Great work Soccerhunter, as usual. Appreciate the work you do on this. Hope your family is doing well too. Just one question. How did Indiana get ranked in the third tier? I look at them with little recruits of note, and programs behind them with National pool players aren't ranked as high. Just curious what the thoughts were. Thanks again.
Well, actually, I had the same reaction, but my numbers came out where they did (Tier IV.) At the time I had to double check to be sure I got it right. (I initially thought I had mis-added.) They have a pretty strong class. Here's how it breaks down (trusting that the details listed in their signing day announcement are correct.) Australian Julia DeAngelis scores an 8 in my system for being both on their U17 and then on their U20 national teams. (Players with the same accolades form the US, Germany, Japan etc. would score a 9 or 10 in my system, but I discount foreign teams depending on where their senior women's team is ranked by FIFA.) Their next strongest players are Sarah L'Hommedieu from the Ohio Premier club, and Grace Labadie from Michigan both of whom have 4 years on the Regional (II) ODP team plus tons of high school accolades (all conference, all region, etc.) I have both these players as a 6 in my system. Then the Hoosiers have corralled a whole string (6 of 'em) of moderately strong players who rank a 5 in my system. ...Players like Meghan Scott from London, Ontario and Chandra Davidson from Binbrook, Ontario both of whom played club ball and in addition were selected to the "Team Ontario" where they played for 4 years and traveled internationally. (Team Ontario is a provincial team roughly equivalent to a strong state ODP team, but often travels abroad as many regional ODP teams do.) These two Canadians might well rank a 6, but I gave them a 5, not being sure how strong Team Ontario was in their years there. 5's also went to Krystal McKinney for her years with the Indiana ODP team, and likewise to Julia Gilliam who played on the SoCal ODP team. Mary Miller nabbed a 5 for being named a High School All-American, and so did Sydney Kilgore from the Ohio Kings Hammer club who was also in the ODP regional pool in 2011. (These last two, I must admit, are a bit shakey and might actually be "4" in my system, but I felt ok going with the my written criteria which, when unambiguous, would be a 5 --especially because I may have under-rated the two Canadians.) Lastly, the two remaining players in this 11-player class I rated 4 and 3 . Then, applying all of these player rankings to my mathematical formula, I get a 7.01. The bottom line here is that this large class had one highly ranked player plus a long line of players who should account well for themselves and each added to the total score which garnered a Tier IV slot. (Classes with a US national team player or two might not have the large supporting cast to support a higher ranking.) So, maybe this is more information than you wanted, but this certainly will give you some insight as to how I go about generating my rankings. Unlike my preliminary looks at upcoming classes (where I mostly go by what BG has been able to generate in the spreadsheet plus any easy to find googled info), for the hundreds of players involved in about the top 70 classes (out of which comes the top 50) I dig as deep as I can into information in their school and/or club bios backed up with google. In this way I can uncover a lot more information about each player. Cheers!
Well, well. The U18 roster going to La Manga next week actually changes a few things in the rankings for 2016. There will be minor upward changes in numbers (which won't effect anything significantly) for Cal, Sanford, & UCLA (the rich will look even a bit stronger) but there will be a significant change for Utah who will jump into Tier IV. The change for Utah has to do with how I weight invites to (U17 and up) national team camps or travel teams. For example, there are many "one and done" invites, and a significant number of "let's take a second look" invites, but when the third invitation comes out, then it ups the ante. So one invite in my system is a tentative 7 and two gets a 7.5, but three invites indicate a more solid commitment to a developing player -especially if that invite is to travel internationally and an 8 or 8.5 may be the result depending on other factors. (U15 invites are discounted as that age group has a lot of experimenting and then moving on....It's common to see two or three U15 camps when the player is a freshman or sophomore in high school, and then nothing after that.) I'll take care of these changes (and more surely to come) when I do the final rankings for the 2016s in August.
Beware of the Women of Troy in 2016 -- I hope the recruiting rank materializes on the field in 2016 for the Trojans.
UCLA adds another player to the 2016 class. Maki Umehara from Japan. She has international experience. She plays center midfield and forward. The rich get richer. The bad memories of last season are about to be swept away this fall.
