Why Junior Golfers Improve 1.2 Shots Per Year (And How To 4X That)

All right, what is going on everyone? In today's video, I want to talk about why the average junior golfer on Junior Golf Scoreboard only improves by about 1.2 shots per year, and how you can essentially almost 4 times that, um, by, by applying the process I'm about to walk you guys through. I would say that it's relatively easy, but I'm not gonna lie to you guys, um, improving golf is, is, you know, it's a challenge. Um, but I think the thing that most players lack that I'm gonna walk you guys through is precision about what they need to do specifically. So first point, first things first, I want to kind of articulate to you guys and show you guys what's actually happening here. So what I've done is I've pulled up kids from 2027, um, '28, '29, and '30, just so we can see a few years worth of data and see how their scoring differentials are changing year over year, and also how their scoring averages is changing year over year. What I've done here is I've pulled each one of these from the 50th percentile, or as close as I to the 50th percentile within Junior Golf Scoreboard. That way it's smoothed out, because if we just look at one individual player, we're going to have a survivorship bias, right? So we just look at the individual player, say, hey, the players who continuously stay ranked, they're going to tend to improve faster than whatever the average would be, simply because that they're actually getting that positive feedback. Hey, I'm getting better, I'm going to continue to do this. For a player who doesn't improve, you know, they might just say, hey, golf's not for me. Right? So that's why it's really important that we look at the 50th percentile rather than an individual player. Anyway, that aside, let's go ahead and look at this, right? So you got scoring differential of 4.34, you got scoring average of 79. Now let's go one year earlier. Again, same exact scoring average, slightly worse scoring differential. So, you know, the difference here is about 4.3, so that's about 1.3 shots. Just again, frame of reference here, trying to be as close to percentile as I can. Moving on to the next year, 78.76, scoring differential of 6.8. So again, the difference here is about 1.2. Again, trying to stay as close as I can to that 50th percentile here. Now let's go one year prior. We've got scoring average 77.36, scoring differential 8.38, and again staying close to that middle, um, number there. So in this case, there's a gap of about 1.4, 1.5, something like that. But all in all, one of the things you can actually see here— I didn't even plan this out— is as the players get older, their scoring differential got better, but their actual scoring average got worse in this particular case. And the reason for that, if you kind of pay attention to these yardages here, this is about 6,900 yards, 6,600 yards, and maybe they've been watching my videos or something like that. And, you know, here we're about 5,500 yards, right? Right? So we've really lengthened out the golf course. And this actually illustrates my point really, really nicely. And this is especially relevant to you if your child is somewhere in that kind of scoring range, you know, scoring after like 77, 78, 79, 80. Odds are they've been working really hard at it for some amount of time. You know, maybe they're newer to the game but they're very talented, or maybe they've been grinding at it their whole life and they're just like kind of right up against that ceiling where it's very, very difficult for them to get their scoring average lower than that. Are they going to have some days, you know, like this player, where they're going to shoot in the low— or, you know, low 70s, even in the 60s? Yes, absolutely. But they might feel like they're kind of up against this— against that ceiling. This video is going to be really, really helpful for you in that. So what we can see here is these players are shooting lower scores primarily because they hit the ball further. That's essentially what's happening here. Um, now it could be, you know, maybe they just increase their, their accuracy on their approach shots. I highly doubt it. Um, almost certainly what's happening is as the player gets bigger, right, they grow up, they get stronger, they're able to hit the ball farther. That's essentially what's happening here. And so that hitting the ball farther is worth about 1.2 shots per year. But caveat here, the player scores aren't going down. Now, to get to a scoring average, you're going to get recruited to play Division 1 golf, you need to be at about 72 to 74 scoring average. So hitting the ball further on its own does not get you there. And so one of the things that I've been able to show and, and see multiple times, I've worked with over 100 junior golfers at this point, is that yes, distance off the tee is awesome. When I was a junior golfer I hit it really far. I've seen a lot of kids where they hit 300 yards and they just really have a hard