Why Most Junior Golfers Scores Don't Improve (And How To Fix It)

What's going on guys, in today's video I'm going to be covering why most junior golfers don't improve by very many shots per year, hardly at all, and what you can do specifically to help your child improve faster than average. If you're new to the channel, welcome in. This is all we talk about, we talk about helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf. So if you're in that boat, if your child's on that boat, then this is the place for you. I'm going to go into the details like this. We're not talking about full fluff. We're not talking about sending out emails. We're talking about what your child actually needs to do to play Division 1 golf and what scores and skills that they need to develop. If you're a returning subscriber, welcome back. You guys enjoy this video, go ahead and leave it a like, um, really helps push it out to more people in the algorithm. Anyway, I wanted to share something with you guys from the webinar that I just did this past, um, would have been last, almost this last Friday, and I'm kind of share what I found. So when I was prepping for that webinar, one of the things I really wanted to touch on is to give you guys benchmarks. Um, so I wanted to actually find what's the middle of the pack for every age range, because I think that that's valuable to know, like where is the average. And so that's what I did. I took class of 20, you know, each one of these classes, figure out what's the median or like the middle 50th percentile scoring differential. The middle scoring average, how that impacts class rank, the average distance, and the average course rating. So again, these are just players that are as close as I could get to 50% on Junior Golf Scoreboard, um, and this is kind of what I found here. So first of all, just right out the gate, any of you guys who have younger kids, or maybe you're in a position where you're like, oh, my kid's ranked 10th in their class or 50th in their class or whatever, just know that throughout time, um, that doesn't hold up because more players get into that class. And so that's not really a great metric to look at. You really want to stay focused on their actual game rather than what everyone else is doing. And you want to make sure the scoring average comes down, the scoring differential comes down. That's how you really should be modeling this stuff out for your child anyway. Also, just kind of like a quick aside here, as far as distances go, the average, you know, player is playing a golf course, it's roughly 170 yards longer year over year. And so that really kind of gets us to the core of, of what's actually going on here in the mean stuff I want to talk to you guys about. If you guys look at this, you can see that the average player, the middle of the pack here, does not really improve very much as far as their scoring average goes. They're shooting somewhere between 80, maybe 81, and 78. Realistically, somewhere between 81 and 78. And all the difference in their scoring differential is a product of playing longer golf courses, and that's reflected in the course rating getting more difficult over time. And so, like, what does that tell us? It's kind of an unfortunate thing, but it's something that, you know, I think you really want to keep— think about here for a second. That tells us that the average player and the instruction that they're getting does almost nothing for their ability to shoot lower scores. The way that these players are improving, or what junior golfers are improving across the board, is mostly a product of they have gotten stronger and they're able to hit the ball further. That is what separates, you know, that is what causes them to improve. And that does not really have anything to do with how great their instruction necessarily is, or what they're doing, or whether it's effective. It has more to do with they're becoming bigger, because a 4th grader is bigger than a junior in high school, obviously. And so when you guys are thinking about this, I think it's important to challenge some of the assumptions where, you know, especially if your child is stalled out, like, really understand that there's probably a reason for that. And that's really what I want to share in this video. So when I talk to junior golfers, I have the privilege of being able to talk to, you know, literally thousands of junior golfers on my email list. Parents of junior golfers. And so I hear a lot of problems that come up. I'm also able to see patterns as far as things that come up a lot in my program. I essentially model out, like, here are the things that I see that work the best, and then I just tell my players exactly what they need to do. It's really straightforward, and those things are proven out. And I've had the, you know, the opportunity to see when a player doesn't do what I ask them to do, or if I— they don't follow through the practice that I give them, what happens. Because, you know, I want to be skeptical of stuff I'm doing. I don't claim to know everything, but consistently when I see players, they make these mistakes in their practice and it causes them to not improve as much versus when they just do what I tell them to do within their practice that I know is proven out over dozens of junior golfers, then they get really good results. So, you know, that's kind of how that works. But anyway, what I see is the scoring average should not go down, and there's a few reasons for that. Number one, The scoring average is not going down because most players have no idea how to actually shoot lower scores. They don't have a single clue how they're going to shoot lower scores. There's a desire— I want to score lower, I want to make birdies, I think it's my mindset, or I think it's my practice, or I think it's my driver, or whatever— but they do not understand mathematically how they will shoot lower scores. They don't spend any time thinking about that. And so when I'm working with students, that's