Why Placement Doesn't Work For Division 1 Golf

All right, what's going on everyone? So in today's video, I want to go over why placement doesn't really work for Division I golf. So this is one of the things that I kind of run into a lot talking to families, but essentially it's the idea of, hey, do we have to create a resume? We have to reach out, email tons and tons of coaches in order to, to be seen and be able to get an offer. Something I kind of find that is fairly common and is even somewhat intuitive to kind of think, well, you know, there's lots of players out there, um, you know, it's probably going to be kind of like a squeaky wheel gets the grease type situation. If you're out there a bunch, then you're going to more likely get recruited. And I'm not going to say that there's no truth to that. There certainly is something to be said for, you know, if you live under a rock, um, then obviously it's gonna be harder for people to find you. But for the most part, it kind of lacks an awareness of how rankings really end up working. I wonder if this can be better. Let's go ahead and keep it like this. Um, but anyway, um, what I wanted to do in today's video is kind of show you, if you're not already familiar with the main ranking index for junior golfers. And if you go to the home page here, it's called Junior Golf Scoreboard. Go to the home page, actually kind of explains, hey, for the last 25 years, pretty much everyone comes through Junior Golf Scoreboard who's going to go on to play college golf. They rank tons and tons of competitions, and so it's going to be a very robust ranking system. And this is really valuable because— to understand— because college coaches are looking at this ranking index if they realistically know what they're doing. And so it's, it's pretty simple, you know, they can go here and say, all right, well, you know, I want to look at players who are in, you know, let's say 2026, up and coming. Who's the best? And they've got a list here of, you know, there are 3,000 students in this class of, you know, 2025. There's only some 300 Division I programs, and not every single one of them is going to make an offer every single year. Some of them might have a couple offers. Um, you know, one of the students that I've worked with is on this, this front page here, Matt Hull. He's gonna be going to UCLA. But these are the players that they're going to pick from, and it's fairly straightforward. And so the question that you want to ask as far as recruiting goes, if you want to be able to play the Division I program, is how do I become one of these kids? How do I be on this front page here of, of players that the coaches are looking at and recruiting? Because, you know, if you're in this position, you're, you're going to get recruited, you're going to get a scholarship. This is worth literally tens of thousands of dollars to be in this position. And there's no amount of email sent or good relationships or, you know, letters of recommendation that makes up for this. Um, so hopefully that's, you know, makes some sense at least. Now just kind of give you guys a look here on scoring average. We're typically going to see a scoring average between 72 and 74. Matt has had the luxury here of playing some golf courses that aren't quite as long. He's also in California, which is a benefit to him. But for the most part, these golf courses are long— or a little bit shorter than typically what I'd see from, you know, a player of his caliber. The difference you'll see here specifically for Matt is that his scoring average is a good bit better than what I would say is kind of like average. So being under 72 scoring average, very, very good here. Um, just kind of like pull another random one here. 73 is more normal, and what you'll see here is the golf courses are slightly longer, um, but the scores are slightly higher. So hopefully that is relatively straightforward for you guys. But here's the thing I find the most valuable here is you go to rankings and honors and college signings and you sort by class because that's the way that you want to think through this stuff. You don't want to think about how many kids there are in the country. You don't want to think about how many, you know, where you're ranked in your state, where your junior golfer is ranked in your state. You want to be looking at where you're ranked across the country, because if I'm UCLA, I don't care if you're in Florida or if you're in California. If you're good, I want to recruit you. And so what you can do is you can say, all right, I want to play this particular program, where do I have to be in order to make that happen? Okay, so you've got all the players who've been recruited You've got what their scoring differential was and where they were ranked in their class, um, when they got recruited here. And so you can kind of see, you know, over here on this, this right-hand side, this is the division, right? So Division I, then you'll also start to see Division II if you get far enough down here, and you'll start to see Division III. Now I'll just tell you straight up, um, Division I is going to be very accurate for this. Division II and Division III, um, some of the JUCOs not quite as comprehensive. Okay. So just knowing that, what you can kind of do here is kind of map out like, okay, well, you know, here's where I need to be in order to accomplish my goals. You're not just flying at this blind. And if you can combine, okay, cool, I'm ranked here and this is where I want to go, then you can just reverse engineer this and do the math. And this is also, just to be clear, for girls as well. Same exact principles apply. So you just want to find like, okay, cool, here's the scoring differential I need to get to, and you know, here's where I'm at right now. You'd want to look at this scoring differential here, so wherever you're at right now, and then you just want to figure out what is the difference between those. And then what you want to do is you want to look at, okay, what is my scoring average? So you're most likely going to have this data of all your tournaments. If you don't have it where it automatically does this for you, you can just add them up and divide by the number of tournaments. Boom, there's your scoring average. And so that, that's really the, the way to look at this. Now the added detail here, that's something that I do with my students, is I I want to know statistically what their game looks like. Because if you've got a scoring average of, let's say, 80, which, you know, wouldn't be