Why should we care about the accuracy of WAGR? Honestly, it really only matters if someone is taking the ranking and doing something with it, such as filling out a tournament field, college roster or Walker Cup team. For the vast majority of amateur golfers, as much as we'd love it to be as accurate as possible, it likely doesn't impact our competitive golf existence in any way. For most, the impact of the 2025 WAGR changes will hardly be felt.
However, WAGR's most critical use case is for exemptions into top amateur events and things like U.S. Open qualifying. Here's just a sampling of some of its use cases:
The top amateur players on WAGR play almost exclusively in Power-rated events above 50, so there is likely no impact to many of the elite events listed above. As an example, we found no case of a player losing or gaining a U.S. Amateur exemption as a result of these changes. However, there is likely an impact to the back half of the Asia-Pacific and Latin American fields, just looking at the results and players involved.
Where these changes are most relevant and impactful is with the U.S. Junior exemption. The vast majority of junior events have below Power ratings below 50. Thus there is bound to be some winners and losers as a direct result of these changes.
In Part III, we'll take a look at those golfers who would move in and out of a U.S. Junior exemption. Similar to Parts 1 & 2, we look at all ~1000 junior golfers on WAGR and measured the impact IF these proposed changes had been in place all along. For example, if a tournament two years ago had a Power rating of 10, we discounted the points earned by finish position by a third (the reduction is less and less as you approach 50 Power).
[Note: not everybody has an age recorded on WAGR. For players without an Age, we used judgment based on recent tournament entries to determine whether a player is a U.S. junior-eligible golfer or not. These players are denoted by a "*" next to their name in the tables below. Some of these players could age out of the U.S. Junior by the time it's held in July 2025]
Our analysis shows that up to 15 players could lose their U.S. junior exemption and be replaced by 15 other juniors. So the primary question is are the 15 Swap-In players more deserving that the 15 Swap-Out players?
Let's first take a look at the Swap Out group.
The first thing we notice is the geographic mix of the players impacted. The only country with more than one player on the list is Jordan, and this is 3/4ths of all the ranked junior golfers in that country. This is particularly interesting given the revelation in Joseph LaMagna's excellent article in The Fried Egg that these changes are a direct result of tournament observations from the country of Jordan. Overall, this group would've seen their points reduced by an average of 13.2% points, enough to move them all from inside the Top 100 to outside the Top 100.
What's frankly incredible is how he got here in the first place. How could someone with a tournament average of 78.4 be considered the 90th best junior golfer in the world? For context, a quick sample of the scoring average of the 1000th-1010th ranked golfers in Junior Golf Scoreboard in WAGR-eligible events is 75.0. One could argue that there are at least 1000 golfers more deserving of a U.S. Junior exemption than some of the players on this list. You may recall from Part II that the scoring average of the handful of U.S. players being dropped and not considered worthy of being ranked was 74.2. International players with the same average or higher have been considered among the best junior golfers in the world and made exempt into the U.S. national championship for juniors.
Next, let's take a look at the Players who would've Swapped In.
Right off the bat, you see the 2025 adjustments only impact this group slightly (-2.0%). They are already playing in mostly 50+ power rating events. They all move from outside the Top 100 to inside the Top 100. This group has a scoring average of 72.5 and includes AJGA first-team All-Americans and the winner of the 2024 Junior Invitational (the Masters of junior golf). On the surface, this appears to be a more deserving group than the players they would be replacing.
To hammer this point home, the head-to-head record of Players in Group A when they face Players in Group B in the same event is an incredible 4-42-1!
From a country perspective, the biggest winners are Thailand (4 players) and the United States (3 players). From that perspective, these changes seem to be directionally correct.
But did these changes go far enough? Recall the fact we've pointed out on multiple occasions: the U.S. vs. International split at the amateur and professional level is right around 50/50. Unless you think junior golfers in the U.S. are woefully underdeveloped until they get to college, you'd expect the junior amateur split to hover around 50/50 as well. Under the current points system, only 13 of the 100 exemptions would go to U.S. based players. So while this change is directionally positiive, it only makes a small dent in the gap.
Let's take a look at what I'm calling Group C. These are the next 12 American-based players that are still ranked outside the Top 100, even after the change.
You see that Group C still fares favorably with both Group A and B, though they lag behind in the junior rankings even after the adjustment. 9 of these 12 players were AJGA All-Americans in 2024.
The root cause here is the issue pointed out in Parts I & II. The proposed changes are meant to address small, weak field events with a Power ranking below 50. But they will also impact large, deep-field events in the junior circuit in the U.S. that also have a Power ranking below 50. Until they get the Power ranking to reflect the true depth and quality of the field, these issues will continue to exist.
