Take a Guess at Which Ranking System Dominated the U.S. Junior Am

Some might say, “There were a lot of upsets this year at the US Junior Am,” to which we at TUGR would say, “Not if you looked at the right ranking system!” 

The U.S. Junior Amateur was held this past week - congratulations to Hamilton Coleman for winning the championship and taking home the gold medal.

Throughout the summer we often test the predictive accuracy of TUGR against the other rankings systems to see which ranking system is the most accurate. The U.S. Junior Am is unique, because as a match play event, every match becomes its own accuracy test. By default, every ranking system makes a prediction on each match based on where they have the players ranked.

We tested TUGR against 3 other well-known ranking systems to see which was the best. The results were decisive and continue the trend that we’ve seen for three years:

To put things in context, in the world of predictive analytics, anything above 60% is a phenomenal outcome. TUGR out-predicted and outperformed every other system by a material margin.

Why is this the case?

It all goes back to the methodology and technology TUGR uses. Most systems use ‘course rating’ or ‘par’ as the anchor for their differential formula. The problem with this approach is there are too many variables that go unaccounted for when calculating an output.

TUGR takes a head-to-head, or strokes-gained approach, making the anchor of the differential actual scores by fellow competitors, not an arbitrary course rating that can’t properly account for variables such as weather, course conditions, elevation, or tournament difficulty.

We’ve written about this often, but the proverbial proof continues to be in the pudding with predictive outcomes as we saw last week at the U.S. Junior Am.

With TUGR, you get the following when comparing to the other well-known systems:

• More players ranked

• More tournaments included

• More predictive and accurate results

Some might say, “There were a lot of upsets this year at the US Junior Am,” to which we at TUGR would say, “Not if you looked at the right ranking system!” Nearly 65% of the time, the higher ranked player on TUGR won their match, compared to just over 50% of the time with other systems.

Quite the difference! As the old saying goes, “One of these is not like the others,” and in this case, the one far outshines the others.

TUGR is simply better at ranking players and continues to be the best place for coaches, parents, and players to see where they stand in the world of junior golf. TUGR has never had more coaches using our recruiting platform that we do right now. The word is out. College coaches trust TUGR, and the accuracy numbers show that using anything other than TUGR puts you at a distinct disadvantage with recruiting.

Rankings are updated: http://tugr.org

Reach out with any questions.

Thanks,
Jeff