External Rankings

National Junior Rankings

Junior golfers are ranked by several independent organisations at once. None of them is the official one, and they disagree with each other by design.

This page covers national junior rankings as a group. We could not identify a single organisation that publishes a ranking under the name “JGNR”. On the predecessor tour's site, Junior Golf National Rankings is the heading over an explanation of several separate systems, which is how it is treated here. If a specific system was intended, tell us which and this page will describe that one.

Why there is more than one ranking

Junior golf has no single governing ranking. Several independent organisations each collect tournament results and publish their own rankings, using their own formulas and their own lists of which events count. A player can appear in several at once, in different positions, and none of them is wrong. They are measuring slightly different things.

What they generally have in common

  • They work from stroke play tournament results over a rolling period, usually the previous twelve months.
  • They weigh how well a player scored relative to the difficulty of the course, not just their finishing position.
  • They account for the strength of the field, so beating a strong field counts for more than beating a weak one.
  • They set a minimum number of qualifying events before a player is ranked at all.

Where they differ

The differences are in the weighting and the eligibility rules: how much scoring counts against field strength, whether one day events count, what the minimum field size is, and which tournaments are recognised in the first place. Two systems can rank the same player very differently because of those choices.

The individual systems

  • Junior Golf Scoreboard, which weighs scoring, strength of field, and finishes.
  • The Universal Golf Ranking, which uses a strokes gained, head to head model.
  • AJGA, which ranks players from its own national tournament schedule.
  • WAGR, the elite amateur ranking that sits above junior golf.

What this means for your player

Play events, post scores, and the rankings follow. Chasing a specific system rarely changes what a junior should actually be doing. Each organisation decides for itself which events it counts, and that decision is theirs rather than ours.

The tour publishes its own season rankings and standings, which are separate from all of the above.