Why Tournaments Probably Aren't Your Child's Problem

In this video, I'm going to be talking about why the tournaments your child plays in is probably not the thing that's holding them back right now. Um, I talk about the subject a lot. I talk a lot about the importance of playing in the right events, and there's absolutely a context here to be said for playing in the right events. But I get so many people coming to me that are convinced that their child is struggling because of the tournaments that they're playing in rather than the scores that they're shooting. And in this video, I want to really break down when are those two cases applicable, um, and, and what, what your child actually really needs to be focused on. So hopefully you guys enjoy this video. If you do, go ahead and leave it a like. It does help push it out in the YouTube algorithm. So, and if you're new here, go ahead and subscribe to the channel. This is all we talk about, it's helping junior golfers develop to play Division 1 golf, helping them level up their game. There. So what I've got pulled up here is I've got 3 different tabs. I've got class of 2027, '28, and '29, and I want to kind of show you guys what the best players are really doing. And so I'm looking at within these classes the top 100th player, right? So in this case, for 2027, that's a -3 scoring differential. And so we can see here for this player, he's got a -3 scoring differential, he's got a scoring average of 73 1.12, and these are the tournaments that he's playing in. We've got a lot of Toyota Tour for all the California people. We've got some AJGA events. We've got some other solid events as well. And so when we look at this, this is, this is very much the poster child to me of just kind of the standard thing that you want to do if you want to play Division 1 golf. You want to play the longest and most importantly the hardest golf courses that we can play. There's also some accounting for altitude right? So if you're playing in the mountains, well, a 7,000-yard golf course is not nearly as long as one that is at sea level. And as a result of that, the course rating is not going to be quite as difficult, right? So we always have to be aware— when I say long, hard golf courses, for the most part what I'm really trying to say is we want hard course ratings, we want high course ratings. And so typically that's going to be correlated with longer golf courses, right? And so we can get a little bit confused when we're in areas that are a little bit more irregular, um, you know, not so much at sea level, where we need to seek out these longer golf courses in order to accommodate for some of this stuff. But anyway, long story short, we can see a scoring average about 73. You see longer, harder golf courses. Okay, now let's look at 2028. 2028, we see a similar story. We see a scoring average of 74.4. We see golf courses that, you know, are a little bit shorter than what we just looked at here. In this case, as players Texas. It's got a -1.76 scoring differential. Cool. Then we go over to Class of 2029. We've got a 2— we got a 0.26 scoring differential here. And so we look at these tournaments again, up in the mountains here, longer average golf course, relatively lower scores. But again, that's kind of what I was alluding to with the length of these golf courses. We have to consider where are we actually playing? So in this case, you can see a course rating of 100— or 142. If we divide that out, that is whatever, 41— I'm sorry, not 41, 71 as a course rating. Puts us in a tough spot because when we shoot 72, which is pretty good technically, you know, we're still one shot over the course rating. And so thus we end up with a scoring differential that's kind of stalled out at 0.26 here, right? So in this player's case, we've got two options. We can say, hey, let's play longer golf courses, which in his case, all, you know, more than likely means, hey, we've got to go and travel a little bit. Because if we're playing in Colorado, I mean, maybe they exist, you know, we gotta find essentially like 7,500-yard, you know, tournaments, right? You're hitting the ball 300 yards is not the same thing in Colorado as it is in California, as an example, right? But long story short, for this player, he needs to do one of two things. Either he needs to play longer and like find the golf courses that are longer and harder, or he needs to bring the scoring average down. And that's really the thing that I wanted to, to get to here, is most the time when I have families coming to me and they're saying, hey, I think the tournaments are an issue, you know, very well could be the case. But more times than not, when I look at them, they're in a situation where their child has a scoring average of 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, right? I even have families with kids who have a scoring average of 85 saying, hey, well, you know, actually we, uh, we want to just want to play professional golf. We don't think any of this high school or, um, any of this college golf stuff matters. And that's just ridiculous. But long story short, yes, you need to play in the right tournaments. Yes, you need to, you know, play in ranked events, as you can see by, you know, this player in this place. Um, obviously, you know, good amount of time ahead of him. He's still, you know, class of 2026, so he's still a top 100 player in his class, enough passion to swear about anything. Greens. But you guys can see here, if you're playing the same length here, but you got scoring average 78, what do you think makes more sense? If you got a scoring average 78, odds are we're gonna have a scoring differential like, I don't know, whatever that