one of the first things that I touch on. That's something that I harp on on this channel. You need to be able to model out what are your statistics and why do you shoot the scores that you do? So for example, if we have a 78 scoring average, why? How many greens per round do we hit? How many penalty balls do we have? How many 3-putts per round? When we miss the green, how often do we get up and down? When we do hit the green, how often do we make birdie? How many times are we missing the green on our approach shot and then missing the green again, um, or potentially multiple times over? And then using that information to strategically say, okay, I want to improve this area of my game here, and that's going to bring my scores down because my numbers are going to change. And as a result of that, my scores are going to change. So that's like, that's the first big one, is most players don't know why they shoot the scores that they shoot. And so what ends up happening is they go to their coach, maybe they see them once a week, maybe they see them multiple times a week, maybe they see them once a month. They go to their coach and their coach looks at their swing and their coach gives their opinion on what they should change, and then they go through some drills, and then maybe they have some focus. And it's, again, it's not tethered to like, hey, this particular skill is hurting you that you need to develop in order to score better. It might be couched in that frame, but I almost guarantee you, because I work with coaches as well, like, I bet you they're not tracking your child's statistics. In 90-plus percent of circumstances, I am almost certain they're not tracking your child's statistics. So they do not know where your child needs to focus. They can have their opinion. They can say, hey, I would like to see this wedge ball flight come down. Me too, I like to see a nice piercing wedge ball flight as well, but that doesn't mean that that's the most impactful thing to tell that player at that moment. And so that's why I approach things the way that I do. I try and be systematic to say there's a lot of things that I could do, there's a lot of stuff I could tell your child. How do we stay focused on the things that have the biggest impact? And let's do those first, right? It wouldn't make any sense to say, hey, you know, you're hitting 15% of your balls out of bounds off the tee, but you know what, our real problem is we don't make enough 10 to 15-footers. That would not make any sense because it's very hard to make 10 to 15-footers. Guys on the PGA Tour have a hard time doing that. That's why that separates out so well on the PGA Tour. But it's very easy to not hit your ball out of bounds. And so let's figure out how to do that before we figure out all the other stuff, right? So there's an infinite number of things that your child could focus on, and the key is being able to focus on the right stuff. And you're only going to know that if you have the data to back that up. So hopefully it's making sense there. The other thing is within the practice, oftentimes what I see with players is they end up in what I would call like a whack-a-mole situation where they have a part of their game that sucks. Let's say it's their driver, and they go work really hard, you know, maybe they do swing mechanics or whatever, they figure out a way to solve that problem. They put in practice after practice after practice, they finally solve that problem, go out on the golf course, guess what? Now their putting's bad because they haven't worked on their putting forever. So they go and then they grind on their putting, and now guess what? Now their approach play is bad, right? Because they were working on their— they're just working on their putting, right? So their tee shot approach play— or their tee shot's better, now deteriorate a little bit, putting's a little bit better, and now approach play is bad. All right, cool, we sharpen up approach play. Now which— or now short game's bad. Like, it's just this whack-a-mole situation where it's like we're not hitting every part of our game. So When you guys are out there practicing, when your child is practicing, it is important that you hit every single part of their game every time they go out there, right? So they should be able to practice for somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours. Over that is going to be too much. It's just be difficult for them to focus. You might have to cut that down if they're, if they're really young, but most players are doing somewhere between 90 minutes and 2 hours of practice. That's just a reasonable amount considering that, you know, if you're on the golf course, you play 18 holes. I'm speaking to players who you want to play Division 1 golf, we better be able to focus and play 18 holes. Well, that's going to take us 4 hours, so it's very reasonable that we should be able to do a 2-hour practice session. You know, just be fair here. If you're doing less than that, you've got a 10-year-old, maybe you're only playing 9 holes, you know, that's something where we need to get that mental stamina up. Maybe they're not there right now. That's not really who I'm talking to anyway. I digress. You want to make sure that you're touching every part of their game, right? So if we break this down practically, it's like, all right, we've got our approach shots, which approach shot should we be working on? Because we can't just hit the whole bag, like, that's going to take too long. We also don't want to just hit an unlimited number of balls, because if we just hit a bunch of balls, number one, it's like there's no guarantee we're actually making a dent in whatever is a problem. What we want to do is say, like, what are the shots we don't have that are costing us shots? So not just the shots we don't have, they're actually costing us shots. So an example of that would be if you don't have a 40-yard spinny pitch shot I don't really care because you shouldn't have that shot. Like, it's