Project Log: Running Social for the 2025 Junior Invitational at Sage Valley
- Matt Hahn
- Apr 14
- 5 min read
Updated: Apr 14
A personal goal for 2025 is to share more of my work - whether that's through Instagram, my site, or this blog. This post will be the first of a hopefully frequently recurring series of "project logs" where my goal is to share some of the background details and work behind the photos & videos you see on my Instagram and website.
The Project: The Junior Invitational at Sage Valley contracted me to plan, capture, and distribute social content for this year's Junior Invitational. The Junior Invitational is one of the best (if not the best) events in junior golf - it's been won by an impressive list of current professionals (i.e. Scottie Scheffler, Akshay Bhatia) and is hosted at one of the best golf courses I've ever had the pleasure to shoot. Our team was on site for 7 days for the event and covered every aspect of the tournament. This year's field included some big names in both the girl's and boy's divisions - Miles Russell, Charlie Woods, Asterisk Talley, and Kai Trump to name a few. Here's a link to the Junior Invitational Instagram account.
The Team: I assembled a small but mighty team of Jeff Marsh, James Turner, and Jordan Gibbons to help bring the event to life. As a combined group, we have experience creating social content for just about every major event in golf. Jeff & I did the majority of the shooting and James & Jordan handled the majority of the video editing.
The Results: On top of making content we were proud of, we also had a pretty amazing week as far as key Instagram metrics go - the account started at 11.1K followers when we logged in on the first day of the event and we more than doubled the following in our 7 days. We ended the last day of the tournament with 22.9k followers and the account sits at 27.4K as I write this blog (a 146% increase).
We reached over 2 million accounts with the @juniorinvitiational page throughout the week and reached a couple million more accounts via posts that were reshared by major aggregators in the industry (Zire Golf, Golf.com, Golf Digest, @NUCLRGOLF) - not too shabby for an account that started the week with a little over ten thousand followers. Here's a peek at the insights screen on IG for the @juniorinvitational account from 3/24, the day after the event ended:
There were a few key things that helped drive our team's success:
Share the golf - the event isn't broadcasted but has an extremely high level of golf being played by players that capture the interest of the golfing public (i.e. Miles Russell). A big part of our content plan was to share 2-3 hole shot by shot videos of key players & leaders during tournament rounds as a way of bringing our own "broadcast highlights" to the account. This is a trend I've picked up on from working recent major championships and paying attention to what works across Instagram - in general, people love to watch golf shots/highlights (especially when there's shot tracer). Our shot by shot/golf focused videos we made throughout the week garnered ~3.5M views on the JI Instagram account alone.
Tap in to big names - it's no secret that Charlie Woods draws eyeballs online. When we found out he was playing, we planned on making one IG reel of him at the event. We ultimately decided on following him for his first two holes of the first round on Wednesday, and the decision paid off in a big way. The reel below has been viewed well over 5M times across various social platforms & accounts, including 1.7M+ times on the Junior Invitational account. Our hole-by-hole videos of Miles Russell (the youngest player ever to make a cut in a PGA Tour event and eventual boy's champion) also accumulated over a million views.
Collaborate with players - kids are chronically online these days, and we wanted to make sure we covered a wide range of the field and shared posts that they'd (1) want to collaborate with or (2) reshare on their own accounts. This helped get a lot more eyes on everything we created as the week went on. This is a strategy that applies/works well at all levels of golf events.
Diversify the Content - we used all sorts of cameras, shooting techniques, and levels of production value/editing throughout the week to keep things fresh and ultimately test what would work best and resonate with the account's audience. When we found things that worked well (like the shot-by-shot videos), we leaned into making more of those style of pieces as the week went along. Content performance wasn't everything though - we wanted to make sure we did plenty of story telling too. It's important to paint a full picture of an event rather than just focus solely on concepts that perform well - it all helps build on itself.
The Content: We posted 46 in-feed posts to the Junior Invitational account comprised primarily of a mix of reels and image carousels. Here's some of my favorite posts from the week (in no particular order) that our team created:
A fellow-tournament-in-Augusta-esque visual forward piece to help build anticipation for the week
A mic'd up piece with one of the bigger personalities in the field
Two sponsor focused pieces with Nike, a huge supporter of the event - both of these pieces were shot on iPhone and include the very talented Hally Leadbetter
A look at one of the non-golf activities at the event - fishing on course
Photo carousels - Sage is a dream to shoot and we tried to show it off as much as possible. The first carousel is a batch of sunset heaters from Jeff and the second includes photos from us both
This hole-by-hole video I shot of Miles Russell - check out the birdie putt he makes on the first hole in this video...
This super slow-motion rain edit shot by Jeff & edited by James
Last but not least, this recap reel with some of our best footage from the week - big shoutout to James for crushing the edit on this one
A huge thanks to the Junior Invitational team for trusting us to bring this event to life - it quickly has become one of our favorite weeks of the year. If you've made it this far in this post (thanks for reading) and have an event or brand social channel that could use some fresh ideas, please don't hesitate to reach out - this sort of quick turn, live event social consulting/execution is something that I've come to specialize in from my experience the past few years covering major golf events. I frequently work with brands on both content capture and content planning to help them make the most of what they're posting. You can check out more of my work here.
