Why Most Junior Golfers Plateau Even When They're Practicing More

All right, in this video I'm going to be covering why junior golfers plateau and how to fix it. So when I talk about plateaus, obviously I mean plateaus in the player's scores. And so it's important to understand why that happens, right? So, you know, odds are your child starts off, they start taking golf seriously at some point, you know, maybe they're 10, 11, 12, 13. You know, they start taking golf seriously and they start playing golf on a regular basis, right? They start playing golf on a weekly or multiple times per week, or sometimes every single day, all day, right? So there's a period of time where they go from shooting— just call it high numbers, 190, something like that— and they, you know, are consistently improving, right? Like, they're, they're consistently shooting lower and lower and lower scores, and they're making progress. Eventually, at some point run into a wall, right? And so in this video, I really want to talk about like why that actually happens. And so what I'm going to do here is a spreadsheet that I give to all my students, um, to really help them understand why they shoot the scores they shoot. Um, and so I'm just going to go and model this out here for you. So let's say we got a 15% penalty rate. Let's say we hit 30% of our greens. So we get up and down 10%, 20% of the time. So we 3-putt 25% of the time. Let's say say we have like 5% birdie conversion rate, and then let's say we shoot 95 on average. Let's say that's your starting point for, for your child, right? And so in this case, yeah, we have a lot of stuff that we could go ahead and do, right? So we got a scoring average of 95, and based off of all their statistics, they should have a scoring average of 89. So which means we've got 6 compound errors per round, right? So these are scenarios where we have missed the green on approach, and maybe we're chunking our chip shots, blading our chip shots, don't get out of the bunker, leave it in the bunker multiple times. Um, you know, hit it in the trees and then, you know, hit a tree trunk, make triple. Uh, we've got an approach shot, we hit in the water, right? Um, things of that nature, right? And so for them, they've got 6 shots right there that essentially boils down to like clean contact around the greens or pitch out or don't hit the ball in a water hazard, where it's like they could hit the same number of greens, but that would just be like, you know, cutting down some of those compounded mistakes. Right? We've got 25% 3-putt rate, right? That means we've got 5 3-putts per round on a relatively small number of greens hit. So, you know, in this case, um, you know, we're looking at something in the range of, you know, we're hitting 30 greens, which— or 30% of our greens, which is going to be whatever that is, like 6, I want to say, something like that, somewhere in that range. All right, so we're 3-putting essentially every green that we hit. In this hypothetical, right? Obviously, 3 putts includes more than just the greens that we didn't hit, right? Includes all of the greens. And so scrambling, kind of negligent here. We got penalties. We also got 3 penalties per round. You know, a good shot— these penalties are bringing down what this greens regulation would otherwise be, right? So there's a compounded effect here too. So let's just say by sheer hard work and, you know, just self-awareness, right, your child is able to say, hey, we're able to cut down these penalties to 10%. So they're able to get the 3-putt rate down to 15%, and maybe they hit a couple more greens because they cut down that penalty rate. And then, you know, maybe they're, they're down to like 87 or something like that, right? So they stopped chunking so many of their shots, start getting balls out of the green, right? So now we've gone from scoring average 95 to 87. Pretty substantial progress, right? I mean, we talk about the average player I work with improves by about 4 shots per year. Granted, a lot of the players that I work with are past this level. Not to say that I don't work with kids at this level, it's just, you know, obviously if I'm working with a bunch of kids who have scoring average 71, we're not going to improve by 4 shots per year anyway. We can look at that and your child's still got a lot of meat on this bone, right? So they can say again, like, okay, well let's go ahead and get this down like 5%. And of course they're not thinking like this, right? Let's say this got down to like 10%. Maybe this gets up to 40%, and again, you know, maybe we're able to continue to cut down on those compound errors. Maybe we don't have any compound errors anymore. We've got a scoring average of 83, right? We still got a penalty rate that could technically be a little bit lower. We've got 3 putts, technically be a little bit lower, but we're a lot closer to that kind of bottomed out, you know, position that we would want to be in, right? And so it's really important to understand this from, from the perspective of, as your child improves there are fewer and fewer things that they can do that are going to have these— the same impact, um, that they would otherwise. And this hypothetical here, your child's improved by 12 shots. In theory, this could happen over a very short period of time because the fundamental underlying skills are like lag putting, hitting a ball in play off the tee, and not chunking our chip shots, or getting the ball out of the bunker. Those