While evaluating this year's group of LPGA rookies, I mentioned that a thorough study of previous rookies was in order.  The Constructivist and I have made some general observations about how certain previous performances might help forecast the success of rookie players but I felt the subject needed some in-depth attention.

I decided to make a list of the rookie players who have finished in my year-end Top 40 dating back to the 2001 season.  Then I noted what accomplishment earned that player her Tour card and generated this chart (I'll explain the ones in bold shortly):

When looking at this chart, it's important to remember the context of each qualifier.  For example - if I say that four players who made the Tour by winning as a non-member each had successful rookie seasons, I must also point out that one player who won as a non-member (Jin Joo Hong, '06 Korea) did not.  Given that 4-1 ratio, I would say that having a non-member victory is a great indicator that a player will have a successful rookie season.  In the following chart, I've listed several pertinent qualifiers with the records/percentages of success vs. opportunities alongside.  Covering nine seasons, the Q-School totals might appear wrong (10x9 does not equal 106) because of ties for 10^th, 20^th and 30^th places.  There are ten "Q-School #1's" because in 2006 there was a tie for first which did not need breaking.

This is by no means a comprehensive list.  I did not include qualifiers like "won at least once on the Futures Tour" or any LET, JLPGA or KLPGA accomplishments.  I omitted these things not because I couldn't compile them for these 27 players, but because I didn't want to undertake the huge task of compiling the "failure numbers" for each.  Maybe I'll delve into those in a future post.

From this list, it seems pretty obvious that the top three are the best indicators of rookie success.  Winning as a non-member is the most dominant group but leading the Futures Tour money list or medaling at Q-School has paid off reasonably often too.  I included a few subsets of groups to show instances where a larger group's percentage might be skewed by most of its success/failure having come from a smaller group.  For example - most of the success rate for fourth-ranked "Top 5 Futures Tour" comes from those who finished #1.  Only one player out of a possible 36 in the study who finished second through fifth on the FT money list had a Top 40 season as an LPGA rookie.

Incidentally, the small differences in percentage among the last groups make some anomalies appear - such as 2-5 Futures Tour coming in behind 6-10 Futures Tour, and 11-20 Q-School behind 21-30 Q-School.  None of these groups appear to be reliable enough predictors to warrant worrying about which one is a "better" predictor.

I must point out - even though the top three groups stand out, they only include 11 of the 27 Top 40 rookies of the last nine years.  So while those three are the best indicators of rookie success, aside from #1 nobody would consider them lead-pipe cinches.  Let's look at those 11 players for a minute (they are the ones in bold).  Seven of them were Top 20 players - Shin, SH Lee, Miyazato, Creamer, Ahn, Ochoa and Bauer - while Jee Young Lee just missed the Top 20.  Note that two of them (Shin and Creamer) had the best rookie seasons of all during that nine-year span.  So it actually isn't too much to expect a player from these groups to debut in the Top 25, much less to expect them to finish in the Top 40.

So how can this information help us predict how the 2010 rookies might perform?  That's another post.