Why It Pays To Start Thinking About D1 Golf Early

All right, what's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering why it pays to start early when it comes to preparing to play Division 1 golf. Uh, if you're new to the channel, this is all we talk about is helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf and going into the specifics, actually going into the math of it, modeling that out so that you guys understand what it's actually going to take. And of course, we go into specific strategies of things you might do or things you need to be aware of in order to play Division 1 golf. You can check out the other videos on the channel for, for that type of stuff. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. I've got another good one for you. So today what I wanted to do is one of the most common things that I see amongst parents as just kind of like a knowledge gap is they don't understand how early they need to think about helping their child play Division 1 golf. And one of the statistics that I commonly share with parents is that playing Division 1 golf, there's only about 1.6% of junior golfers that go on to do that. This is not that very— not very many spots. I think it's about 300 spots in total. Um, give or take the year, um, that they're actually available to, to be recruited. So when you start just doing the simple math on that, it's like, you know, there's not that many players are going to do that. And, you know, when we consider there's about between boys and girls, I want to say there's about 13,000 to 15,000 ranked players, um, and overall in junior golf, I think there's about 3.5 million depending on, you know, give or take the age. But anyway, point being there's not a lot of people to do it. There's not a lot of junior golfers who accomplish that goal. And, you know, there's people out there that'll tell you, be like, oh, you know, you don't need to think about it until, you know, you know, sophomore year, June 15th, which is when recruiting technically starts. Um, or, you know, you think about it till junior year, which is, you know, where a lot of players end up actually like getting recruited or making their, like, you know, commitments and all that. Or even, or even senior year, some, in some cases. And a lot of times those coaches will cite things like, you know, I worked with this player and they got recruited and they, you know didn't think about it until junior year. You know, one of the things that commonly gets thrown up is like the multi-sport athlete, um, type of thing is like, oh, well, that's superior because, you know, they're more athletic. And, you know, there's some truth to that. You know, it's like if you have an athletic kid, you know, they're definitely going to be able to play better golf. But there's also just some like hard math and like rules about, you know, just kind of what's going on and what you can kind of expect. I'm speaking to you guys personally as a player who, you know, started playing golf when I was 16. I was scratch by the time I was 17. Yeah, I'm 6'2". I'm, um, very strong guy, um, 120-mile-an-hour clubhead speed. I was not able to play college golf because I didn't know a lot of this stuff, um, that I'm going to be sharing with you guys, and I do share with you guys on this channel. Um, so this is something that I have not only like seen firsthand from, you know, working with players, um, but this is also something that I've experienced myself. You understand what it's like. So the chart I've got in front of you guys is a resource that I created a couple months ago, but I just wanted to be able to look at this and say like what's average amongst junior golfers who are ranked by their class? You know, how is the scoring average changing? How are the distances changing? How are the— how's the difficulty of the golf course changing? All that information is kind of what I wanted to know. And how much are the players improving year over year? And so this is, you know, by class. You can see, okay, what's the scoring average for a class of 2025, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, and 31. And what you'll kind of notice is that we kind of hit a hard plateau right around between 78 and 81. I don't think any of these scores go below 78, um, if I'm not mistaken. It doesn't go below 78.24, and none of them really go over— I guess it would be 80.83. So somewhere between 78 and 81 is kind of that place where players get stuck. Now the scoring differential continues to go down, and all that really represents is, you know, these golf courses get harder, which you can see by the course rating And the course rating pretty much goes up because these golf courses are getting longer over time. So, you know, when we really kind of analyze this, the reason these players are getting better is because they're getting stronger, essentially, because they're going from being, you know, like a 5th grader or 6th grader to being in high school, which is like, of course they're hitting the ball further. If not hitting the ball further, then like, what are we doing? You know, like, it's pretty hard to not hit the ball further if you go from, you know, being 12 to