While I will not take time to rejigger the 2016 final recruiting class (that will be in mid August when all is said and done) I will note that USC has just picked up two transfers that should strengthen their class significantly. Leah Pruitt was last year's conference freshman of the year last season at SanDiego State (where she was their leading scorer) and has experience on youth national teams both at the U17 and U20 level.. Alex Anthony will come in as a Junior and, like Pruitt, was her team's leading scorer last season at Maryland and also has USYNT experience. I'll have to wait and do this properly in August, but at first glance, this should put USC up at the #3 slot high in the second tier in front of Duke and only behind UCLA and Stanford. The PAC 12 now has the top three classes for 2016. Poor Maryland... their roster continues to be decimated. Firing their well liked coach has led to essentially a complete exodus of their best players and the strongest prospects already lined up for 2016 and 2017 have now also gone elsewhere. (Their 2016 class was once a top ten class.) Their tenure at the bottom of the Big-10 looks secure for some years to come.
So, Anthony spent the Spring with the new coach at UMD and still left? I'd say that's a bad sign. Don't know if the players really wanted a change or not but I have heard Leone is an intense and vocal coach. Opposite of Morgan. Hope they can rebuild.
Assuming Stanford did not sign Kat Hess from So Cal Blues. National pool goalkeeper from Newport Beach. So if this happens every year to 1-2 kids at Stanford why doesn't their coaching staff get called out more for this? If a kid is not going to get in the staff can make an academic read early based on grades and SATs instead of waiting until February of senior year. But she's going to Harvard.
According to the USC story about her transfer she had already graduated from Maryland. I assume she's in some sort of graduate program at USC. This would be a good time to change.
No. It's not necessarily a sign of anything. The letter of intent is for an entire school year. If you want to play elsewhere the next year you have to finish your year or incur what is called the basic penalty, the loss of a year of eligibility and sitting a year. She may have given notice or just decided before the new coach was hired and decided to play in the Spring anyway. From the LOI: http://www.nationalletter.org/nliProvisions/penaltyBasic.html
No, I haven't yet. I was planning on working on the ratings several weeks ago, but things just got unexpectedly busy and I have been swamped. Perhaps I'll find the time next week. Sorry.
OK... At long last here is a partial listing of the 2016 recruiting classes. I will be busy for a few days so may not finish up and insert the last 10 teams into the list for a little while yet, but I will get to it. The top 2 tiers should be stable. Changes are more likely in the lower tiers as teams are inserted or new information about where U20 players are hiding comes to light. This year, this task is, as they say, kickin' my butt. This task is taking me way more time than it has in the past. This is because my research time has gone way up for two reasons. One is that there has been an explosion this year in foreign players. and while I have my long standing methods and criteria set up for scoring each player, the data on the foreign players is often very difficult to find... even if I can. (That would be short of calling the recruiting coordinators of the various teams and begging for more data about the players.) Canadians are usually fairly straight forward to track down, but even then it might take 10 or more minutes searching the internet for each player who has not been involved in their national or provincial youth teams. Trying to find the club team or school and seeing what we've really got then takes time. And actually the same is increasingly true for many American players as well --many of the colleges are not putting any useful information up when they do a bio on the player on their website such as blathering on and on about the various winning exploits of a player's high school team and I can't even tell if the player was a bench warmer or star. (And BTW, in case you haven't noticed, no matter who the recruit is, they "led" their club or high school team to success!) Yuk. And some college bio pages are just blank as it seems that the school doesn't have any interesting information that is important enough to put up. To do this task for the top 50 classes, I have to research about 65 teams that would seem to be in the running. That translates into trying to get enough truly useful information on about 650 players. I'm pretty confident that I get close for most, but some times one has to do a best guess based on fragments or hints of data. Fortunately in most cases, there is only for a small percentage of the players in a class as the average class is about 10. Unfortunately, for the players about which I am flummoxed, I have to default to a low score based on no data and this may drag a small (5 or 6 players or so) class's score down unfairly... but this doesn't happen that often. The other reason that I am slowed down is that there has been an unusually high rate of changes in the late spring or summer