just— yeah, can PGA Tour players hit it? Absolutely. Like, yes, 100%. Should your child have that shot very often? Almost never, right? Like, here we're going to be playing par 4s, par 5s, par 3s. We're gonna have different shots on those holes. You know, par 3s, you might have— I'm just making up numbers here, um, 150 yards, right? Does it make any— if I only played par 3s, I always have 150 yards. Does it make any sense for me to practice 100-yard shot on those par 3s, or just practice 100-yard shot in general. It makes absolutely zero sense. There's no probability that I'll ever have a 100-yard shot, so I should never practice that shot. Um, in the same way, if I was playing par 5s again and I knew that, you know, I'm gonna have a driver, and then on my second shot I'm probably gonna have to have like a 3-wood or hybrid, and that might put me into a spot where I can hit my third shot on the green potentially, just for the sake of example. Does it make any sense for me to ever practice hitting 7-irons? Hopefully your answer is no, right? Because we're either going to have a driver, we're either going to have that, you know, 3-wood hybrid, whatever, and then we're going to have like a wedge. We're going to leave ourselves a wedge, we hit that third shot on the green. Those are the only skills we need to develop for that tee to green, right? We might need to develop other skills like on the green. We might have to develop our lag putting, we might have to develop our, our shorter putts. Maybe if we're really good at our wedge play, maybe we're developing our 10 to 15-foot putts, right? What does not make a ton of sense to develop is a 90-foot lag putt. It's like, how often are you ever going to have that shot? Almost never. When you do, how probable is it you're going to 3-putt? It's kind of probable. Could you still end up 2-putting from there? Yeah, absolutely. Does it make any sense to devote energy and to be really good at lag putting from 90 feet? No. It does not, because you almost never have that shot. So again, the principle here is applying time to the things that are going to cause your child to improve. Um, so just to recap here so far, tracking their numbers and looking at the right stuff, super, super important. Um, from there, hitting every part of their game when you go out and practice. In addition to that, making sure the parts of your game that you are hitting are actually impacting their scores. And you need to be able to prove that with math, not just, I think it would be better to hit this wedge in a better window. Is that possible? Could that be allegedly improvement? Sure. My book, improvement is scores come down. And I would say as evidence, most players' scores do not come down. And that's where I would say most people screw up almost all of us. The last one that I'm gonna see here, number 4, is going to be you want to make sure that you are playing a round of golf per practice session. One of the biggest mistakes that I see, one of the instant ways to just screw everything up, is to play back— or to do back to back to back practice sessions, or just practice for 2 weeks. I've had this, I can't tell you how many times I've had this happen. It doesn't really happen anymore cuz I hammer my students about this. But, um, where I have a student and they say, I feel really good about my game. I've been working really hard on it for the last 2 weeks, goes in tournament 85. And it's like, oh, well why did, you know, why did I play poorly? And I'm like, be because you didn't play golf. Like you, you hit balls on the driving range, you did something, I don't know what, but you didn't have any validation for yourself that you were actually improving. The whole point of practice is to shoot better scores. And so if we're going out there and we're practicing, we think we're getting better, but we don't actually prove it to ourselves on the golf course by tracking our statistics and saying, hey, yeah, that thing that I was trying to move, that statistic that I was trying to move, actually moved, then you don't have a clue if you got better or not. And so if you're really serious about lowering your scores, you need to do that. And so again, my rule is for every practice session we need around golf. It could be 9 holes, it could be 18 holes, it could be around a simulator. But we do not go practice, practice, and then play golf. Does not happen. The flip side is not true. If you say I do a practice session, go play around golf, you can play another round of golf. Absolutely. You can play as many rounds of golf as you want because odds are you're going to play in some tournaments and they're going to be 36 holes, 54 holes, 72 holes. Maybe you have to do a practice round on top of that, right? You could be playing literally almost 100 holes straight. That's something that you want to develop your stamina on. Do I recommend just going from, you know, 9 holes to playing, you know, 72 holes straight? No, I don't. But again, that's okay. Playing a lot of golf is okay. The better players that I see, they play a lot of golf, like a lot of golf, and I might have to pull their teeth a little bit to get them to practice. That's much better. I always see better results from those players as opposed to the player who practices all the time that doesn't play enough golf, then I have to convince that player to practice, actually play golf more. And that tends to be a little bit more of a challenge. And that player tends to be, you know, quite frankly, not as good as a player who just simply played more golf. Um, that's for a lot of reasons, you know, and I'm not going to be able to go into every single one of them right now. But just to be fair, there's a lot of skills that you can only develop on the golf course. I'll give you an example just so you guys are kind of clear on what I'm talking about here. If I have an approach shot from 150 yards and I have wind into my face of 10 miles an hour, and it's a back pin, and I'm playing in a