being 18 or 17 or 16. So anyway, that, that's kind of, you know, just like first things first that jumps out at me. But here's kind of like the more, um, you know, important detail here. Depending on where your child is at, you know, maybe they're not ranked at all, or maybe they are ranked and you actually know what their scoring differential is. But regardless, they're at some point, whether you're aware of it or not is kind of irrelevant, um, at least for this point. It's like they're somewhere. And let me jump over to another page here. This is on Junior Golf Scoreboard rankings and honors college signings. This shows you all the players that were recruited to Division I programs, um, you know, essentially all over the past several years, all the way back to 2017. Um, this— and you can do this for boys and girls. And what this shows you here is their scoring differential at the point that they were recruited, right? So just kind of keep this in mind here. This is kind of like our target, right? Like, where do we want to get to? You know, if you thought about, like, um, your GPA— go to Harvard, you need a 4.0, right? This is kind of like your 4.0, right? Um, so It's a little bit more detailed than that, but that's all you need to know is you need to get here. And so kind of the question is like, okay, well, here's kind of just averages as an example of scoring differentials for, for the average player. And they need to be able to, if they wanted to play Division 1 golf, you know, get to somewhere in here. Um, you know, realistically, you know, I would kind of say if you're under -2, you're, you're pretty much going to be playing Division 1 golf. If you're in this like -1.5 range, you can still pull it off. Um, but a whole lot over that, you're just going to see it's a lot more kind of far and few between as far as the players who do get recruited. There's bigger gaps in between these rankings. So I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm just saying that, you know, a good target is like -2. So we consider that and we say, okay, well, here's where these players are at. How— the question you want to be asking yourself is, how much does the average player improve year over year? That's kind of like the way to, to think about this, right? Because let's say you're in class of 2027, you've got a scoring differential of 5.81, and you want to get to a scoring differential of -2, right? So in this case, we've essentially got 2, maybe 3 years, uh, depending on how, you know, we look at that. Um, but let's just say it's 2 years for, for the sake of this discussion. You got a scoring differential of 5.81 and you want to get to -2, right? So in that case, we need to improve by 7.81 shots and we need to do that over 2 years. So we need to improve by about 3.9 shots per year. Now, do you think it would be more helpful to know that ahead of time or just like figure that out one day? Like, do you think that by not paying attention to where your child is at, that magically they're gonna improve by like 5 shots? Um, now maybe you think that that's possible, but I wanna give you guys kind of a, a secondary look at this. Sorry, I got a, a presentation here. Um, if we average these out, you know, if we look back up here and we average these out, the average player's improving by about 1.19 shots per year. Now, one question you might be asking is like, oh, is this different for elite players? So these were 6 random players that I pulled out right around the top 50 in their class. This is where they were at a year ago, is where they're at today, and this is the change over the last, um, 12 months. So 2 of them got worse, 2 of them got, you know, significantly better, and 2 of them got kind of, you know, okay, you know, a little bit under that average that is skating. So You know, they're pretty much the same improvement. And so when we kind of consider that, you can kind of see where it's like, okay, well, if we're only going to improve by like 1.2 shots a year, depending on like wherever you're at right now, and if you're trying to get to -2, it's like, well, we need to have as much time as possible in order to drop those shots. We can't just like roll out of bed and say, hey, I want to drop 6 shots tomorrow, um, because I'm an athlete. Like, that's not, that's not how this stuff works, you know. Even to the degree that it does, it's like it's not going to account for that many shots. Um, so a lot of the time, because most parents aren't aware that like, okay, we need to get to this -2 scoring differential, because you're not aware, okay, here's where we're at right now as far as our scoring differential, because you're not aware of, okay, well, I need to know what the difference is and how many years we have ahead of us, and, you know, here's how much time I have to get it there, and here's how much we need to improve per year, it just becomes very difficult to have a high probability of playing Division 1 golf, which is back to my initial point why only 1.6% of junior golfers go on to play Division golf is because they just don't know what they're doing. And even if they did all know all those variables, they don't necessarily know which