math is, like 5, right? So you could look at this, say, oh, we gotta play longer, harder golf courses. It's like, no, you need to get the scores down. And when we go beyond that, we got to think about why is— why does this settle right around here? You know, 73, Let me pull this kid up again. Dude, 74. It's got another California kid, 73.3. I got another Texas, 73.9. Why do we think 72, right? We can kind of see here that, you know, when you play these golf courses that are a little bit shorter or playing at altitude, we've got to have a little bit lower scores. Long story short, we want to be able to see, hey, where are we at in the spectrum, right? Because we've got to have two things. We've got to play long enough, hard enough golf courses, and you have a scoring average of 72 to 74, roughly, right? And so when we're looking at that, we want to say, based on our situation, where are we at here? Now, when we talk about tournaments, especially if we talk about going and finding tournaments that are really long, really hard, they don't exist in your backyard, like one of the people who's blessed to be in California or Texas or Florida or, you know, the Carolinas or something like that, you know, what do we do here? Well, the first thing we want to do is the thing that's the most cost-effective, which is just shoot lower scores until that becomes unreasonable. Now, for me, typically when I'm working with players, I start to consider it unreasonable when you got a scoring average of 72-something and we continue to try and push that down if we haven't already maxed out the difficulty of the tournaments that we're playing in. But you can absolutely make a case, hey, if you got a scoring average of 70, you do that on a little bit shorter golf courses, that's going to work out just fine for you. And so You know, my main point here is don't neglect the importance of your child lowering their scoring average in unison with making these tournaments more difficult, right? So typically what you'll find here, we look at, you know, as classes become more and more mature, if you will. Let's go and look at my first page here. As players get better and better, we play fewer and fewer tournaments. So if I go to the first page of, you know, class of 2027 here, and we're going to see, you know, something in the range of maybe 15 events on the high end. Obviously there's going to be some outliers like this 21 here, and we see low, low end, 4. You know, that's an international, 4 international, 4 kind of minimum there. But we can see that, you know, the number of tournaments that we play in has no impact on where we end up being ranked here. Obviously for this player, they're playing a bunch of great tournaments, they're also doing very, very well in those tournaments, right? So we don't need to play just as many as humanly possible. We need to play in ones that are appropriate for our current situation, right? And so that's dynamic. Your child could be in a position where they have a really good practice scoring average, they struggle in tournaments, and so as a result of that, we need to play more tournaments in order to get them comfortable playing in those events and shooting lower scores, right? If they got scoring after 76, might give you the illusion that they're pretty good. It might be the best player in their local area, don't get me wrong, but But, you know, just kind of knowing objectively, hey, we got like 4 shots, right? So if they've got a scoring differential of 2, you don't need to look at that and say, hey, we need to fix tournaments. You want to look at that and say, hey, we need to bring this scoring average down in order to, you know, to be able to play at the programs we want to play at. Now, obviously, that just depends on, you know, what your child's particular goals are. If they just want to play Division 3 golf, it's a different target than if they want to play Division 1. And then even within Division 1, if they want to play at an Auburn or a Stanford or a Clemson or whatever, then obviously they're going to have different, different expectations of where they need to get to comparatively to if they're just more okay with, you know, a UConn or Villanova or something of that sort, right? So that, that's really the way we want to be looking at this. Now, I want to throw out the exception here, because you guys might be watching and be like, yeah, I think our situation is a little bit different. Calvin's a great example of this, right? So Calvin's in a situation where technically he's got a scoring average of 74.5. Pretty solid, right? He's not too bad at all playing golf courses that are reasonably long, right? But he's only got a scoring differential of 2.29, right? Now let's look at the Colorado kid. Let's see how his stuff's different. Yeah, they're playing, I'd say, pretty similar. You know, maybe Calvin has had a couple of these shorter golf courses. Yeah, this one definitely didn't help him. Um, this is the thing that cracks me up— Invitational for a 6,300-yard golf course. Not helpful at all, not, not worth it. Um, you know, we've got this 6,400-yard golf course where we can take the course rating of, you know, 215 here, divide that by 3, it's course rating 71.6. For the original one I was just making fun of here, of course rating is 70, right? And so obviously I'm not taking anything away from Calvin here, but just trying to make the point. We got solid scores here, but the tournaments are just shooting ourselves in the foot, right? That's really where we can start to say, hey, we've got a tournaments issue. And even in Calvin's case, I'd say we could still probably drop the scoring average by a couple shots. Odds