are all pretty basic skills, but they have a huge impact on your child's ability to improve. And there's a certain sense where it's like, if they just play enough golf they can clean a lot of that stuff up just, just by sheer effort, not even paying attention, just like literally being out there, right? But here's the thing, let's get them to the point where they've got no penalties. Let's say they've got them down like 7%, 3-pie rate, which is honestly pretty, pretty good. And we got a scoring average of, again, let's just say 82. Now we're starting to get into a tougher position. What do we have as our options here? Now this is where a lot of people screw up. We'll go over to something like, hey, let's try and get up and down rate like 50%. And that sounds cool and all, but it's like when we start— we actually do the math on this, we go from 20% to 50%. Let's just say hypothetically we could even get there, which I'm skeptical with these statistics that we could. But let's say we get to that 50%. What does that give us? We got a scoring average— projected scoring average of 78. Doesn't do a lot for us, not if we want to play Division 1 golf. Right? And so again, we're kind of in this tough position here. We start saying, oh, I need to make more birdies, let me get this up. It's like, what— let's say we got all the way to 20%, which would be phenomenal, right? It's like, that's still got us stuck at a scoring average of 77, right? We're getting up and down all the time, you know, you've got a pretty high birdie conversion rate. We're not really 3-putting, we don't have balls up, we're stuck, right? And so what we have to do is we have to be a little bit more precise about what's the next move that we take, right? If we just go out there and outcomes, right? And so a lot of cases, players get into this mode, they start saying, oh, I got to take my game seriously. Now we start seeing the coach weekly or more than weekly, and we start trying to change the swing to make it more consistent. And sometimes that plays out, but a lot of times it's still kind of inconsistent. Maybe it's just better, but it's still inconsistent, right? Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not good. And maybe that's on a shot-per-shot basis. One shot they're flushing it, the next shot laying the sod over it, right, going back and forth. It's like, well, one day it's all going to click. Now, I've worked with over 100 junior golfers at this point. I have yet to see a single junior golfer where it just clicks. I've looked at thousands of rounds of data. I have never once seen a player where it just clicks indefinitely. There are times, periods, where obviously players hit it better than other times, but I've never once seen a situation where it just clicks, right? Improvement is an incremental thing that happens over time. And the best way to shoot yourself in the foot, which I see junior golfers do all the time, is think, hey, I'm gonna get 10 shots better in one summer. Just doesn't happen. It's not how it works, right? And so that requires a few things, right? First of all, it requires an honest assessment of the player's game, which they're not able to supply and you're not able to supply in all likelihood unless you track their statistics on a regular basis. As in you track everything and you're able to segregate out tournaments versus practice, right? It's not just like one of those things where it's, oh hey, like we play great in practice and then we struggle in tournaments, and it's like, okay cool, what are our statistics based off of? Oh well, they're based off of practice. Kind of useless then. So you want to have as much data as humanly possible to be able to say, okay, here's where we are at objectively, right? And here's what we're going to do with that data, right? So you also have to have the right data points. Like there's just so many stats tools out there and a lot of them don't have things like as basic as a penalty right off the tee, which boggles my mind. My recommendation, I use a tool called Draw More Circles. They're phenomenal. Um, but what we get to in this point, right, we got a scoring average, let's call it E1 here. What we can actually do here, and I, I know the answer to this already, but just so you guys can see this here, if I move this from 40 to 45, right, 5% improvement, I'm going to improve that score by 0.77 shots. If I improve scrambling by— from 20% to 25%, I improve my scoring average by 0.54 shots. If I improve from 7% 3-putts to 2%, that's 0.9 shots. But I think it's pretty hard to get down to 2%. I don't see a lot of players at that, so I'd call it 3%. So that's 0.72 shots. Okay. And then if I got birdie conversion rate up by 10%, then that's 0.36 shots, right? So this is where I see players getting screwed up because they think, oh, I need to make more birdies. And it's just like, no, no you don't. And like, mathematically, no you don't, right? It's, it's being able to look at all of these things and say, out of all these things that I could do, I can actually say mathematically the biggest impact is getting greens regulation up. And so that answers one question, right? We need to hit more greens, wrap our heads around that. Next layer to this is go a room deeper. How, how do we do that? Just get the golf swing better. Well, we're already trying to do that, right? That's not, that's not necessarily that helpful, right? So we need to know, okay, here's big, big picture statistic here. That's the thing