Top-ranked Players vs Field by Hole Difficulty 📊
MikkelGolf.com Newsletter
Nuggets from the more than 60,000 lines of Norwegian Junior Tour scoring data.
Previously, we’ve seen how elite junior golfers gain roughly 75% of their strokes to the field through bogey or worse avoidance.
Are there other patterns to how the best are separating themselves?
In previous Substack posts, I’ve mentioned how I used to track quite a bit of data during my time as a collegiate coach. From each tournament I attended, I tracked hole location, relative wind direction, wind strength, par, length, type of hole, average score (field), top five individual scores, and scores from all of the players on our team.
An aspect I observed was how the top-five in each tournament would typically gain more strokes to the field the further the average score was from par. Meaning, the best players would gain at an increased rate on very tough holes (holes playing well over par) - but also on very easy holes (playing well under par).
They would make fewer bogeys on tough holes, and more birdies (as well as fewer mistakes) on the easiest holes. Logically, this could make sense as longer clubs have smaller margin of errors - and they’re in play in both instances (reachable par 5s + long par 4s or par 3s).
Now that I have complete data from a tour, I wanted to look into this.
THE CHART
In the chart below, I’ve grouped the top-10 ranked players from the season on the Norwegian Junior Tour (using the yellow-number logic) in the Gutter U19 (Boys under 19) division.
The horizontal axis describes the difficulty of the hole. 1 represents all holes grouped which we’re in the 10% lowest scoring average to par for the field. 10 represents holes that were in the 90+ percentiles. I will list the scoring averages for each grouped percentile below the chart.
Field scoring averages per grouped percentile:
-0.32 —> 1 (easiest holes)
0.00
0.11
0.20
0.28
0.36
0.42
0.51
0.61
0.89 —> 10 (hardest holes)
MY THOUGHTS
The data looks similar to what I observed in college golf. The best players gain the most on the hardest holes - presumably by avoiding bogeys and worse. This makes total sense considering what we know about the importance of bogey avoidance.
However, we can see from the trendline how they also gain marginally more on the easiest holes. It’s easier for an elite player to separate from the field on the 20% easiest holes than the 21-50% easiest holes.
When ranking players by quartiles, the best performers on this junior tour gain the most strokes on the following types of holes (ranked):
Fourth Quartile – The toughest holes: These holes play approximately half a stroke over par or more.
Third Quartile – Challenging holes: These holes play roughly a third to half a stroke over par.
First Quartile – The easiest holes: These holes play under par to just over par.
Second Quartile – Moderately easy holes: These holes play about a tenth to a third of a stroke over par.
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