time scoring, right? Because you can hit it 300 yards and fat your wedge shot, and you're gonna think because you hit it 300 yards, therefore you shouldn't fat your wedge shots. And it's like, well, your tee shot game has nothing to do with, with your wedge play. And it's also, if you're gonna hit 300 yards, you're gonna hit it out of bounds twice around. That's also going to be a serious problem, right? So we always have to look at this from the context skills. Now anyway, how do we go about breaking the ceiling, right? This is why the average player only improves that much. Um, here's the other— before I dive into that, here's the other caveat. I know a lot of you guys watching this video, you guys are actually taking this seriously enough to watch YouTube videos on this exact subject, right? Probably with a— working with a coach probably like once a week. And I would bet that there's some level in your brain where you look at those lessons and you're like, I feel like we're kind of going over the same stuff every single lesson. I feel like we're not really like moving the needle. I feel like we're just doing this to do it. And you know, good on you for actually like making that investment, first of all. But second of all, I just want to validate that that's almost certainly the case. It's probably not moving the needle that much because every one of these players, I bet you any amount of money, they're all working with swing coaches. The problem with swing coaching as a default method— I get arrows for this, but it's the reality— is the incentive structure is screwed up. Right, for going in there to tweak the golf swing. You guys know at this level of golf that getting the golf swing a little bit better or more consistent is not what is actually going to get them over the hump, right? You see them making mistakes on the golf course where they add these compound mistakes, right? They hit in the trees and they, you know, instead of pitching out, they, you know, make a mental error, hit a tree trunk, make triple, right? You see them 3-putting, you see them chunking their shots around the greens maybe. Or just making bad strategic choices on par 5s. Those are all things that are going to come out and they're going to hurt them. And it's not because their golf swing's not good enough, it's not because they haven't figured it out yet, it's, it's because that's all they're working on is just their golf swing mechanics. And they get into a tournament and they get kind of, you know, psyched out, they have a spiral, they have a few holes where they can't figure it out. Um, you know, it's like having more lessons isn't going to change that, right? With What actually needs to happen is, is they need to do what I'm gonna walk you guys through. Um, yeah, also full disclosure, this is what I do for a living. This is all I do. Um, I work with junior golfers, help them develop. Um, I walk them through the process. I'm gonna show you guys obviously in a lot more detail. If that's something you're interested in, there's a link below, um, where you can apply to work with me. Um, every player I work with is, is one-on-one. It's not like a team of me, it's, it's all me. And so if that's something you're interested, um, you can fill out the application, make sure it's a good fit, and then if it is, then we'll, we'll talk it over, make sure, make sure it makes sense. I'm also talking about junior golfers Scoreboard. If you're like, hey, I don't even know what Junior Golf Scoreboard is, how do I get these ranked tournaments, stuff like that, I've also got a link below, um, where you can actually purchase my framework for how I pick out tournaments. You can even add on a one-on-one call with me if you guys want that. So that aside, those two things are down there. Anyway, how do we actually break this ceiling, right? So we know we're gonna hit the ball further over time, we're gonna get bigger, all that stuff. How do we actually shoot lower scores though? Because it's not go work with our swing coach every single week. I think that can be clearly demonstrated here, right? Now what do we need to do? Foundation: we need to track our statistics. We need to know what's actually going out on the golf course. This is one of the things that, uh, really hurts swing coaches, and it's not their fault, right? You're paying them $100 an hour, you know, maybe if they're a good swing coach you're paying $200 an hour. Maybe if you're going to really one of the big boys, maybe you're paying them $500 an hour, right? You're paying them some serious cash. Here's a problem: I see this at every single level. Junior golfers do not track their statistics. And because junior golfers do not track their statistics en masse, which is to say, if I'm a swing coach, the majority of people who come through my door do not— or onto my lesson tee— do not track their statistics. Why is that a problem? It's a problem because as a coach, I have to have an incentive structure of like, how do I learn as a coach, right? Like, how