Round 1, Longer holes, and Less bogeys

My thoughts on scoring data from a junior golf championship.

My home club, Haga Golf Club, is hosting the Norwegian Championships this week. Haga also hosted last year’s Norwegian junior championship. In an effort to point out pivotal holes on the course, one of the players I coach, Petter Dale, ran all of the numbers from that junior championship.
He wrote an article in Norwegian which you can find here.
You can fin his published dashboard with the data here.

I love this chart. In it, Petter has grouped players in the boy’s division into two - top-20 finishers, and outside.
This is not necessarily earth-shattering information, but it confirms a few scoring-dynamics hold true at the junior level as well:

1. The best players gain a lot more by avoiding bogeys and worse than by making birdies. Here, classified into top-20 vs outside. We can see that top-20 players made 5.2% more birdies or better, and 12.7% less bogeys or worse. The stroke value of that ratio (when we include the value of doubles and triples, etc), is about the same ratio we’ve discussed before on this Substack - 3/4ths of the strokes gained is from avoiding mistakes.

   1. A side-not to this point: The two holes with the biggest delta in birdie or better percentage (14.1% and 12.6%), were the only reachable par-5s on this course.

2. The top-20 players gained the most on tough par 4s with trouble off the tee. Holes 1, 3, 10, and 13 all have something in common - they are relatively long par-4s with some kind of trouble off the tee.
   The best players gain more on the field on these holes as there is larger variance in the scoring. The scoring average for those holes is effected by doubles and triples from players in trouble off the tee.
   Here is hole 10 for the guys:

   

   In comparison, here is hole 17 - a short par 3 without much trouble:

   

   
   3. Round 1 saw the highest scoring average.
   This is a point we’ve looked at several times on this Substack - round 1 is often the easiest time to gain stroke son the field - especially at the junior level. Here are the scoring averages for rounds 1 and 2 (before the cut):
   Boys
   Round 1: 80.4
   Round 2: 78.0
   

   Girls
   Round 1: 83.7
   Round 2: 82.8
   
   Great work, Petter! Best of luck to everyone competing at Haga this week!

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