What Junior Golfers Really Think About the College Recruiting Process
At the 2018 National Golf Coaches Convention in Las Vegas, I spent a lot of speaking to coaches about the recruiting process. Based on the feedback, I decided to do something a little different; look at the recruitment process from the perspective of the junior golfer. With the feedback I collected I created a 10-question survey with some interesting questions. Then with the help of the Junior Tour of Northern California (THANK YOU!), collected response from 57 junior golfers. Here are the questions and what I found: Q1: What percent more would a mid-major school have to offer you for [...]
Does being a First Team All-American in the AJGA predict professional success?
Does being a First Team American Junior Golf Association (AJGA) All-American predict success in professional golf? We decided to crunch the numbers and share our results! Examining results from 1978 to 2008, we found that 237 different players earned the honor of being named an AJGA First Team All-American, with 42 individuals earning the honor on multiple occasions. Of the 237, a whopping 46 or approximately 20 percent of them, went on to win on the PGA Tour, with 10 of them, or approximately 4 percent, winning major championships. However, when looking at players who were multiple year AJGA All-Americans, [...]
How good do you REALLY have to be to compete at a high-level in college golf?
One of the major complaints I hear from parents is, “schools don’t email my son back.” In October of last year, I published a story with data from college coaches called “Stop Bothering Me! Why NCAA coaches already get too many emails.” The story demonstrated the overwhelming demand of time coaches need to respond to emails from a melee of people from junior golfers to donors to members of their own administration. That article, however, tells only half the story; the other half is for junior players, their parents and coaches to understand the level it takes to contribute to [...]
Strength of Junior Golf
There is a growing theme in college and junior golf; going deep! I mean deep, here are some examples: Andrea Lee of Stanford shots 58 in practice Cal Berkley wins Wyoming Desert Intercollegiate with -47 as a team College of Charleston wins Loyola Intercollegiate with -48 as a team UNLV wins National Invitational Tournament with -50 as a team Kaitlin Milligan of University of Oklahoma shoots 62 in the first round of the Westbrook Invitational Ximena Gonzalez Garcia shoots 64 in the final round of the Global Junior Golf Event in Mexico Florida Junior Tour had 27 boys break par [...]
Early Commitments
In this month’s article, I would like to address the issue of early commitments. As many of the readers might be aware, Brad Dalke, a member of the 2017 NCAA Championship team at the University of Oklahoma Golf committed when he was 12 years old. Since that time, many more young men and women are committing early with players like Ben James (2021) committed to UConn and Hudson Weibel (2021) to Oklahoma. As this becomes more common, I wanted to explore the reasons it is happening, as well as the thoughts of eminent scientists about the phenomena. A key aspect [...]
The Skill of Breaking Par
In our previous article, NCAA Handicap, we provided data on the tournament handicaps of the #1 players at DI, DII, NAIA and Junior College. In this article, we are going to talk about the importance of the skill of breaking par including providing data on the number of rounds under par by junior golfers and ways you can build the skill of breaking par. In the last article we reported that the best player in the country Justin Suh of USC has a handicap of between +6-+7 in tournament golf over the fall. Likewise, last year I reported that there [...]
NCAA Handicap
Starting this year, I have partnered with the Northern California to provide junior golfers, their families and golf professionals more data about junior golf development and the college search process. For our first article, we are going to examine the question: How good are the #1 players at Division 1, Division 2, NAIA and Junior College Men’s Golf? With the help of Jim Cowan, director of course rating and handicapping for the Northern California Golf Association, I set out to examine the tournament handicaps of each of these players from their results in the 2017 fall season and answer this [...]