do I actually apply stuff? And if I rely on something like statistics and I know the average player who comes onto my lesson tee doesn't track their statistics, then I can't use it as a metric, right? I can't, I can't invest the time to really understand how these different statistics play together, right? I just have to go based off the stuff that I can see, which is like, I want you to hit some golf balls in front of me and then I'm going to film your swing and you're going to tell me what's wrong and I'm going to try and explain, you know, what you need to do to fix it. And, you know, hopefully it works out. If you play bad in a tournament, hey, well, guess we need another lesson. And I can always kind of— I can fudge it a little bit, um, for lack of a better term, because the incentive structure for that coach, um, is, is for them to spend more time with you, right? So hopefully that makes sense. That's not a knock on swing coaches, um, that's just the reality of, of the situation, right? Every swing coach would love to have every player track their statistics, be able to get better results from that, but it's just not the reality for me. I charge a decent chunk of, of— it's a decent investment to work with me, um, It's not anything crazy, but it's an amount where at least the majority of students have to take it seriously, right? There's a high incentive to do that, right? And so that's part of why I've been able to make this investment of time. So gotta track our statistics. My preferred tool called Draw More Circles. When I work with students, I give them a $500 discount off of it. It's not cheap, um, but it's the best tool out there in my experience. You guys might be like, hey, what about Decade? What about, uh, Clipped? What about Arccos? Whatever. Um, I've tried all of them. This one's the best, um, in part because I've been able to have input in the actual statistics that they track. All the statistics that I'm talking about in this video, they're the only ones to do all of them and also have the drill-down metrics that we need. So anyway, appreciate you bearing with me here. So, so we're going to track our statistics. Um, ideally we want to look at 5 to 10 rounds of golf, ideally 10. Regardless, even with a tool like this, we're gonna get a bunch of just nonsense, just stuff that's not helpful at all. Um, I know some people are like real fond of, um of strokes gained. I'm not a big fan, um, to be perfectly honest. I really am not a big fan for junior golfers. I think that a lot of times junior golfers have much clearer problems. I think that it's very important that a junior golfer can conceptualize what they're being asked to do as well. So an example of that is, if I look at a strokes gained perspective, if we hit the ball on the green and, you know, we hit it 30 feet on average and we should be hitting it to 27 feet, there's no way I can explain that visually to a junior golfer, right? That just creates this existential thing of, I feel like I should be getting it closer, which causes us to make mistakes. Versus if I say, I want you to hit one more green per round, they can understand what that means. They can say, oh, I need to hit the green. Okay, cool. I can see that. I can actually go and try and implement that. Now, if we have a case where we have super high greens regulation and we have terrible proximity, okay, fine. Like, we can, we can solve that problem at some point if that is actually a problem. I've almost never seen that be the case. I've seen very, very rarely super high greens regulation and crazy bad proximity. So proximity takes care of itself. We need greens regulation. That aside, we need to track these statistics so we can actually see what's going on in the player's game. We need to know why they shoot the numbers that they shoot. It's not just that they shoot 79. Why is it? Because we get 2 balls out of bounds per round? Is it because we 3-putt 3 times per round? Is it because when we don't hit the green regulation, we just make a mess, right? Is it because we have, you know, these, these compounding mistakes? Um, is it because we have one one bad hole, and all of a sudden we start spiraling. We have to be able to identify what's going on and not just, hey, I think this is what happens, because that's where most families stop. They say, hey, we've got a problem, you know, they have a bad hole, they spiral, and then, you know, they shoot 83, right? Like that, as much as it seems like that's a solution, it's not, because we haven't quantified what it actually is. Because we do not go from have this problem where I'm losing 3 shots per round to I completely fixed it, now I don't lose any shots. That's not reality. And again, example, 1.2 shots per year being the average, right? People aren't getting better, they're not shooting lower scores. And so if we're able to say, hey, this one thing, if we clean this up, it's worth 3 shots per round on average, well, we can go from 3 shots to 2 shots. It's still a