The USGA has spent two years quietly building what it calls the United States National Development Program, a Team USA-style structure for junior golf modelled on hockey's federation pipelines. Last week No Laying Up's Neil Schuster spent multiple days inside one of the program's camps and came away with the clearest picture yet of the metrics, drills and cultural choices that USGA leadership believes will reverse a worrying trend at the top of the world rankings.
The unit is small and deliberately so: the top 12 boys and the top 12 girls in American junior golf, identified annually and tracked through camps, testing and competition support. The pitch from program leadership was direct.
"The USGA has put the stake in the ground and said we're committed to investing in and cultivating the top junior golf talent in the United States," staff explained inside the camp. "USA Hockey did amazing things at the Olympics. We're like that version of golf. We're the federation that's been put together to look after America's best young talent."
The driver behind the project is a number Mike Whan brought from his time at the LPGA. "When Mike Whan started as the commissioner of the LPGA, there were 21 US women in the top 100. And when he left, there's around 15. And I think that pissed him off," staff said. On the men's side, college coaches told the program that an increasing share of the top US college recruits are now international players. The benchmarks the USGA studied — Team Canada, Team Sweden, Great Britain and a handful of other federations — all start with that same insight: more juniors than rivals, but worse representation at the top.
The most striking technical layer of the program is its testing. Coach Zambri, the long-time USC head coach who now anchors the camp, has been running what he calls the "line test" for more than 12 years. Players hit roughly eight clubs across a structured series of shots and are scored on dispersion against a target line. Lower is better.
"I think this is the single best test of who's going to play pro golf or not," Zambri told the camp. "The name of the game is, can you control your dispersion over a 20-shot span? That's going to dictate are you going to play a good round of golf?"
The benchmarks Zambri has built up are unforgiving. An All-American score is 116 or below. The all-time best he has ever seen at USC was a 43, posted by current PGA Tour player Rico Hoey. The average career score across his USC players sits around 95. At the camp, the kids' first-pass scores ran from the 110s into the 170s — useful, calibrated data that Zambri says most juniors do not see anywhere else.
The line test sat alongside Titleist Performance Institute fitness screens led on site by Dr Beth Brown. TPI's research has identified 21 inches of vertical jump as a meaningful threshold for elite swing speed; players were also tested on broad jump, chest pass, set-up throw, grip strength and left-right asymmetry. "The trick is you have to have asymmetries to be a great golfer," Brown explained. "The question is how far of an asymmetry can you allow? If it gets too far, you get injured. If you get too symmetrical, you lose your motor patterns."
Putting practice is built around a separate strokes-gained protocol — 18 putts from 2 to 52 feet — that grades pace control rather than line. "Coach Zambri found out over his two decades of coaching super elite players that his guys, his team members, got so much better at putting in competition by practicing this way," staff said.
Dr Brown framed the program's underlying philosophy in deliberately patient terms. "Probably the overall lesson is to go slow to go fast, to be deliberate, and to go at our pace to make sure that we build this foundation that's not going to crack. Whatever we're creating, let's make it solid so that it lasts long after we're here."
What surprised Schuster as much as the data was the cultural emphasis. The camp included a nutritionist, a mental performance coach and a long session on letting go of poor shots. The mental session culminated in nine holes with no score kept and every player required to physically hold a golf ball at all times — an exercise designed to force a bodily awareness of how heavy mental baggage really feels. "It's stupid, but by the end of that nine holes I could tell they were all kind of enjoying it," Schuster said. "It was a really good, physical, tangible way to manifest the weight of not letting things go mentally."
The current cohort already includes recognisable names. Anna Fang, a Stanford commit from San Diego, said the breakthrough moment for her own self-belief came at the 2024 US Junior Amateur. "I made it to quarterfinals. I played against a really good girl in that and I lost on the last hole, which sucked a lot. But that was when I was like, oh, I can actually play at the highest level." Mason Howell, a Thomasville, Georgia high-schooler, drew comparisons inside the camp to Harris English for both swing shape and physical resemblance.
For all the data, the simplest summary came from a player asked what he liked about the camp. "Just hanging out with everybody. I love my buddies. I love being here. I'm an only child, so seeing my friends is probably my favourite part."
That, staff said, is the point. The USGA's bet is that culture and data, applied early and patiently to a tiny elite group, will eventually move the only number Mike Whan really cares about — the number of Americans inside the world's top 100.
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/usga-national-development-program-junior-golf-pipeline-line-test-mike-whan-no-laying-up). Visit for full coverage.*