particular buttons to push, so to speak, to be able to improve faster than that amount. A lot of the time you kind of see randomness where we have peaks or periods of time where we improve by a lot. Typically that comes with either— sometimes it'll be a major swing change, like let's say you're a junior golfer, or let's say you're younger, right, 11, 12 years old apologies for my son in the background. Um, I'm sure all you guys know what that's like. But anyway, you have a period where, you know, maybe there's major swing change going from like 10 years to, to 12 years old or something like that. That could be one thing that could happen. Growth spurts are another one where we just rapidly, you know, get bigger, get stronger, hit the ball further is another way that, um, that, that can happen. Um, but then we have other periods of time where we're just kind of like stuck. We're kind of like stuck in a plateau for an extended period of time. And a great example of that, um, that I often use is, um, Charlie Woods. So, and I, I'm just using Charlie as an example because his dad is the GOAT. I don't mean to put unnecessary pressure on Charlie or say that he is the model. It's just kind of like, you know, if you could have Tiger Woods coaching you all the time, like, you know, what's that look like? So if we look at Charlie over the last year, so we've got March 17th, if we went back to March, so over the last year A year ago he was at 0.32 and now he's at negative 0.96. So he's improved by 1.28 shots over this past year. So a little bit better than average. Um, but you know, he's also got his dad who's the GOAT. Um, so you kind of take that with, um, what you will. Now what I will say is if we go all the way back here, um, let's just make this as easy as possible. Um, if I go right here, right, so if we go back to February, which is almost March, um, several years ago, so back in 2022, so that was 3 years ago, he was at 12.95. So 12.95 plus 0.96 divided by 3 years, Charlie's improved by about 4.63 shots per year, which is unbelievable, right? That's really, really good. Um, you know, so if you could sign yourself up for that, um, again, you know, if your dad is the GOAT and you have access all the things that, um, you know, come along with that. You can improve by 4.63 shots per year, you know, that's unbelievable. Um, but what actually happens for Charlie, if we kind of like dig into this, is he has one year that's just like massive for him. So he goes from a scoring differential of 13 to a scoring differential of 4 in a year, right? So I would have to look at the PNC and see, like, I think that was where he kind of like had his kind of major swing change, where he went from like super strong grip across the line to a little bit more neutral mechanics. And that would make sense that he had that significant jump, but then he kind of hits this plateau and he stops kind of improving as much. Now I don't know how much he's practicing. I don't know what any of that stuff looks like. I'm just assuming it's relatively constant. But you know, that just kind of shows you, it's like, even if you got like the crème de la crème, you know, as far as like resources and stuff, this stuff can still move all over the place. You hit this low point here and then he's kind of backed up a little bit. So I don't know why that's happening. But that's just kind of, you know, something to kind of be aware of. We think about like, okay, we want to have as much time as possible, um, you're probably not going to beat that 1.2 shots per year by very much, you know, within reason, right? Which is just to say, if you want to accomplish that goal, you want to give yourself more time. It's just fundamentally— now you could argue, be like, oh, you start earlier, then, you know, like, what if your kid burns out? You're like, yeah, that's a possibility. That's a possibility in literally anything, right? You could say, oh, I want to, you know, have good grades so I can go to an Ivy League school. What if they burn out and they don't want to do school anymore? You're like, yeah, sure, you know, that could happen, right? But I bet you if you started off with being like, hey, the target's Harvard, right, when you get a 4.0, and they're like, yeah, I don't really care about school anymore, um, they might drop off to like a 3.6. They're still going to get into some really good schools there. And in the same sense, if your child starts earlier in golf, assuming they actually continue, right, even if they do hit a wall where it's like, yeah, I'm not as interested anymore, um, there's still a higher probability that it works out for them. And it doesn't follow that it's like, well, you know, if we start later, then we're going to improve faster. That's just not— that doesn't really make a lot of sense. Um, there's not really data to back that up. And so when you're considering this, like, the earlier you can start, the better, you know, within reason, right? And some of that's going to be dependent on your child. You know, it's like if you want to play, you know, professional sports, and, you know, let's say something else, like, um, if you want to be a pitcher in baseball, well, your