Here’s What They’re Looking For In Players

Physical skills wow you as a recruiter. Those players who send it or roll it beautifully certainly get our attention. However, there are skills that don’t show up on the stat line and for that reason, I always went to watch players in person to see if I could get a glimpse of the skills that often are the ones that make a difference. What are they? 

The first is attitude. This one comes across pretty quickly, especially if you can talk with the players at any length. A good attitude contains accountability. If a player started a sentence with the words, “I should have” or “I could have” I knew they were digging into their mistakes with reflection and were accountable for what they did on the course. Words that showed a lack of accountability were phrases such as, “it was _____”. You can fill the blank with rainy, windy, tough, firm, slow, long, short, in bad shape, etc. It’s possible that the player is simply relating the conditions, but more often, it’s the player giving you the reason they didn’t play well. Another tell is when a player says, “Here’s what happened to me on the third hole.” It’s as though they’re the victim of a crime instead of the person pulling the trigger. Accountability is a big step toward a great attitude. 

Another indicator of attitude or mindset is the ability to bounce back after a bad hole. When I look at scorecards, I always looked for what happens after a bogey or a double bogey. Even better if I was there in person. Can the player get a par and get back on track or are they stringing bogeys on multiple holes? Good players make more pars and birdies, so they have a better chance to bounce back, so it isn’t a perfect indicator, but it still can give a glimpse into whether the player has resilience woven into their attitude on the golf course. 

Two other things that showed up in a player’s attitude were their presence on the course and their vanity. Presence is the ability to be in the shot at hand and it showed up in a lot of little ways. A player’s pace of play staying similar, a routine that doesn’t change, how their eyes connected to the target, how they looked at shots that were out of position and their overall approach to each shot or putt. I can remember watching Brittany Lang when she was 16 and she reminded me of a tiger after prey when she looked at putts. 

I didn’t get her signed, but she went on to win a U.S. Open in a long career on tour. She was totally present when she competed and that skill allowed her to do great things. 

One of the things that gets in the way of presence is vanity. When a player becomes too conscious of what others think of them, whether good or bad, it starts to show up in a lot of little ways. These players overreact to mistakes so those around them know it wasn’t what was intended. Results become more important than the process and strategy, poise and groundedness fly out the window. The player sees their worth in their score instead of their efforts or attitude. Vanity isn’t spoken of enough with young players, because the age of influence and image is making it acceptable in our culture. It gets in the way of learning and growth, because the character it takes to become great can’t be seen. Vanity is like a gateway drug of pride, which we all know is one of the deadly sins. Golf is a humbling game and perhaps giving into that fact is seen as a weakness by some, but I looked for humble players over vain players whenever I was out watching the top juniors. 

Other skills that show up when you watch a player in person are the Golf IQ skills. They include awareness, shot choices, strategy, green reading, reading slopes and wind, short game choices and what a player chooses to do when in trouble. College coaches understand that they’re watching young players who lack experience in decision making under pressure, but they’re still looking for it from every player they recruit. While the physical skills wow coaches, the Golf IQ skills cement their decision-making when making offers. Over the years, I’ve recruited the players with the wow skills and started coaching the Golf IQ skills as soon as it was legal and some still never caught up. These are the skills that lead to scoring well and it takes an understanding of their importance to learn them. I remember taking my team at Texas A&M to Scotland and playing the ladies of the St. Rule club at the New Course at St. Andrews. Our golf skills were superior. We hit it better and farther, but they cleaned our clock. They understood how to play links golf. They could read the wind and the firmness of the turf. They didn’t send the ball high into the sky with spin. They had high golf IQ. It was a great learning moment for us. 