uncommon if, let's say, you're, um, you know, 7th grader, 8th grader, 9th grader, you want to play Division 1 golf, we got a little bit of work to do here. But, you know, let's say we got a scoring average of 80. We want to know why that is. We want to know why we have a scoring average of 80, because if we understand that then we can make strategic decisions about what we need to do to improve, and we can also measure whether or not we're improving at that rate. So hopefully that makes sense, but let me be a little bit more concrete about that. Let's say you have a scoring average of 80 and you're only hitting, let's say, 30% of your greens. Well, it's going to be extremely difficult for you to ever get to a place where you're having a scoring average of 73 simply because if you run the math out on that, you're going to have to get up and down an outrageous amount of times, or you're going to have to make an outrageous amount of birdies for a very small number of greens hit in order to shoot low enough scores. So you can reverse engineer that and say, okay, cool, I need to focus specifically on hitting more greens regulation in order to be able to reach my scoring goals. And then from there, you can dig further down into those stats This is why having a good stats program is actually really, really helpful. I recommend Draw More Circles. Um, Decade's pretty good, um, but Circles is definitely my favorite. Um, what you can then do is look at like, okay, cool, of those approach distances, where are the approach distances that I'm hitting all the time and where am I struggling? And then you can go specific, more specific than that and say, okay, cool, why is that the case? Is it because I have a golf swing issue Or is it because I just don't spend enough time there, right? These are both possible. You could have a situation where you don't hit enough balls on the green with pitching wedge and you spend all of your time hitting 7-irons because that's what your coach likes to see you hit. Or it could be a situation of, hey, maybe, you know, we thought this coach was helping us hit it amazing, but turns out we just didn't really have a clear criteria of what amazing should really be defined as. And so by going through this process, which you can really, you know, you know, you see pretty clearly is here's where I wanna go. Here's where I'm at right now. Statistically, here's what needs to change. And then you can get really granular about what exactly needs to happen in order to do that. And then you can see, okay, we said we're gonna do this a month ago, 2 months ago, 3 months ago. Am I improving at the rate necessary to reach my end goal? And we can constantly evaluate that and change that. So at least that's the process that I apply. With my students. So hopefully this gives you guys a little bit of clarity here on how to be looking at, you know, do you need a resume, um, do you need all this different stuff to be recruited? Realistically, no. If you did want to do a resume, I would recommend that you go through Junior Golf Scoreboard here. So they have kind of like this built-in feature, but Junior Golf Scoreboard really is the resume that, that you want to have. Because if you go up to a coach and you say, hey, interested in your program, I'm ranked 100th in my class, there's a decent chance you're gonna get a response there. Whereas if you just say, hey, you know, I played high school golf, I was on my varsity team, and you know, I shot 78, 76, and won this tournament, they're not really going to be that interested. And if they respond to you, it's essentially going to be like, hey, you know, appreciate you reaching out, glad you're interested in the program, you know, keep me updated with scores. It's kind of a polite way of saying, you know, you don't have the scores yet. Now my recommendation for all my players is let's make sure we're in a good position first so that when we do those introductions or when we have those opportunities to meet a coach, we can actually make that good first impression. So hopefully this video is helpful for you guys. Wanted to keep this a little bit simpler, but if you guys want help with this, obviously reach out. There'll be resources below this video where you can learn more about my process and, you know, how to apply that. Or if you want to work together, we can look to look at doing that. Um, but my biggest thing here is like, I want to make sure you guys understand that there's a lot of stuff out there that's going to try and convince you that the main thing is not the main thing, you know. Um, that you're in a position where you need to do all this other stuff in order to, um, to get recruited. And that's not really the case. You need to put all of your focus, all of your energy, all of your effort into lowering your scores and playing in the highest quality tournaments possible. So I guess I'll kind of leave you guys with that. If you go to tournaments and results, you're just not sure which tournaments are ranked, just go search for tournaments. Like, this is free advice here, um, but if you guys do this, whatever state you're in, just pick whatever state. Let's say you're in California, we're in 2024, and then boom, take your pick. Which ones are easier for you to get to? You want to narrow this down, you know, you can, um, I guess you can't narrow down by state or city necessarily, but you can look throughout your entire state and just say, okay, cool, these are the things that are ranked. Can I get to any of them? You only need to play in 4 per year. So, um, again, like advocating here is just like, if you want to play Division I golf, step number 1, know what the heck you're doing. You know, you can't just go out there blindly and be like, oh, I think I'm pretty good. You want to know exactly where you're at and you want to know exactly where you're trying to get to. And then you just need to reverse engineer the process. If you don't know exactly where you're at, follow those instructions, get tournaments on the calendar, but then improve as fast as possible. And if you're not sure how to do that, you don't know how to lower the ranking. If it's just like you get the same lesson over and over again, you're— that's as far as your coach wants to think, um, reach out. They can help you out with that. Um, but yeah, this is the process. It's fairly simple. Um, that doesn't mean it's easy, but Hopefully this guy helps you guys understand what you need to do and remove some of the confusion here. All right, talk to you guys in the next one.