are, um, typically I start to see the low-hanging fruit disappear around a scoring average of 72, which to be clear means you're still shooting a bunch of scores in the 60s. It's just our average needs to improve a little bit. And typically once we get to that point we're really looking mostly on the greens of trying to figure out ways to make more birdies. Pretty much everybody else doesn't need to worry about making more birdies whatsoever. Everyone thinks they need to make more birdies, but the reality is you can get to 72 as a scoring average just by eliminating 3 putts, hitting a ton of greens, you know, making sure you're not hitting balls out of bounds, make sure you're not compounding your mistakes. It's just, you know, worst case scenario, when you miss a green, you make bogey. Every other time you're hitting the green, you're either making birdie or you're making par. And as you get better and better at those elite levels where you have a scoring average of 71 70, or, you know, let's say you're in a position like Miles Russell or something like that where, yeah, you're shooting— where's Miles at? Let's see here. Got a scoring average of 69.6. You know, in his case, I bet you any amount of money he's hitting a ton of greens and he's making a ton of putts, probably from a 10 to 15-foot range where we're able to get the birdie conversion rate really, really high. For him. So he's probably not 3-putting hardly ever. He's not compounding his mistakes. Probably gets up and down a fair, fair bit too, um, but that's probably less important. Again, you just do the math here. If we hit 70% of our greens, we're just not really missing that many greens per round. You got up and down 40% of the time here. I mean, you're talking about— that's 3 bogeys a round, right? Like, that's— it's very reasonable that you're going to go out there and make, you know, 2 maybe 3 birdies. And again, you can kind of see here where it's like you got up and down a little bit more, you hit one more green, it makes a huge difference, right? It's very easy to get to a place where you're going to shoot under par in that particular round. So long story short, in this video I just wanted to help you guys understand that there's no one-size-fits-all answer. We have to understand from a holistic perspective of where are we at today, where are we trying to get to, and where, where are we the farthest off from our benchmarks is really kind of the right way to think about it, right? So if your child is just getting started right, or they're, they're playing in tournaments, you're not really sure what to do, you want to look at like, where's our, where's our scoring average, right? If the scoring average is 78, they need to lower their scores, right? Just like fundamentally, that's what they need to do. And so there's different levers that you can pull because it's not just going to be hard, hard work, right? It's got to be working on the right stuff, right? We can't just go into the gym and work all day and lift weights like we're just going to destroy our bodies like that. Same thing's true for golf. We can't just go out there to say, let me just do more. Because the reps are going to start to deteriorate, right? So we need to be focused on the right things. We also need to have insight into our game as far as where we're actually bleeding shots, because I can't tell you how often I talk to families where they think that they're losing shots in one particular area and they're actually doing pretty well in that area. It's actually something else that is a problem for them, right? So you've got to understand where they're at. But on the flip side, if you're in a position where your child's like, hey, I've got a scoring average of 73 and my scoring differential is like above zero, that's definitely a sign where they need to play in some better tournaments and then see, hey, does our scoring average actually hold up under that higher stress? Last thing I'll leave you guys with is this: when you think about that low number, um, 72-74 is a scoring average range, you guys can kind of think about this as if you go out there and play in pretty much any qualifier, you got a scoring average of 72-74, if you don't play a bad round, you're probably going to qualify for whatever the event is, right? So if you're trying to play in the US Junior, if you're trying to play in the Junior PGA, if you're trying to play in, you know, a lot of these events, you know, you're trying to qualify for Toyota Cup, you're going to be able to qualify for those events pretty comfortably. AJGA, right? And so a lot of times when families are like, oh, I can't get into these events, it's like because their scores aren't good enough, right? So we need to figure out that, and then we're going to be able to unlock the next level of tournaments here. So hopefully this video shed some light here, gave you some— a little bit of clarity on where your child needs to be focusing. This is something you want me to guide you through personally and help you understand exactly what you need to do and when. Got an application below this video in the description. Fill that out, make sure your child's in a spot where I can actually help them. And then assuming it's, um, you guys are in a position I can help, we'll talk it over, make sure it's a fit for you guys, and then we'll go from there. But hopefully you guys enjoyed the video. You guys want to go check out some other videos on the channel as well where I go through different tournaments, how we want to be approaching things like AJGA, just getting ranked on Junior Golf Scoreboard, etc. You can go find that stuff on the channel as well, and I'll see you in those videos.