Registration for Drive, Chip and Putt
Drive, Chip and Putt is one of the most popular junior golf tournaments. In order to sign up your child for this tournament, you have to go to the Drive, Chip and Putt website, create an account, and pick the golf club in the area where you’d like to go to local qualifying.
Registration for the next season is not open all year round. In 2026, it opened in late January. If you are on the mailing list, they will send you an email ahead of time indicating when registration will open.
Please keep in mind that the age group is based on your child’s age on the date of National Finals in Augusta (which is usually in April), not the date when you register. So, it’s quite possible that your child will be placed in an older group. For example, my daughter was 9, but she was placed into 10-11 age category because she would turn 10 by the Augusta National finals.
Once you fill out all the required info, you will receive a confirmation. You also get on their mailing list with various tips and updates. Please be mindful that if your plans change, you need to cancel your child’s participation. If you don’t cancel and don’t show up, your child won’t be able to participate next year.
Strategy for Drive, Chip and Putt
Competition dates are different for different qualifying sites (i.e., golf clubs). This gives you an opportunity to choose the date which works best for your schedule. When choosing the date for the local competition, pay close attention to the timing of the sub-regional and regional competition. Assuming your child gets through the local Drive, Chip and Putt competition, you’d be going to the next stage. So, it’s good to check if these dates will work for your family (there might be vacations, weddings etc.)
Also, keep in mind that it’s easier to get through the local competition in some qualifying sites and more difficult in others. More remote golf clubs will likely attract fewer players. The most popular clubs will likely have the best players. If your child’s goal is to go to sub-regional competition (rather than simply to participate), you might want to be strategic about which golf club to pick.
Key rules and regulations
You can review the detailed rules and regulations for Drive, Chip and Putt at their website. I suggest familiarizing yourself and your child in order to know what to expect.
The most important points are as follows:
- Participation in the DCP competition is free.
- There are four main stages of competition: local, subregional, regional and national finals. Each stage represents a new round (so you start from zero).
- Local qualifying is conducted throughout May, June and July in all 50 states. Different qualifying sites have different competition dates.
- The child will hit a total of nine shots (3 drives, 3 chips and 3 putts). They cannot re-do any shots. They will accumulate points for every shot. The maximum for every skill is 75 points (25+25+25). The child with the most overall points will be the winner.
How should you practice?
For younger kids, I recommend focusing their main attention on chips and putts. This is where all the points are.
Drives will not give as many points as putts and chips will. In the girls’ 10-11 group, we saw scores of 5-9 points for each drive (totals for this skill were 20 or so). On the other hand, some girls got 45-50 points for the putting skill.
Putting skill is very important because some of the putts are quite makeable and your child can get 15 or 20 points on each putt (assuming they practiced well). Chips are a bit longer and more complicated, in my view, and usually kids score lower. But still, if they scored 10-15 points on each chip, that would be 40 or more points right there.
Just to give you an idea, for the 10-11 group for girls, you’d need to score around 90-100 points to be at the top for local and sub-regional.
Before the tournament
5 days before the event, you’ll receive an email from the organizers about participants and tee times.
While this might be the final tee time, be on the lookout for more emails. Participants cancel all the time till last day, and times might shift by 30 minutes or more. One day before the tournament, make sure to doublecheck your kid’s tee time on the website. This is the safest way in case you missed the email. I also always check the schedule on the day of the tournament. It never hurts to check.
A few days before the tournament, make sure you pack all the things you will need, like clubs, gloves, balls etc. Check out my post Packing List for Drive, Chip and Putt to make sure you don’t forget anything.
The day of competition
I suggest getting to the golf club 1.5-2 hours before your kid’s scheduled tee time if you have not been at this club before. It might take time to get there because of traffic, plus you need extra time to orient yourself and find different things (practice area, competition area, food, bathrooms…) Your child might get hungry and want to eat some food. You definitely don’t want to be rushing on such an important day!
At the entrance, organizers will give you and your kid the scorecard with your kid’s name on it. Make sure not to lose it. This will need to be presented to the organizers before each skill.
Spend a bit of time observing other kids to familiarize with the format and settle the nerves of your contestant. Then you can head to practice.
Try to put your kid in the right mindset from the start. Even if they do badly on one skill, there is still a chance to win by doing very well in others. They should try their best till the end. As mentioned earlier, for the youngest competitors, we have noticed that driving is less of a winning skill (as distance is still quite low), but chipping and especially putting bring a lot of points.
How long should you practice before your tee time? Well, it depends. We usually spend 30-40 minutes practicing, and it seems to work well. You can do more or less depending on how good you feel about your child’s game and how you want to go about it. The organizers recommend practicing the shots in the reverse order (first putts, then chips, then drives). If it’s too hot, it’s probably good not to practice too much.
About 10 minutes before your scheduled tee time, you’ll need to head to the clearly marked area where kids would be starting the competition and hitting their drives.
Your child will be grouped together with two or three other kids. Each one will have an opportunity to hit 3 drives. The scores will be immediately recorded in their scorecards by the organizers. Later the same group would walk to the chipping and putting areas, respectively. Each one will hit 3 chips and 3 putts. The drives will only count if they are within bounds. The length of drives will determine the points. In chipping and putting, the shots will only yield points if they are relatively close to the pin.
Keep in mind that drives will be all identical (hit from the same spot), and so will be the chips. But putts will be different in length and hit from various places on the putting green (one short, one medium and one long).
The whole process was 15-20 minutes max, very fast and efficient.
Once everyone in all the groups finishes, the organizers will announce winners for each individual skill and then the overall winner.
The awards
Every kid wants to be the winner. That’s clear. Of course, it’s not always possible as there are so many good kids participating. Competition is especially tough in the younger divisions for boys (especially 7-9 category) as there are usually so many contestants. From what we’ve seen, fewer kids participate in older age groups. It does not mean that competition is less fierce. As I imagine, some kids drop out of golf later and focus on other sports. But the best ones probably stay.
Well, the good things about DCP is that there are ways to be a winner at least in some way.
The tournament awards first, second and third place for each skill and overall. Even if your kid is not an overall winner, they could win a place in one or several of the skills. The kids win some nice gifts (pins, ribbons) for different skills. Obviously, older kids will be less interested in these things, but younger kids will likely be happy when getting at least some “prize” rather than nothing at all.
Rules might change, but in 2025, 3 top players advanced from the local competition to subregional, 2 advanced to regional and 1 advanced to national finals. Something to keep in perspective. So, even the third place in the local competition will still get your kid to the next stage. Another reason to try till the end. Every point matters. We often see that a lot of kids are separated by just a couple of points. So, one or two points might decide who moves on to the next stage.
The Final Word
If your kid did not do well this year, don’t despair. The competition is till they are 15 years old, so there are still chances.
If you’d like to read more about my daughter’s preparation for the DCP tournament and our experience on the day of the tournament, check out my blog post: Getting Ready for the Drive Chip and Putt.