Why Most Junior Golfers Only Improve 1.18 Shots

What's going on guys? In today's video, I'm going to be covering why most junior golfers only improve by 1.18 shots per year and how to fix it. If you're new to the channel, this is the type of stuff that we cover every single week. It's all about helping your junior golfer develop to play better golf and ultimately get recruited to play Division 1 golf. So if that sounds like something that would be helpful for you, go ahead and hit the subscribe button below. So Like I said, in this video we are going to be covering why most junior golfers only improve by 1.18 shots per year. Um, now that is a very specific number, but that's based on research. Uh, when we look at the scoring averages and the improvement of those players on a ranking index like Junior Golf Scoreboard, the average player is improving by about 1.18 shots per year. And the way that we're getting that number is by looking at cohorts year over year. So you have a particular size of your cohort. If you apply, if you look at the middle 50%, how much is that average player improving over the course of those subsequent years, you're going to see about 1.18 shots per year of improvements, which means that some players are going to do way better than that, some players are going to do way worse. But the average, the middle number, you should expect to improve by 1.18 shots per year. Now, when I first saw this, my first instinct was, Well, that kind of sucks. This is not very good. You know, the average family spends an enormous amount of money, close to $10,000 or even north of that per year just on instruction. And to see that they only improved by about 1.18 shots per year is pretty remarkable. So in this video, we're gonna be going over how do you actually fix that. Now, it involves us first understanding something that is really foundational. A lot of families believe that if you just practice more, you're gonna get better. And that's just not true. And it's really important to kind of wrap your head around that. Spending more time on the driving range does not mean we're going to shoot lower scores. We could potentially, maybe, but again, it only is going to drive lower scores if it's actually causing us to— if we're actually working on something that is going to cause us to improve. And a lot of the time, that's not actually the case. A lot of the time, junior golfers, for example, you might be hitting balls with their 7-iron, they're trying trying to maybe improve their golf swing. But when you look at their game statistically, what's actually happening is they're 3-putting about 3 times per round. And the 3-putting might be occurring because their lag putting is poor. Maybe from 40 feet, their average second putt is something like 7 feet in proximity. And so you can kind of look at that and say, well, what's our biggest issue as far as like, you know, shooting lower scores? And also, where's the biggest opportunity to shave a few shots off of our scores? And I can assure you that the biggest bang for your buck for your child is not going to be, you know, first and foremost, hitting more greens with a 7-iron if they're 3-putting 3 times per round and they have the opportunity to just sharpen up their lag putting a little bit. That's not going to take very long and it's going to be very impactful to their overall score. So that's kind of an example of that. Another one of those things that we'll see is, you know, time spent with the coach means that we're going to improve more. If we can just get more hours with our coach, that's the thing that's keeping us from improving is we just don't see our coach enough. Things like that. Time spent getting instruction in general. So this could be, you know, obviously the coaching example, but it could also be, you know, seeing a fitness coach, it could be seeing a mindset coach or sports psychologist or something like that. The basic idea here is a lot of parents, a lot of junior golfers get this idea in their head that what they need to do is more, they need to spend more time in order to get better results. And in my experience, that just isn't— that isn't true at all. The reality is measured improvement leads to real progress. So what do I actually mean by that? Well, we want to be able to approach things systematically. We want to be able to say, okay, I have an objective, I have something I'm trying to accomplish in this practice session. And I need to be able to measure that because otherwise I'm just going out there and just doing a bunch of stuff. And we've already established that just doing stuff doesn't get us to where we want to go, or at least it gets us mediocre results. If you're good with improving by 1.18 shots per year, by all means, do whatever you want. But this is for you if you're trying to actually do better than that. So the first kind of foundational question you want to be able to ask is like, where are you trying to get to? Like, and this is, this is a very simple question. But it's a profound question. Where do you want to get to? If you've got a junior golfer who wants to play Division 1 golf, that's primarily what I'm, you know, the type of players that I'm working with. You want to get to a place where you have a scoring average about 72-74. That's, that should be the goal. The sooner you can get there, the better, but that should be the goal. Now, the next question you want to be asking yourself is what is the most impactful thing you could do right now to get there? Again, very simple, maybe a little bit more complicated. But it's a relatively simple premise. Out of all the things we could do, because we could do an infinite number of things, what is the thing that is going to have the highest probability of getting us there? What is going to have the biggest impact right now? And so if we're, let's say we're scoring average at 80, we want to get down to 72 or 74. What's the easiest way to do that? And this is going to be different on a per-player basis. You want to be able to look at their numbers. Ideally, if you guys aren't tracking statistics, got a bunch of videos on the channel about tracking statistics. But that's what you