college golf

It’s never too early to research schools and golf programs. This will give you an idea of what it takes to play for those programs so you can set goals and get to work! You can check out the team and school websites for both academic and athletic information. And of course, their social media! Scoreboard by Clippd  is a great resource for rankings and results. And when looking at the current players’ scores, remember a few things... courses are longer, tougher, and played in fall and spring only, and it’s a higher level of pressure and demand that college players are under, so scores aren’t exactly reflective of junior golf scores. Also, don’t compare yourself to the 5th player on the team to see what is realistic; coaches are trying to make the team better, which means they need to replace their 2nd and 3rd position [...]

It’s one step to send out some initial emails, but it takes ongoing communication to generate interest and develop a relationship with the coach. Based on NCAA rules, DI coaches can't respond to your emails or speak to you until June 15th prior to your junior year. So it will mostly just be update emails that you will be sending up to that point to try and generate their interest. If it's after June 15th, then hopefully you are currently in communication with some college coaches and receiving feedback on their part. Whichever scenario, it is necessary to maintain some form of communication and updates as you move throughout this process. If you are being too unrealistic with your options, then you may not be very productive in your efforts, so do keep that in mind. Coaches like ongoing updates about your progress on the golf course, [...]

While I am an advocate for having big goals to work hard to achieve and keeping some dream schools on your list, you have to be cautious about what percentage of dream schools vs realistic schools you have on your list, especially these days with the transfer portal and roster caps added extra elements of difficulty for high school recruits when it comes to available spots. I say to contact 50+ schools, but as with most parts of this process, that is dependent on many factors. The reason I use that number is for the average player who is doing this process on their own, without knowledgeable or reliable guidance, I have seen a trend of what happens if they create a list of less than that. When I am providing general advice and tips on the steps of the process, I am trying to consider what [...]

Create a college golf resume. Seems pretty simple right? Wrong. It’s amazing how many resumes I’ve seen that are difficult to read, hard to access, and don’t contain the information a coach needs to begin their initial assessment of you as a potential recruit. I’ve had players send me resumes that don’t even include a single tourney score, the most important stat a coach needs to see is tournament scores and experience! Crazy, right? There are several ways to format resumes that are all acceptable - Documents, PDFs, a personal website, or an online resume service. For the most part, a coach doesn’t care about the format you use, they just need it to be accessible, easy to read, organized, and contain the information they need to see. At a minimum include (please keep in mind, this is just a brief overview of the information needed, if [...]