problem, still might be the biggest problem, but we're a shot better. Right? So it's understanding that a lot of the times the things that we need to do to shoot lower scores are not as hard as we think, but we need to have them more clearly defined so that we can work hard at them for a longer period of time and know, okay, cool, I fixed it. Like I've gotten past that. I'm onto the next highest priority thing. Right? So anyway, we've got these statistics here. When I'm working with students, there's 5 stats that I like to look at. There's a proprietary sheet that I built myself for all my students. If you're really good at math, you could figure out how to do this for yourself along with doing Excel. But, um, penalty rate, greens regulation, scrambling, 3-putts, and birdie conversion rate— those are the statistics that I like to look at. That neatly segregates the game into pretty much all the skills that your child needs to have. If you know their statistics for these, then you're going to be able to break this down and say, okay, out of all the things that we could improve, what's going to have the biggest impact on their scores? Is it penalty rate off the tee? Is that way too high? Is it greens regulation? Is it scrambling? Is it 3-putts? Is it birdie conversion rate? A lot of coaches do the thing where they're like, hey, your scrambling needs to get better, your short game needs to get better, you should par. And then when I look at that player's statistics, I'm like, well, they hit 45% of their greens. There's no chance they're gonna have a scoring average of 72. It's just not possible. They can't get that good at their short game, right? So it's understanding where the leverage is, right? Um, And so just, just for the sake of this video, I'm going to give you 3 of them just off the top here. Compound errors, number 1. Compound errors, what I'm going to refer to as stuff where it's like can't get out of the bunker 3 times, right? If that happens at any frequency, that's a major opportunity. If your child could just figure that one thing out, forget everything else, forget the rest of their practice plan, forget every single swing lesson they ever get, they just figure out that one thing, it's probably worth a few shots to them. Pitching out of the trees, right? If we're hitting tree trunks in the trees, almost certainly we've got a few shots right there. So just those two things alone— chunking your chip shots, blading your chip shots, stuff like that— you just figure out how to chip, get a ball out of bunker, and pitch out of the trees— that's probably worth a couple shots to them if they do that in frequency that you're like, oh yeah, that happens. There's probably a decent chunk of shots that they have right there. And they could be in a spot where they have a scoring average of 79. All the way down to 77, just right there, just by knowing the right thing. But I told you I was going to give you 3 of these, okay? Penalties off the tee, huge one. You can hit as many good tee shots as you want, you hit 2 balls out of bounds, that's gonna crush your scores. It's also gonna crush your greens regulation, but it's gonna crush your scores. So getting that under control— primarily the place where I see a lot of players get killed with this one is they just try and hit the ball straight. And most swing coaches tolerate the idea of hitting the ball straight. A lot of swing coaches even push back on the idea that you should curve the golf ball any substantial amount. I completely reject that. I think that's completely crazy. I think if you watch any of the shot tracer videos on the PGA Tour, LPGA Tour, you see them curving the golf ball. So we need to have reliable curve, right? Doesn't mean it's going to curve a ton every single time. So I'm saying, not saying we're Bubba Watson here trying to, you know, sling the golf ball 50 yards. But I am saying that ball should be curving in a predictable way where you can aim down, you know, let's say right-handed player, you're gonna draw off the tee, should be able to aim down the right rough and know that ball is going to draw and know the farthest right you're going to hit that is just high block right. And know, hey, if I'm going to miss this thing left, I've got to hook this thing 60 yards before it's gone. Just make that adjustment instead of trying to hit the ball straight where you cut your literal margin for error in half. You're going to cut down your penalties, especially if you train that in practice. It's a whole other topic. Beyond that, 3-putting, specifically lag putting and shorter putts. If we can clean those two things up, you're going to cut down on 3-putts. You just do that alone, you're a mildly decent ball striker, you can definitely get in the mid-70s just, just on that alone, right? Now obviously, want more precision? This is what I do. Um, fill out the application below. But that's just kind of a starting point. The thing that is really missing for most junior golfers, they don't have this level of precision with their own game. They don't understand, hey, I'm struggling this area specifically. I hit 50%, I need to hit 55%, right? 