want to be looking at and say, okay, we're at 80 right now. What do we need to focus on in order to get a shot better, 2 shots better, 3 shots better, and 4 shots better? Because it's probably not going to be all the same thing. But you want to be able to ask yourself that question. What is the most impactful thing you can do right now to get there? Next one is, what is the best method to achieve that? So when we're looking at You know, I might say that per the example earlier, let's say we're 3-putting 3 times around, we're shooting 80 on average, we're 3-putting 3 times around. Why, why is that the case? And also, what's the best way for us to be able to improve that? So there's lots of different ways that you could work on your putting. You could work on with a metronome, you could work on a putting mat, you could work on your stroke, you could work on your speed. You got to be able to understand what is the best way to address that particular issue. And so I'm not going to be able to go in this video all the way deep dive into, you know, all the different potential putting drills you do and how those things are connected and so on and so forth. Um, that is, we'll cover that in other videos, but you want to be able to say like, am I using the best method possible? So just, I'll give you guys one for the sake of the speed analogy. If we've identified that the reason that we're 3-putting too much is because our lag putting is poor from, let's say, 20 to 50 feet or 20 to 40 feet, then we're going to want to make sure that when we go out there and practice, we're not just doing putting drills, we're working on specifically lag putting from 20 to 40 feet, and we're specifically trying to better our average second putt proximity to get better than what it is currently, right? So if it was 7 feet, you know, maybe we're trying to get to 6 feet, 5 feet, 4 feet. We're trying to get it to a spot that is going to lower our overall 3-putt rate. Now, how are you going to measure if this method is effective, right? Because I can have my ideas about, hey, you should use this drill, you should practice this way, or you might have particular drills that you use to address these particular things. But if you're just going out there and grinding real hard and you think you're— you've kind of addressed, you know, 1, 2, and 3, If you screw this one up, you screw the whole thing up. Uh, because if you're not measuring whether or not your practice is effective, you're really, you're at square one. You're just doing stuff. And this is truthfully where I see the majority of junior golfers that I talk to. And it's not, it's not through fault of their own. It's just no one's really walked them through this process. You're watching this video so you don't have to make these same mistakes, but you need to make sure that you're measuring that progress. So my recommendation, when you're measuring is say, we're going to go out there and practice. What's the point of practice? The point of practice is to improve a particular skill or set of skills. That's it. And with the ultimate goal of lowering our scores. So how do we know if we've accomplished that? Well, it can't just be based on whether or not we do the drill better. Sure, that's nice. But to be honest, it doesn't really matter. What matters is when we go to the golf course, do we shoot lower scores? And then more specifically, do our skills, the statistics that reflect that skill improve? So for example, in our 3-putting example, does my average proximity get tighter? Not just in the practice, but actually on the golf course. And then do I see my 3-putt rate go down? And if I do see that, I'm going to see my average score go down unless other parts of my game fall apart. So, and that's why it's important to have a well-structured practice. You can't just say, hey, this is the biggest thing. I'm gonna just screw everything else. I'm just going to work on this one particular area. You have to work on the whole thing, but you need to be able to look at each one of those areas in a strategic way to make sure you're consistently improving, your junior golfer is consistently improving. So those are, those are really the keys when we're talking about how do you actually improve much, much faster than normal. It all comes down to being very precise about how your junior golfer or how you're spending your time. So just kind of in summary here, if we were trying to like plaster this, data-driven improvement beats random practice every day, all day. And to be honest, if you guys go out there and you've probably experienced this, you can actually have a situation where you practice so much, you actually get worse. And that's just a product of, you know, if you're just random stuff, you're going to get random results, right? Sometimes it can be better. Sometimes it's going to be worse. But if you're deliberate about the way you're spending your time, then you're going to improve, you know, very consistently, you're gonna be able to model out, okay, well, I think that these things are going to happen based on where I'm at, what my numbers are telling me. So hopefully this video makes sense. Hopefully it's helpful for you. This is going to be part of an entire series around tournament performance and how you can improve that. If you've enjoyed this video, go ahead and leave a like below. And if you want me to map this out for your junior golfer, if you want me to build your junior golfer's practice plan, if you want help with that, or just kind of seeing like, where you guys stand and what your child needs to do to play Division I golf, or if they're even likely to play Division I golf right now, there'll be a link below this video where you can learn a little bit more about my process. And we can actually sit down and look at your junior golfer's specific situation and kind of model out where are they right now? What do they need to do specifically? And make sure that you have a roadmap that you can execute on rather than just random information about, oh, these are the things you should do to play Division I golf. So once again, hope this video was helpful for you guys, and I'll see you in the next one.