different temperature, right? So maybe I'm used to playing at 50 degrees, you know, now I'm playing at 70 degrees, right? So it's a little bit warmer, and I'm at a different altitude, right? Let's say I'm playing 5% higher up in altitude. I need to be able to know ahead of time that I need to adjust my distances so I'm not air mailing every single green, right? Because I'm gonna hit the ball 2 yards further per 10 yards or 10 degrees, right? So I'm hitting 4 yards further right there. Then based on whatever my altitude is, I'm going to hit it about 1% further per 500 feet, right? So I've got that, that I should know just before I even have the shot. Now I've got the shot, I've got 10 miles an hour wind in my face, so my adjustment is going to be 10% plus 5 on the approach shot. That's just for the record, that's how you do into the wind. It's not the same as downwind, it's not the same as crosswind. That stuff I help my students with, um, but but again, just for the sake of this example here, you got 150 yards. This is going to be playing plus 20, this is playing 170 yards. You got a back pin here, and let's say we're in between clubs. So now we've got to hit realistically either a knockdown of a longer club and take some distance off of it, or we're going to hit a full one into the wind. That's a real scenario that's going to happen a lot. That's not even mentioning what if you had you're hitting a downhill or uphill, something like that, right? That's just saying like you're gonna have to do that 45 seconds. You have to get really good at that, right? Because you got to figure all that within your practice session or within your just getting your ball, laser, and flag, figuring all that stuff out. Um, you know, you can't practice that on the driving range. You don't have a single clue of how to hit that shot when you're just ripping balls full swing on the driving range trying to make sure the club shallows. Doesn't make any sense. So again, just to kind of recap here, if you want to help your child improve faster than average, then you need to do these things. Um, let me give you one other example here that just really closes out really nicely. You might be asking yourself, you're like, that's cool, but those are average players. My kid is above average, right? My kid is superior. My kid, you know, has a higher class ranking. Let's look at a bunch of players right next to each other, ranked roughly top 50 in class of 2026. This is where they were a year ago. This is where they're at today. This is the change over those— that period of time. Again, these are random players. I can assume because these players are really good— might not necessarily be true— they're probably all paying for coaching. They're probably all seeing lessons. Two of these players got worse. Two of these players improved slightly less than average. If you guys wanted to go back and add up all of that, The difference here, the average improvement is about 1.19 shots per year, and 2 players beat that average, right? Just to be fair, overall, if you add this up, the average is still about 1.19 shots per year. And I would wager a big chunk of this is the golf courses got longer, not the scores came down. So once again, it doesn't matter where you're at here, these principles apply. And these are things that I see consistently amongst good players and average players make the same practice mistakes. So Back to it. Number 1, track your stats. Track your child's stats. They need— ideally they should be tracking their stats, but tracking statistics, knowing why you shoot the scores you shoot, just knowing that goes a long way. Number 2, they need to hit every part of their game when they go out and practice. They can't just have one thing that they work on. They need to have everything every single time. That way their game stays consistent. Even if we're just maintaining something, we need to make sure we're touching it. Okay, number 3, we want to make sure that when we are practicing our different shots, we're only focusing on the shots that we need to be able to hit that we can't currently hit. So again, like, if I need to be able to get more effective off the tee, I need to be hitting one ball flight off the tee exclusively and get really good at that. That's what I want to be practicing. If I have 100 yards into every single hole, then I better be hitting 100-yard shots and pretty much nothing else. That, that's the way that we should be thinking through this. Um, and then last here, we want to make sure, number 4, that we're matching for every practice session we have at least one round of golf. At least one. Can have more than one, but at least one. So I hope this is helpful for you guys. Um, I know that this stuff is really impactful. I'm making this video for you guys because I know that this information, uh, always gets people really good results, even just being on my YouTube channel. That said, if you want more detail on all this stuff, you want me to actually help your child and tell them exactly what to do in their practice, exactly which tournaments to play in, and exactly what they need to do to play Division 1 golf, then there will be a link below this video where you can apply for my program, um, and work together. And I'll do all that stuff for your child, so all you have to do is just, you know, your child will have to do is just go out there and execute, um, and we'll just tell them everything they need to do. So if that's something you're interested in, again, link below here. Otherwise, hope you guys enjoy this video. Go apply this stuff, uh, your child will get better by applying any one of these things. Literally just just do one of them, um, and they will get better. I promise you that. And again, when you guys are ready to put some jet fuel on this, when you guys are ready to speed things up, then application is down below the video. Hope you guys enjoyed it. Leave a like if you did, subscribe if you're new, and I will see you guys in the next one.