that's going to improve us the most, right? We need to know, okay, cool, where within that is the easiest place to improve the player's statistic, right? Is there a particular yardage gap where they're not hitting the ball on the green, you know, as well as they ought to, right? And how do you define what it— you know, what they ought to, right? Personally, for me, I like to look at it from the perspective where the biggest drop-off is, right? So if I were hitting 80%, 70% of our greens and we go to like 70%, 30%, that's usually the place to pick up, right? Because it could be as simple as like, hey, we go from hitting a 7-iron and that's fine to a 6-iron, it's a disaster, right? So it's like, we just get a little bit better hitting our 6-iron, it's got a really big impact, right? So that's, that's one avenue, right? That's deliberate practice. We have another avenue here where we can look at strategy, right? We can look at par 3, par 4, par 5. What's our on-green percentages there? Are there any, um, arbitrages, for lack of a better term, that we can look at? Right? So par 5s are one of the ones that I reference all the time. If we're able to lay up to a number where we have a higher on-green percentage comparatively to our greens regulation, then we should do that, and we're going to pick up that, that green per round, right? So this is where for me it's like, yeah, at a very tactical level, we can improve by this, you know, shot per quarter. But it's also— there's a lot of things where it's just like, we can get a shot right away if we're able to implement the strategy, right? Sometimes there's mindset stuff, just having a little bit of a mental shift of what to expect out of ourselves. Might cut down on compound errors, might just kind of like lower our general anxiety, might give us a clearer perspective what we're trying to do, and we're going to be able to execute on that better, right? If I just say I don't care how many greens you hit versus I say now I actually do care how many greens you hit, that's going to change the outcome, right? There could be the strategy element, right, of hey, maybe we're trying to hit it straight at every single pin and we're getting pulls and pushes, and you know, every time we hit a ball it's falling away from the pin, right? So understanding, hey, here's where my ball should be starting and here's how much it should be curving, and then practicing that in a structured way on the golf— or on on the driving range and then seeing it on the golf course, having that bleed into our alignment, which I see is a really common problem among junior golfers where we can't align ourselves effectively on the golf course. See a lot of parents talk about that as well. And so there's so many of these little tiny things that used to not matter for these more broad brush issues, right? Like penalties off the tee, you don't necessarily have to be that strategic about how exactly you're playing. You're just like, I don't want to hit it out of bounds. I can intuitively figure that out. Lag putting, same thing. It's like, well, you could intuitively figure that out. You can get better at making your short putts, right? You could be a little bit more stable with your stroke, right? But some of those more nuanced things, a little bit more difficult, right, to be able to see that stuff. So we have to start measuring what's going on, and then we have to start quantifying. Hey, it's getting harder and harder to make this progress. I have to narrow down my focus into one thing that I'm really trying to move. I can move that one thing, great, then I can move on to the next thing, right? So in this hypothetical here, as I, again, already know how this math's gonna turn out, I can go to this again and I can say, all right, well, we got to 45%. What if we got to 50%? We're gonna improve by 0.77, and we're gonna continue to improve by 0.77 until, you know, as long as we want to, right? So for me, typically I see this cap out around 70%. Do I see players get above that sometimes? Yeah, for sure. Is it realistic to kind of stay way above that? I don't see it, right? It's kind of like the 2% 3x rate. It's like, could you do it? Are you gonna do it for an extended period of time? Probably not. So 70% is kind of where I had my cutoff here. But you'll notice we haven't changed anything else, right? We're shooting 82, we get all the way up 70%, now we're shooting 76.9, right? Now, odds are, just passively, almost all cases that I see You see scrambling is going to come up passively. Why scrambling is going to come up passively? Because we have more control over our golf ball by increasing our greens regulation. We'll have to have developed that skill, and that has a compounded effect into our scrambling, right? And so, you know, same thing for penalty rate off the tee. If we cut down penalty rate, it has a compounded effect into our greens regulation, has compounded effect into our scrambling, right? So all these statistics are connected. And so if I get my, my greens regulation up. My scrambling is also going to come up, right? Now this is one that we're gonna have a little bit of tension on. Putt— our total, our 3-putt rate might come up a little bit because we're hitting more greens, we have more opportunities to 3-putt, right? So we have to develop that skill. So to maintain this, technically 3-putts has still improved, right? So we have to be working on our putting. I'm not just saying, hey, go put all your focus into one