It’s the one competitive advantage you can give your kid. And no one will ever describe it that way.
Junior golf has a strange rule that trips up a lot of parents: you can’t coach your kid during a round. No club advice, no reading putts, no “aim a little left.” That’s advice, and advice is a penalty. So most parents end up standing off to the side for four hours, watching, not allowed to help with the one thing they actually know something about.
Except there’s one thing you can do that’s completely legal, genuinely useful, and most parents don’t do it well, or don’t do it at all: forecaddying.
What forecaddying actually is
It’s walking ahead of the group, or positioning yourself where you can see, so you know exactly where every ball lands. Not just your kid’s. Everyone’s in the group.
That’s it. You’re not advising, you’re not reading greens, you’re not doing anything a rules official would blink at. You’re just watching, and remembering, so nobody has to spend four minutes searching a rough line for a ball that you already saw land twelve feet left of the sprinkler head.
Why it’s the advantage, not just a nice gesture
Pace of play is enforced and penalized at almost every junior event — groups get timed, warnings get issued, and a group that falls behind can lose strokes as a team. The single biggest, most avoidable cause of slow play is searching for golf balls. Four players, four tee shots, and if nobody marked where any of them went, that’s four separate searches instead of four quick pickups.
A parent who forecaddies well can cut that search time to almost nothing. And because you’re doing it for the whole group, not just your own kid, it does something else: it takes the pace-of-play pressure off everyone, which is the kind of thing other families notice and remember. It’s one of the few ways a parent actually contributes to how a round goes, without touching a single rule.
How to actually do it well
- Watch every shot, not just your kid’s. The value is in covering the group. If you only track your own kid’s ball, you’ve helped one search out of four.
- Pick a fixed landmark, not a guess. “It’s over there somewhere” doesn’t help anyone. “It’s pin-high, just past that bunker, in line with the second sprinkler head” does. Watch the ball all the way down, then lock it to something that isn’t going to move.
- Position yourself where you can actually see landing areas — ahead and to the side of the tee box, not directly behind it, and not so far ahead that you’re interfering with the group behind you. If you can’t see where it lands, you can’t help.
- Stay out of the fairway and out of the way. You’re a spectator, not part of the group. Give the players room, and don’t be a hazard for their sightlines or their shots.
- Know the line between watching and coaching. Marking a location is fine. Telling your kid what club to hit, how a putt breaks, or where to aim is not — that’s advice, and it’s a real penalty, not a technicality. If you’re ever unsure whether something you’re about to say crosses that line, don’t say it.
- Respect the search-time rule. Even with a great forecaddy, a ball can still go missing. The group still only gets three minutes to look once they start searching — forecaddying reduces how often you need that time, it doesn’t extend it.
The part that actually pays off
Do this for the whole group a few times, and something reliable happens: other parents start doing it too, for your kid included. It’s one of the only genuinely reciprocal norms in junior golf — nobody’s told to do it, there’s no rule requiring it, but the groups where everyone forecaddies for everyone finish faster, argue less, and generally have a better day on the course. That’s the actual advantage. Not that your kid’s ball gets found faster. That the whole group runs better, and your kid gets to play in a group like that.