71 Scorecards
MikkelGolf.com Newsletter #25
A Freshman on a Men’s or Women’s College Golf Team arrives on campus. They are terrified, optimistic, confident, and scared. Every possible emotion is experienced during the first couple of weeks on campus. The root of all of these emotions is often the uncertainty about the future. “My future starts here.”
The upcoming years of college will be incredibly molding for this young person. Most freshmen are 18 when they enroll, and 22 when they graduate. This means that when graduating, they’ve spent 18% of their entire life in college. That’s a lot of time, isn’t it?
The notion for the Freshman is that they have all the time in the world, and they are going to play incredible amounts of golf. It feels like they’re starting a new career.
Well… In terms of competitive golf, it might be a bit less than you think…
How many competitive rounds?
A division one team has 24 days to compete during the regular season. There are a few exceptions to this rule, such as tournaments in Hawaii. Also, some events are 36-18, meaning you play 36 holes on the first day. These are factors that lead to college golf teams playing more than 24 competitive rounds per year.
I’ve looked at the 2023/2024 schedules of both the Men’s and Women’s teams at the schools I’ve coached at: Baylor, Texas Tech, and Stephen F. Austin. Below is a table of how many rounds each of the six teams were scheduled to play during the 2023/2024 season:
We can see that the average scheduled team rounds for these six teams is 33.3. If we assume that there are a couple of rounds rained out each year, that brings our total to 31.3 rounds.
We know that roughly a quarter of Division I teams will get to play an NCAA Regional Championship. Further, about a tenth of teams will end up qualifying for Nationals. For simplicity, let’s keep these same proportions for both Men and Women.
For the Women, we know from the recent Women’s Golf Roster article that there are 277 Teams in D1. That gives us the following calculation for amount of Team Rounds and Individual Rounds played in D1 every year:
We also know that there are 2,308 players in D1 Women’s Golf this year. That gives an average amount of competitive rounds per player of 44,943/2,308 = 19.5. With four years of eligibility this equates to roughly 78 Scorecards through a college career.
Let’s look at the Men’s side. From the Men’s roster article from a few weeks ago, we know that there are 306 Teams and 2,999 Players in Men’s Division I this year.
We can see how there are 16.6 competitive rounds played per player in Men’s Division I this year. Over a college career this equates to about 66 Scorecards.
Across all of Division I, the average is 17.8 scorecards per player per year, which translates to about 71 scorecards over four years. This figure is surprisingly lower than many might anticipate. For the freshman, who might feel like they have an entire golf career ahead of them, 71 scorecards may put it all into perspective.
Now, there are a few things I’ve (purposely) overlooked in my assumptions. The first is individual events. Nowadays, there are quite a few individual playing opportunities, especially at the top schools. Further, in these calculations, I’ve assumed all tournaments are played as 5-count-4 without individual spots. I’ve done this for simplicity reasons and to prove a point. Your college career is shorter than you think, and you should to be grateful for every competitive opportunity. The 71 scorecards across a college career had been slightly higher had I added individual tournaments and assumed some more spots per team.
Boiling it down - 71 College Scorecards is all you get - Be grateful for every competitive opportunity!
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Have a fantastic week!
Best,
Mikkel Bjerch-Andresen | Golf Coach & Analyst | Former College Coach | Oslo, Norway