thing, don't practice anything else. I'm just saying, hey, we're thinking about what do we blow up and what do we just like incrementally improve. Or just like practice but don't really pay too much attention to. We want to have our main thing we're trying to move, and then everything else just kind of like exists in the background. We don't think about it, we're still doing it, but we're not, we're not blowing it up. We're not going to the drawing board. We're not exercising brainpower on it. We're trying to be as efficient as possible. And this is one of the reasons why the students that I work with, I'm telling them, I want you to play one round of golf per week, and I want you to play— I want you to have one practice session per week. And even if they've got a high academic schedule, it fits really, really nicely for, you know, whatever they're doing because it's about being efficient. Um, not just because obviously, you know, I have limited time, you know, more rigorous our academics are, but it's also like we've got limited brain power as is, right? They can't go out there and focus for 10 hours straight. They just can't, right? It doesn't matter how physically able to, there's mentally they're not going to be able to do that. Um, and I'm sure you've seen this where it's like, you know, the reps that, you know, 30 minutes in are totally different from the reps that, you know, 4 hours in. right? So you got to know where to cut that. Typically for me it's about 2 hours. And so this allows us to say, okay, out of all these things, what do we do next? Now in this case, this is pretty absurd, but it's like, okay, we got to start bringing up pre-conversion rate. Just kind of like fast forward on this a little bit. This is a very reasonable range for a player who plays Division 1 golf to end up in, right? Where we've got zero penalties, we're in about 70% of our greens. Ideally for boys we're doing this about 7,000 yards, girls closer about 6,000, 5,800 yards. Scram is 40-ish. You know, in this case, 3-putting is a bit high technically for a D1 player, but still reasonable. 25% birdie conversion rate. It's going to be a lot of like make putts from like 10 to 15 feet. Gets a little bit into green reading, Aimpoint if you're familiar with that. It's definitely a thing to be leveraging here. Now we've got a projected scoring average of 73.3, and if we look at Junior Golf Scoreboard, we're gonna have plenty of players in that range, right? So it's being able to prioritize for, for your child What are the— what's the statistical story for them? And then, you know, how are they strategically going to get these additional greens in regulation or get this, you know, improvement in their birdie conversion rate or what have you, and knowing precisely what to do in order to make that happen? Because one thing, look around, so this can be like, oh yeah, you know, my kid, you know, they've got these statistics too, like they need to get 70% as well, right? But it's like, how do you go about doing that, right? Again, are we blowing up the golf swing? In all cases probably not a great idea. Maybe it is, but you know, probably not. And if it was, and we want to know specifically why we're doing that, right? It's a contact issue, is it a shot shape issue, um, you know, do we have clarity on how our alignment works, like what's our theory with our golf swing and how that's supposed to function, right? There's all sorts of like little nuances in here. Um, the long story short, or the source of why your child, um, you know, is likely stuck if you're watching this video as far as like hitting a plateau, or they're getting close to a plateau, is they don't have the numbers behind their game to understand, okay, here's where I can push something and I'm going to get more for comparatively something else, right? Because I'm— what I'm saying in these scenarios here is like, well, if I can improve greens regulation or I can improve scrambling, which one gives me more for the same amount of effort? That's really the game we want to be playing, is just looking at everything and be like, all right, cool, where, where do I get an outsized return for the effort that I put in? And so if you're watching this and, you know, you're operating at a high level, you know, maybe you're a business owner or something like that, like, you understand this very, very clearly. Uh, maybe you're responsible for teams or something like that, maybe you're in like a managerial level. It's like, still understand that like We want to be looking for these points of leverage, and that's where we're going to get stuff out of literally whatever we're doing. In this case, it's applied to golf. Um, but it's for your child to understand, it's like, hey, we got limited time as a resource, right? We've got limited mental bandwidth as a resource. We've got limited ability to focus as a resource. How do we be as efficient with that as possible to be able to get the results that we want to get to, right? And so in my opinion, that's why I've been able to have success with the students that I've worked with, because I'm operating within those constraints rather than just saying, hey, just got to work really hard. It's like you don't have clarity. We're not considering those constraints. We don't have a target. Uh, and so, you know, just give you a little bit more clarity here. I'm also telling the students exactly what to do in their practice, right? So it's not just like, hey, we need to get