55%, I want to get to 60%. Being able to have that precision in your game is crucial. Not just, oh yeah, I know what's going on. I, I mean, it's like, you know, sometimes I have students that sign up with me, we start working together, and they're so certain that they know what's going on in their game that they think, oh, I don't need to track my stats. And it's like those kids always get stalled out, right? They all— they always don't improve. And I'm just like, dude, just do the thing I told you to do. Like, I— this is through a lot of pain. Like, I've done the old method. Like, I've done the thing of like, you know, swing coach and all that. It's like it just doesn't work as well. And, and it's like, I will admit, like, to a fault, sometimes I have kids where they have goofy looking golf swings and I just haven't touched it because I've never even looked at it, right? They're hitting 55% of their greens. I'm just like, yeah, you 3-putt 3 times per round. It's like, I don't care what your golf swing looks like. Then I look at the golf swing, I'm just like, that's horrific. I can't believe you shoot these scores. But who cares, right? How dumb would it be if Scottie Scheffler decided he wanted to change his golf swing because it looks a little bit weird, right? Doesn't make any sense. So anyway, I was going to go to practice. I think I've given you guys plenty on this. I'm just going to go one step further, just kind of like validate my claim here. So this spreadsheet I use to track all my students, right? I'm not saying that every student who ever works with me is a superstar instantly. As you can see, I've got a little, a little tiny handful, a little less than a handful of students who have actually not gotten better. And so the primary reason for that, of these players who aren't improving quite as much, is because we're not tracking those rounds as much. Some of those are also a little bit more, um, newer students, right? So like this one's kind of like hedge. This player's actually doing a good job tracking his stuff, he's just a little bit more recent. Um, this player's not tracking his stuff. And then let's see here, this one's a little bit more recent as well, so he just had a lot of, had a lot of movement there. He's been doing a good job though. So anyway, we've But you can also see, because I tracked the number of rounds the last 3 months, right, how often we're tracking. As you can kind of see, high correlation— more rounds tracked, better results. Um, and I've kind of got it as color-coded, so guys who are kind of below the average versus below the net overall, or like, you know, whatever, average on Junior College Scoreboard. Anyway, average all students, 3.36. That's like every student I've ever worked with, um, or at least within this model here. Players who've got a minimum of 13 rounds averaging about 4.78 shots per year, so it's pretty close to about 4x the 1.2. And then, you know, players who are logging less than 9 rounds, they're only improved by about 1.2 shots per year, right? Benchmark, Charlie Woods, 4.75 shots obviously per year. Um, you know, Charlie Woods is obviously in a position where he's got infinite resources here. So if I'm just saying, hey, you apply this process, you log a round of golf per week to play Division 1 golf. Um, it's not really— it's not really that big of a jump here. Um, so just to kind of like recap for you guys, if your child isn't improving as fast as you know they could, especially if they kind of hit that like high 70s, low 80s range, there's not— they're not improving, then the key here is we need to start getting more precise about what their game actually looks like. Then be more precise about what we're going to do to fix it and what the highest priority is there, right? Because we start getting to the point where we can't just like work out there forever, right? You know, it's like there's— if your solution to this is like, oh, we'll work even harder, we're going to do homeschooling, it's like, no, don't, don't do that. Just get more precise about what your child is actually doing and you'll start to see that, that progress. And so again, something you want help with, link in the description. But otherwise, just start tracking their statistics. That on its own can make a massive difference. I know Circles has a 5-day free trial. So if you want to try it— or not 5-day, 5-round free trial. So you just want to try it out and just see if your kid will even do the stats, you got that option. But start tracking these statistics and really start to identify, like, here's our agenda. We know the stats are going to fluctuate, but this is the really thing— this is the thing that's really gonna have the biggest impact. Let's focus here, which you'll find scores start coming down pretty quickly. So hopefully you guys enjoyed this video, and I'll see you guys in the next one.