The chart below shows how difficult it is to get ranked and earn an exemption-level (5.25+) number of points in the U.S. This shows the average score per finish position across the three groups. The average score needed to win in Group A events is higher than the average score of Group C finishing 10th. Even with the points adjustment, those 1st place finishes are worth 6.36 points on average while the average 10th place finish in Group C is worth 3.87 points.
It is important to note that these Swap-in/Swap-Out populations are generated only by applying the adjustments to every tournament going back in time. In practice, however, the changes are only made to tournaments starting in January and going forward. From that perspective, we may see very little of this desired movement. One could argue that it could actually create an even wider divide.
Take for instance, the junior events in Jordan with the aforementioned players in Group A. This summer in UAE, there were a series of events run by Golf Event Management called the Summer Swing Invitational. Nearly every event had the same finish order:
Look at the Power Ranking evolution of these events over time:
* Note the reason the Week 30 event is lower than the rest is because Mousa Shana'ah was playing in the U.S. Junior at Oakland Hills that week, where he finished 260th out of 264 golfers. Mousa is an interesting case study in that he has to have the most wins of any player in WAGR -- a remarkable 18 wins (and 8 seconds) in 32 events run by Golf Event Management (an organization run by the fathers of the three players above) over the last two years. However, that success has yet to translate into bigger events. He has averaged 7.00 pts per event in those 32 Gem events, but only 3.32 points per event in 9 non-GEM events.
It's also worth noting that these are mixed events, and there's reason to believe based on the Power ranking that at least one of them involved these three players competing in a 8-player tournament against five girls. Worse yet, unranked girls competing in these events are worth more than unranked boys, as unranked women are assumed to be ranked 3196th (worth about 1.87 towards the Power Ranking) and unranked men are assumed to be ranked 4191st (worth about 1.21 towards the Power Ranking). Competing against five unranked girls in Jordan is considered more impressive than competing against American juniors Hamilton Coleman (18th overall on JGS), Nate Miller (64th), Sohan Patel (31st), Chase Hughes (43rd) and Aadi Parmar (103rd).
So as you can see, these events are already reaching the 50-point minimum threshold needed to avoid any downard adjustment. All they have to do is reach the new 16-player minimum and these players will continue to accrue positive points and keep climbing up the ranks. A 16-player event with these three players and filled with six unranked girls and seven unranked boys would be worth 61.75 points, with 8.58 points likely going to Mousa for 1st, 6.78 points for Hashem for 2nd and 5.89 for Abdulla for finishing 3rd.
It appears the changes intended to go directly after these Jordanian tournaments will have little to no impact at all. Even if some of these events don't reach the 16 player minimum and get excluded altogether (which could very well happen considering there's no Summer Swing Round 1 on WAGR), these players will still keep their high rank. Expect to see all three at Trinity Forest next July.
The solution here is the same as in Parts 1 & 2. In order to rank these players accurately (a stated goal of WAGR, by the way), they absolutely need to fix the strength of field metric -- ranking between unranked players accordingly, more accurately ranking players who haven't reached the 8-tournament divisor and avoid treating unranked girls as more powerful as unranked boys in the same event.
[If you want an indication of the influence of ranking on the Power rating for the tournament, look at the recently completed Rolex Tournament of Champions. Using the WAGR ranks fo the 37 ranked players in the field, the event has a Power Rating of 329 and approximately 13.27 points for the winner. If you believed DataGolf is a more accurate reflection of Amateur rank and replace the 13 golfers who have a DataGolf Amateur ranking (only goes to top 500 and only ranks golfers in the top 1000 of WAGR), the Power rating goes to 550 and 17.12 pts to the winner.]
If they want the change to truly go after these smaller, weaker field events, they're going to have to retroscore tournaments going back in time and published a revised set of rankings. That is the only way this proposed change would have the desired impact. But this has not been the M.O. of WAGR in the past -- they typically roll things out over time. As a result, it's unlikely these changes will have the desired effect, and likely could lead to them being even more inaccurate on the junior side.
It's clear that there are no easy and immediate term fixes here. With that in mind, the one immediate fix they could do is have region or country-based exemptions for the U.S. Junior. This would be an admission that ranking golfers equitably and accuracy across geographies is hard to do, but still provide adequate opportunities for juniors around the world to play in the U.S. Junior. There is precedent here with the R&A Amateur Championship and Augusta National Women's Amateur exemption criteria.
There are also Power formula and Point allocation methodology choices that create a bias in favor of smaller-field events over larger-field events. Those issues will be explored in more detail in the future.
Part IV: The Impact to Women's Golf
ICYMI: Check out Driven Golf Podcast Episode 32 - celebrating the Class of 2025 signees
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