that, that might seem foreign to some of you guys. Some of you guys might be more familiar with it. Maybe you've worked with a coach on Skill List. But, you know, a lot of, you know, what we're going to do here is going to be set up at address. It's going to be set up kind of to about P2 here. And, you know, if we're, if we're in decent spots there. We're going to be in a decent spot on the top, we're going to be a decent spot in transition, and again, golf's going to be pretty dang simple. And so I don't like introducing lots and lots of complexity, uh, with my students. I like to make sure that they have touch points on a regular basis as needed. Some players need it more than others do, um, so that they're able to consistently improve, and we can just focus on, hey, you know, we're improving, we're moving in a good direction. We don't need to touch anything. Like, even if there's something that could be improved, we don't have to touch it right that moment. Because again, if we have the context of, hey, we're only going to improve somewhere within this range, well, then we can make really good strategic decisions about which things we want to attack and which things we want to change. Because there's always a probability that, yeah, we could improve it, we could also make it worse. And so we want to balance those things, right? So if I have a player that I'm working with where they've improved by say 7 shots over the course of a really short period of time, well, I'm not going to touch anything, right? Because we've already improved a ton. I'm probably going to tell them, hey, let's just keep playing golf and get comfortable with this level of performance because we've improved a ton, right? You know, if you win a big hand in poker, you don't necessarily need to double down on the exact next hand when you have kind of a questionable hand. You say, okay, cool, we just keep the main thing the main thing, keep focus on the things we've been focusing on. We don't need to change stuff. And so, um, you know, on average, you guys saw me kind of work through one of those progression logs. On average, when I look at across the board on Junior Golf Scoreboard, average about 1.18 shots. That player improved a little bit faster than normally at the 1 year, that was 3.5. But for the most part, it was, you know, somewhere between 1 and 2 shots. Average about 1.18 in my experience. Um, that player is probably a little bit exceptional because again, they're one of the best players in the country. When I work with students, I see an improvement about 2.71 shots per year. It's been trending up, but that's kind of where I see it. And so again, if you know that and you can say, all right, well, I'm wherever I'm at on Junior Golf Scoreboard, which again, it's just go play in the tournaments, playing 4 of them, you're ranked, you got it from there. All right, cool. Then you can say, all right, cool, where am I right now? Where am I trying to get to? What program do I want to play at? And then just do, just do the math, you know, like how many shots do you have to improve by and how much time do you have to do it? Divide those out. That'll tell you how, how much you need to improve per year. And you can say, well, if I improve at average, am I there? And you know, if, if you're interested in getting help, you can run my numbers and say, okay, well, what if I improved by, you know, 2.71? And again, that's an average. Some do better, some do be worse, but that's just the middle ground there. What, where does that put me then? That, that's gonna give you a lot of clarity. And so once again, I know this is very different and, and a lot more kind of organized than just kind of your standard in-person lesson, but that's the way that I approach things. And I think that's why I've been able to have the, the success with players improving, um, as much as I have. So anyway, I hope this video is helpful for you guys and just kind of understanding the methodology there. And, you know, if you're not already, you know, doing something like that, that, you know, there might be an opportunity to improve if you're just a little bit more deliberate about where you put attention and kind of how you approach, um, you know, the way your junior golf is developing. So if you guys enjoyed this video, um, go ahead and leave it a like. And if you want to see more stuff like it, then go ahead and hit the subscribe button. I'll see you guys next week.