shoulder has to be able to hold up to that load, and you have to not get injured. And the longer you throw pitches, the more likely you are to get injured. But it doesn't follow that, well, let's not, you know, do anything until, you know, our senior year. Let's, you know, not do that, you know, as long as possible. Yes, I understand that, you know, to some degree they do push off that just out of like a legal thing, um, because you can actually bust your shoulder up pretty good. The same thing's like true for football, you know, like if you said, hey, um, I want to be good at football, it's like, well, you generally like the earlier you start you know, the better you're going to be. Um, at the same time, it's like you increase the injury probability, and part of being a professional athlete is not getting injured. It's just like, that's, that's just what goes along with the territory. In the same sense for junior golf, you know, part of getting better and, and playing elite level golf is you don't really get burned out. Now, are there strategies around like how to not get burned out? Yeah. I mean, when I'm working with my players, my minimum is I want one practice session that's 2 hours, and I want one round of golf per week. Um, just to be clear, guys, if you guys want specific help on that, if that's something that you're interested in, you want me to tell you exactly which tournaments to play in, um, you know, what they should be doing in their practice, analyze their statistics and help them improve. Just to be clear, my average student improves by about 3.6 shots per year, give or take, um, you know, where they're at. I think right now, off the top of my head, of the students who have had at least like a season of tournaments, right, I've got a number that just signed up where we haven't had any tournaments, so that kind of like skews the numbers a little bit. But over the ones that have just signed up, mean average is like 3.72 shots per year, you know, and that's over— I don't know exactly off the top of my head, but that's, you know, that's 20+ students that's just kind of like being referenced there. And I think the mean is somewhere around 3.61, so that's— I was trying to quote on the lower end of that. But if that's something you're interested in, if you want me to help you with that, there's a link or for an application below the video where you can learn more about that. And, you know, if your child would be a good fit, we can talk about it. But anyway, back into the video here. Um, you know, the, the important thing to really have context on is if you want to help your child do this, like, they need to have a decent amount of time. Like, hopefully that makes logical sense. If you want to get good at something, the more time you can do it for the longer period of time, the better. And we start reverse engineering this stuff, you know, let's say you want to get to a scoring differential of -2 or better. Well, you know, how many years do you have and how much you need to improve? It's as simple as that. And if you know where you're at right now, you know where you need to get to, and you know, you can kind of like work with the numbers. You know, maybe 1.2 shots per year is enough. You just need to do kind of like what everyone else does. That's going to get you about average, which makes some sense. You know, if you want to improve, you want to do way better than that, you know, one option might be like, you know, become Tiger Woods's son. Maybe you can get to the 4.6. But even, you know, Charlie's got his own You know, kind of limits there. Um, obviously, like I said, I've kind of outlined my program, my stuff. That's something that's interesting to you, you can apply there. Um, but it's important that you can just think with these variables, right? So you don't have someone telling you something like, oh, well, you know, it doesn't matter until like, you know, last second. And then you just need to like send out emails and like show that you have a good attitude. You know, it's like, that's just nonsense. Um, and if someone wants to tell me otherwise, like, I'd love to see the data. I don't mean to be disrespectful. Um, But I've just, I've spent a lot of time looking at data and helping players, and I just, I don't see players who, you know, don't think about anything until they're 17 have a great time with recruiting. It's just really stressful and challenging, and I've helped a few of them pull it off, but it's not my preference. You know, I'd much rather work with a, you know, 11-year-old, 12-year-old, um, who's got a nice long runway ahead of them. They're shooting decent scores right now, maybe they're even shooting in the mid-80s, but we know we got a lot of time. Makes things really, really easy to accomplish their goals. So anyway, I hope this video is helpful for you guys. If you enjoyed it, go ahead and leave a like. Really helps push it out to more people in the algorithm and all that stuff. If you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, go ahead and subscribe. We drop a new video every single week. So once again, hopefully this was helpful for you guys, and I'll see you guys in the next one.