Awareness is the first step to all the other skills that make up your Golf IQ. When young players learn the game, they’re often taught to focus in on self-awareness as they work on their mechanics. They then have to shift that awareness to reading the course, figuring out the best option for a shot, which includes club choice, landing point, read, speed, spin, trajectory and all the other things you have to control on every shot you hit. The ability to do all of these things might be more important than the ability to hit pure irons on the range or blast long drives. What good is it to hit it great if you can’t match your shots to the situation? An example that comes to mind is a when I watched a junior who bombed it off the tee pump it out of bounds over number 17, a short par 4 at Columbia Country Club at the US Girl’s Jr. It was a gutsy shot that didn’t work out, but it showed incredible power. That player played D1 golf and didn’t develop as I thought she might and it was probably her Golf IQ that held her back. 

Developing Golf IQ takes a lot of time on the course, the ability to be accountable for every bounce the ball takes and connecting the dots between strategy, shot choices and outcomes. It also means shifting awareness from inside to outside. Instead of thinking about what you’re doing with each swing, you have to think about what the ball is doing with each shot. How do you read that when you’re recruiting? It’s subtle, but you see players adjust to green speeds or golf course firmness. You see good wind play and fewer typical shots left short into the wind or sent long with the wind. You see aim points adjusted when ball flight and slopes go the same direction. You see players matching their shotmaking to the course instead of hitting perfect shots that don’t fit the situation. 

The final skill that doesn’t show up on a stat sheet, but does routinely show up on a scorecard is competitiveness. This is the player’s ability to do the best they can with each shot regardless of the situation they’re in. This is the most fun skill to witness when you’re recruiting. It’s the kid who flubs a chip and chips the next one in or who hits it into the trees, punches out, wedges it to 10 feet and drains it. Sure, all good players have done these things, but when you watch a lot of golf, you see it far more often from the really competitive players and less often from the players who are still wondering how they managed to hit it into the woods. Competitors are present, because the most important thing to them is getting the ball in the hole. They work on the how after the round, but when they’re playing, they don’t care too much about the how. I recruited a lot of competitors over the years and enjoyed coaching them. One of the most competitive players I coached was Casey Grice. The best example of her ability to compete happened her second year on the Symetra Tour when she earned her LPGA card despite a wrist injury which kept her from hitting balls or practicing away from tournament rounds. She would warm up with about 10-12 balls and then play the round with what she had that day. She rarely visited the range after the round, but did spend time putting and chipping. Perhaps that was her key to success that season, but I’d guess it was simply the grittiness of being a competitor. 

So much of what it takes to become a great player is within the character and habits that never show up on stat sheets. If you’re a parent of a young player, these are the things you want to develop as they grow up. Separate results from praise and instead give praise to good attitude, good adjustments, good awareness and good manners. Listen hard for words that designate accountability and call out the words that sound like victimization. Figure out how to downplay image and play up character that doesn’t show. 

If you’re a junior golfer, think about the skills you possess that help you score that don’t show up in the stats. How can you continue to develop them and make them even stronger? What is holding you back from other skills such as these? What needs to change in your approach to develop your character, your Golf IQ and your competitiveness? Know that you can develop all you need if you put effort into the right things and let go of what doesn’t help you on the golf course.

Here’s a story that outlines that idea. It’s about Coach Anson Dorrance and Olympian Mia Hamm, who at the time was playing college soccer at UNC-Chapel Hill.

He said one cold, late winter morning while driving to work, he saw Mia doing a grueling conditioning workout all by herself where she ran cone drills to exhaustion without a ball or teammates and coaches to push or celebrate her.

Coach Dorrance secretly pulled over to watch her, and he said in between each sprint, he saw her bent over with sweat flying off her and hot air shooting from her lungs.

He said he was so impressed with what he saw that when he got to work, Coach Anson scribbled a note for Mia that said: “The vision of a champion is someone who is bent over, drenched in sweat, at the point of exhaustion when no one else is watching.”

Coach Dorrance says, “The final measure of athletic greatness is not what you do in the training session with your peers and teammates; it’s basically what you do on your own.”

Mia has said when chasing greatness, “No one is watching you. The accountability is your own.”