better at gluteus regulation, or hey, I want to keep everything else the same. I'm controlling all the variables, right? I'm looking at what they're doing for their entire practice. I'm controlling the exact drills that we're doing. I'm controlling how hard it is. I'm controlling the number of reps. And it allows me to churn out a very consistent result across all the students that I work with. And so, and also as I work with more and more students, the data gets more and more clear, right? I can start to see patterns and trends. When I see something and be like, hey, I want to test this out and see if this works better, I can see very quickly if it works better and then sub it out for everybody, right? So one of the recent things I did with that was a distance drill that I heard about. I thought it was a great idea, figured I'd roll it out. Some of the students were struggling in that category, just boom, their distance shot up through the roof. I was like, all right, cool, everyone's doing this. Who needs more distance? And just consistently across the board, it's like plus, you know, 15, 20 yards off the tee over a very short period of time. Um, again, obviously everybody's different, right? That's just what I'm seeing. These videos are for entertainment purposes, all that stuff. Um, that's just what I see, right? So I'm able to control all the variables, and I'm able to control strategic and mental adjustments as well, potentially mechanics if that's necessary. It's not a place that I like to go into, not because I'm not comfortable with it, it's just Usually there are other things that are easier. Usually kids have swing coaches. And, you know, the only thing worse than bad information is too many people saying different stuff and the kid doesn't even know what to commit to, right? Rather we commit to something bad than, than, um, than nothing at all, right? Or we've got too much like chaos. So, and then we're just updating this. We're measuring, hey, are we actually trending in the direction that we want to trend? We're measuring the main statistics that we're trying to measure here, and we're able to say, hey, I said I was going to do this in practice, you know, I said I was going to do this, this practice here for this period of time, right? And I was getting these results, and now I'm getting these results, right? That, that's what really is what I'm looking for, right? So I can say, hey, that's progress, right? And is it progress at the rate that we want? That gets into, you know, long-term pacing and stuff like that, you know, which might be relevant. I've got other videos on the channel that go through that specifically. But if your child's stuck in a plateau, this is exactly what they need to be able to do to get out of that plateau. Because not only does this help them get better, right, it also gives you perspective on, you know, how much is it reasonable to get better month over month, right? It allows them to commit to whatever that is. You actually do the micro work. And even if they don't get better, guess what? You also figured out what didn't work. If you did something, I didn't move the needle, you can go back to the drawing board and refigure it out. Whereas if you just sit on it for months or years, be like, yeah, they've been stuck for like last year, and there's like What are you doing, right? What are we doing to, to change that, right? And so if you're in that position, you want help changing that, there's an application, um, where you can fill out to work together if that's something you're interested in, if you think it would be helpful for your child. There'll be a video that you can watch that'll just kind of walk you through how my program works, what my approach is, and then again you can fill out the application. Make sure your child's in a good spot where I have a high probability of being able to help them. Schedule a call, make sure everything makes sense for, for your child, answer all your questions. At the end of the day, as you guys can see, um, I want to have a lot of clarity for you guys. I want to make sure you guys understand what we're doing, why we're doing it. That way we can just focus on the process. There's no hype in that. It's just, it's just going to be underwriting. Like, hey, here's where a child's at, here's what we're trying to get to. Is that reasonable? If I feel like it's a little bit of a stretch, I'm going to be able to quantify that and be like, hey, instead of improving by 4 shots per year, we need to improve by 6 shots per year. Where the case is, and then you can assess whether or not you want to take on, you know, that respective risk. So, you know, for the most part, I'm talking about players playing Division 1 golf. Obviously, this process will work for anyone trying to get better. It's just that's where I tend to find people being the most serious about this. And so, you know, if your child's somewhere in that, you know, 12, 13, 14, 15 range and they want to play Division 1 golf, then this is, you know, this is the process that they need to apply that's going to have a high probability working. So again, hopefully this is helpful. If you're interested, application below. And, uh, hope you guys enjoy some other videos on the channel as well, going through tournaments, practice, statistics, all stuff like that. That's something you're interested— again, other videos on the channel you can check out to do deep dives into those as well. All right, talk to you soon.