NCAA Championships

We often get the question, “Do college coaches use TUGR?” The answer is an emphatic, “Yes,” and seeing the field of the NCAA Championships this year, reemphasized that the best teams continue to embrace the best technologies.

As I looked over the field of this years’ Men’s NCAA Championship, I was excited to see many familiar names of teams and coaches, who use TUGR, and who interact and communicate with us on a regular basis. 30 teams made the NCAA Championships this year, with many of the usual Division I teams advancing into the Top-8 Match Play portion.

As we mentioned last winter, when we attended the College Coaches National Convention, we spent two straight days talking with coaches and educating them on our platforms. Since then, coaches from all over the country, across 23 different conferences, and every division, have signed up and are using TUGR tools to make better decisions.

We continue to get feedback, such as:

• The rankings “feel” spot on, pass every “eye test” and don’t feel manufactured.

• The recruiting tools for coaches invoke a huge “Wow!” when they see the capabilities.

• There is no “gaming” or manipulating of the rankings.

What was even more fun was seeing the University of Virginia play so well. Why? It was two years ago at the US Amateur that I was walking around and talking with the mom of a now current Virginia player. It was this conversation that spurred us to get into junior rankings after all the success we had with professional rankings.

Gaming The System

A couple months ago we wrote an article titled, “Can you ‘game’ TUGR?”. It was one of our most read posts. The topic invokes so many interesting feelings among juniors, parents, and coaches.

I had a conversation last week with a parent who told me the “gaming” of certain systems is getting crazy. I’ve had multiple conversations with parents who have showed me their “gaming” spreadsheet to pick and choose which events to play because they know the host site or tour will get a favorable difficulty adjustment.

The beauty of TUGR is you can’t “game” the rankings system. We’re not a points-based system that skews finish place rewards. We’re not a multi-factor system that arbitrarily weights, and then conveniently adjusts, many criteria. TUGR is the only system in junior golf that is based on a strokes-gained approach relative to competitors played, which in our system we call Relative Strokes.

By using this approach, rankings are more accurate, and we are able to incorporate many more events, that other systems refuse to rank, because we’re not constrained by a made-up points system or an arbitrary multi-factor system.

Check out our “gaming” post from a few months ago: https://tugr.org/insights/can-you-game-tugr

Announcements

A few announcements:

• The Otter Creek Championship: Reach out to Andrew Weisheit at [email protected] if you’re interested in learning more about this opportunity

• Backlog of Requests:

  • We have a small backlog of requests from our users due to the Memorial Day weekend. If you sent a request in last week, it may still be outstanding and we’ll get to it shortly. Thanks for the patience

Rankings are updated at http://tugr.org

Thanks,
Jeff