College Golf Verbal Commitment Lists

 

If you’re a junior golfer looking to get recruited to play golf in college, one of the best and most under-utilized resources you have access to, is the Junior Golf Scoreboard’s list of college signees and commitments. Unlike other college golf verbal commitment lists, the JGS commitment list includes the junior golf ranking and differential for each committed play at the time of their signing. 

Here is why this college golf verbal commitment list is so helpful, and how you can use it to have a better recruiting process… 

 

The JGS college golf verbal commitment list allows you to compare junior golf rankings

In order to really get a sense of where you can play golf in college, you need to compare your scores/differential/ranking to the scores/differential/ranking that current college players had as juniors. 

Comparing your scores as a junior to the scores that players are shooting in college just doesn’t cut it. Sure, it’s helpful in a sense, but it misses a really important nuance of college recruiting.

What you really need to know is: what made these junior golfers recruitable? 

Let’s look at an example to help this sink in. For the sake of the argument, let’s say that I am:

• Female
• Class of 2022
• Ranked 200 in the class
• Tournament Scoring Ave = 75
• Differential = 0.9

If I look at something like the Ping Guide to College Golf or Golfstat results, or if I just go to the team’s website results page, I can see that my scores are pretty much right in line or slightly lower than most Georgetown Women’s Golf team members. Assuming I have the grades and test scores, that makes me a great fit, right?? 

NO!!!

If I look at the rankings of the players Georgetown has recruited over the last 4 years it tells a totally different and much more accurate story. 

Here are the rankings of players who have been recruited, made verbal commitments, and been accepted to play their college golf at Georgetown over the last 5 years:

 

Class of 2017 commit rank: 71, 103, 140

Class of 2018 commit rank: 58, 134

Class of 2019 commit rank: 77, 105, 115

Class of 2020 commit rank: 97, 121

Class of 2021 commit rank: 102

 

And when you calculate the scoring differential these committed players had at the time of their commitment, their average differential is 0.21. Much lower than the example player above.

What this tells me, is that the Georgetown Women’s Golf Coach is typically recruiting junior players who are ranked in the top 100 in their graduating class — and I need to improve my ranking in order to be a strong candidate for their team.

 

Why are junior golf rankings so much better at predicting college fit than scoring averages?

The example above is quite common, and here the nuance it highlights: how good someone is as a junior is not always indicative of how well they will play in college.

For a variety of reasons, players’ scores can be more likely to go up or down in college. When I was coaching at Harvard, one of our biggest recruiting competitors was Stanford. A handful of recruits even chose to come to Harvard over Stanford. 

So why is it that Stanford is so much better at golf than Harvard? Because Stanford has more resources to help kids continue to improve and is a more conducive environment for continued improvement. It does not mean that they recruited better junior players though.

If you compare junior golf scores to college golf scores, you’ll overlook this nuance completely. There are many factors that contribute to why some players get better in college and others don’t. During the recruiting process, you should consider these factors to help you determine what kind of a golf experience you want in college, but you also need to know what really makes you recruitable. 

Furthermore, some classes are stronger than others. I might be scoring what it typically takes to get recruited to Georgetown, but if there are a lot of players ahead of me in the rankings who also want to go to a top academic school, my scores aren’t going to be enough.

Note: if you are a junior golfer with aspirations of playing professional golf, look for a program that you can get recruited to based on your ranking, and then look at the scoring averages. Which team has players who are scoring better than their peer schools who recruited kids with similar rankings? That’s the team/coach/environment that knows how to help kids continue to improve!

 

How to use the college golf verbal commitment list 

In the example above, I showed you the junior golf rankings of all of the players who had committed to Georgetown over the last 5 years. Junior Golf Scoreboard makes this information available for free on their website, but you have to search through each list individually. That’s fine if I am only looking for the commitment data on one or two schools, but to look up the full list of players who committed to all of the schools I might be interested in is going to take way too long.

This is exactly what the College Golf School & Scholarship Finder is designed for.

One search and you can see all that data (and a lot more) on every school that is a reasonable fit for you. No clicking back and forth, it’s all right there on a single screen. You’ll also be able to see the academic info and scoring data on that school. Here’s what it looks like: 

From there, you’ll be able to select a set list of schools that are realistic options for you, which means you’ll have a less stressful and more successful recruiting process.

 

Conclusion

There are a lot of resources out there to help you in the recruiting process. One of the best resources available is the list of college golf commitments by ranking. Use this list, along with the School & Scholarship Finder, to make sure that you are targeting the right schools for you.