AOA - Joseph Edit

The main idea is that parents should not wait until their child is "good enough" to start playing competitive golf. It is important for junior golfers to gain experience and learn to perform under pressure. The evolution of a junior golfer involves starting with basic skills and gradually moving on to more competitive tournaments. It is also beneficial for young golfers to compete against older kids to challenge themselves and improve. The focus should be on gaining experience rather than winning or rankings. All right. Let's welcome back Andrew Lewis to the Driven Golf Podcast. This is the Angle of Attack with Andrew Lewis. That's a nice name for a segment, right? Very catchy. I wonder who came up with that. Exactly. Hey, you know, part of this segment is we really want to just cover like one aspect in each episode around really attacking junior golf and developing in the game. Andrew's got quite a bit of experience working with a number of different golfers, being the father of a competitive junior golfer. So I think each episode we're going to cover a different topic. If folks want to ask a question for a future episode, you can reach me at Instagram at Driven Golf Analytics. Feel free to slide into my DMs and we'll maybe use that as a topic for a future episode. So one of the things I wanted to talk about is just sort of the evolution of a junior golfer. In the first episode, we talked about just introducing junior golfers to the game, some of the tips, some of the advice for parents, and some of the lessons learned, frankly, from our mistakes in the past. But what about that step when you got a young golfer playing golf, he's getting his way around, he's getting the ball in the hole, and you're starting to see some progress? When do you know it's at the right time to jump into tournament golf and competitive golf? Yeah, this is a tricky question because on the one hand, if you think if you find your kid to play soccer at age three, basically within a week, they're playing a game. And they're on a team, though, so they don't have to have tons of skills. They don't have to be able to score a goal or be goalie. They basically just have to be able to run around. And that's how most sports are. If you sign up for basketball or baseball, to a degree, you can almost hide. But they are getting game experience. So the alternative is not true that you need to wait until your kid is proficient at every skill that you're going to encounter when you play a round of golf. The first time that my son played a tournament, he was nine, and he shot a 59 on nine holes. And I really didn't know what he was going to shoot because we hadn't played a lot of nine hole rounds. Within three months, he was shooting in the 30s. And I bring that up because the number one motivator for him was seeing that he was in last place by a mile. 59 is 23 over. I remember I stroked him in the bunker for grounding his foot, by the way. So not a great. Yeah, he didn't know the rules. So I would say when your kid can hit the ball in the air, he has some level of speed control on the greens. He can hit a basic chip shot. That's about all someone would need to go and play a competitive round of golf. You do not need to worry about if they go and finish last. You don't need to worry if they make a nine. They are going to do all of that. You're going to play against some kids who have been playing for years because they started like age four or five, which might be a little bit on the early side. But you don't need to wait. I would say most parents wait too long because they're trying to wait until their kid is good enough. But there is never going to be a good enough because there's always going to be someone that's a little bit better than your kid, most likely, until they're the number one player in the world. So if you can take them out for nine holes and they seem to have enough skill just to complete most of the holes, that's good enough. Yeah. And a lot of these, we're just talking like local nine hole events. Yes. They'll have a limit on score. The rules are set up such that it doesn't get too frustrating. I do think you're right. I mean, the first time it's going to be a shock to the system. So set your expectations accordingly. And remember that having the best nine-year-old in the world doesn't matter. No one knows who the best... Jim, do you know who the best nine-year-old in the world is right now? I have no idea. No idea. So just breathe, relax, go get some ice cream. It'll be okay. Yeah. The only thing that I would add to that, you just touched base on it, is there are always going to be kids better than your kid. I think if you're dominating the local scene and you're seven years old, my son, he never played in any of these U.S. kids events, like the IMG Junior Worlds, one of these big international national events. I never felt that he needed to do it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But you shouldn't feel like you have to do this for your kid's development. Like you said, no one's going to remember. If the kid's basically winning a trophy that's bigger than him, it might be a little excessive. But I think they do want to win ribbons or whatever. But my strategy was when Luke was pretty good and beating kids his age, he played the local kids, but that were one or two years older. Those kids are going to be bigger. They would have been doing it longer. He was losing to them at first, and then he figured out a way to beat them. I think one of the biggest advantages of being one of the smaller golfers is every stage of golf, for the most part, there's going to be somebody that's out driving you by 40 yards. Or even on a hole, even if you're with that guy, there may be times you don't hit it quite as well, or you hit in the rough, and you're 40 yards behind the other guy. Maybe it's match play. And you got to figure out a way to beat that guy from 40 yards behind. That's an acquired and developed skill. For sure. So I always felt like we didn't really have a need to travel too far. There were kids that could give my son a run for the money a couple of years older in our town. And I remember, we would look up to those kids and think, oh, that kid is unbeatable. He's winning everything at these little local events. And you just keep chipping away at it. And eventually, you're the guy. And then you just move on to the next stage. So I would say, if you're winning everything, you're probably not doing it right. You should seek out competition. You should seek out guys that are maybe one or two steps ahead of you in order to meet and get that continued development. Yeah. Something I'd add is I frequently seem like, when I'm doing the ear and goal sessions or something like that, that I'm having to talk to kids about gaining competitive experience. They just haven't played enough tournaments. Because playing competitive golf is a skill. Like learning how you perform under pressure, all of your processes, skills, your golf IQ, all that stuff takes, I mean, it frankly takes hundreds of reps. If I had to guess, I would say Cameron's played probably 200 tournaments to date. He's 14. So there's no substitute. Even if the kid goes and plays terrible, he's still gaining some experience of what it feels like to see up and how you can't hold the club because you're so nervous, or your heart rate's really high, or you make a nine and you're having to move on from that. All of those things are going to happen. And you might as well let them happen because you need to learn to deal with it. Because, oh, by the way, as you play golf, all that stuff's going to continue to happen, even at the highest levels. So gaining experience is huge. Yeah. I remember the first year Luke started playing in 36 hole events here in the Legends events that you mentioned last time, in his age group, in the first tournament, first round, he shot an 88. And he'd been shooting par, close to par, a few over par for most of that time. And it was a bit of that shell shock that I mentioned earlier. But we had that moment of was this the right decision? Did we do the right thing? And you just got to go through those experiences. And a couple months later, he's back to shooting his normal scores. And that summer, he was extremely competitive in those events. And look, a lot of times, especially in those early ages, you don't really need to focus on the rankings. And we'll talk about rankings at some later date. But those things are going to roll off and nobody's going to care about it 12 months later. It'll leave a little bit of a mark early on, but it's pretty much meaningless as they go through their development. Yeah. I hope that's the case. I hope Cameron's 59 doesn't hold him back moving forward. At least he's in the 59 club. All right, Andrew. Well, I definitely appreciate your perspective. And as I mentioned, folks can reach out if they have any questions, but we'll cover some aspects of the student golf world and just learning to attack it with drive and passion. I definitely appreciate your perspective. Absolutely. Thanks for having me.