that cause re-doing teams that normally would only be about checking that nothing had materially changed since the last go-around. The poster child for this would be USC who copped a couple of talented internationals and then got two high powered transfers. The listing below identifies 40 teams over the usual span of scores. The ten teams that will be added later will mostly slide in in the bottom two tiers, although there may be a surprise or two. If you don't see your favorite team, it may be on the way. (Washington, Washington State, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Wake Forest are yet to go, and I see transfers there. I also have to get Santa Clara together and take a look at SMU, SanDiego and SanDiego State, Rhode Island, Ohio State, Minnesota, Indiana, Oklahoma and OK State, and the list goes on for perhaps a dozen more to get the job done. This list is different because I have mostly (see USC and Texas Tech discussion below) not counted the players who are away on U20 duty. This mostly effects UCLA which, if Pugh and Canales were in Westwood, that class would be off the charts in a tier all by itself. (It sure will be in 2017 when I'll include these players in that class.) USC, Arkansas, UNC, Duke, and some other teams are also effected, but there is still confusion here. For example USC does not list De Melo on their roster, but she was not listed on the U20 game rosters for the tournament this last week in her back yard. (Is she injured?) To the contrary, Jordie Harr is actively playing for Texas Tech this fall, and is playing with the U20s as of this past week. Are there other situations like this? I am aware of that colleges are doing this differently, but the bottom line regardless of being listed on a roster is are they playing college ball or not. Can some of you in the know enlighten me as to what is going on here? Once we get that all straightened out, I may have to do some tweaking. If I find the time, I am always happy to answer any questions about my methodology for these rankings. I am careful not to change my criteria between the years other than to allow for systemic changes happening in the recruiting landscape. Lastly, once again, I need to say that incremental changes in the scores determining the rankings should be viewed as inconsequential. The grouping into tiers is my best effort to communicate this. The idea is that classes within the same tier should be viewed as essentially equal in strength, although one could argue that the top and bottom team in the same tier are starting to diverge more than the top team in a lower tier and the bottom team in the next higher tier. But that is quibbling. And thanks once again to CBG whose long term commitment to the spreadsheet gets all of this started. More later. Have fun. TIER I 9.20 Stanford 9.00 USC 8.90 UCLA 8.89 Virginia 8.87 Florida State 8.75 Duke TIER II 8.51 Florida 8.46 UNC 8.32 Boston College 8.30 Colorado TIER III 7.93 Louisville 7.90 Central Florida 7.87 California 7.87 Tennessee 7.77 Notre Dame 7.73 Texas 7.72 Texas Tech 7.58 Kentucky 7.50 Rutgers 7.50 Syracuse 7.45 Utah 7.41 Penn State 7.40 South Florida 7.37 NCSU TIER IV 7.15 Clemson 7.03 Portland 6.97 Columbia 6.97 VT 6.93 Florida Gulf Coast 6.92 Iowa 6.89 Georgetown 6.82 Miami (Fl) 6.73 Florida Atlantic TIER V 6.55 U Conn 6.39 Arkansas 6.30 Alabama 6.25 Arizona 6.23 Vanderbilt 6.22 Arizona St 6.07 Illinois
OK! This should be the last iteration for the 2016s. I think I've got all of the transfers folded in and have accounted for all of the international players. (Whew!) Note that all of the U20 YNT players in this class who are skipping their college season are not calculated into these classes. But rest assured that they will appear in the 2017 classes. (UCLA should be way ahead of the pack next year and may even reach the record they set with their astounding 2011 class.) All of the comments in the preliminary posting (immediately above) still apply. If you have questions about specific methodology, or wonder why a specific team may not be listed, I'll be happy to expound, but not to next week as I am covered up for about 9 days here with other responsibilities. The Top 50 2016 recruiting classes TIER I 9.20 Stanford 9.00 USC 8.90 UCLA 8.89 Virginia 8.87 Florida State 8.75 Duke TIER II 8.51 Florida 8.46 UNC 8.32 Boston College 8.30 Colorado TIER III 7.93 Louisville 7.92 Tennessee 7.90 Central Florida 7.87 California 7.77 Notre Dame 7.73 Texas 7.72 Texas Tech 7.65 South Carolina 7.62 Santa Clara 7.58 Kentucky 7.50 Rutgers 7.50 Syracuse 7.45 Utah 7.41 Penn State 7.40 South Florida 7.40 Princeton 7.37 NCSU 7.27 Wisconsin TIER IV 7.17 Clemson 7.15 OK State 7.08 UC Irvine 7.03 Portland 7.01 Indiana 6.97 Columbia 6.97 VT 6.94 Arkansas 6.93 Florida Gulf Coast 6.92 Iowa 6.89 Georgetown 6.82 Miami (Fl) 6.73 Florida Atlantic TIER V 6.61 Wake Forest 6.60 Ohio State 6.55 U Conn 6.53 BYU 6.53 Pitt 6.45 Washington St 6.30 Alabama 6.29 Auburn 6.28 Cincinnati 6.27 Oregon
To speak to your request for their 2016 class, the Tigers placed at 54 (a bit out side my top 50 range.) Their class was fairly weak by their standards. The top player in their 2016 class was Sarah Leubbert. Their 10-player 2017 class is a lot stronger led by a England international at both the U17 and U19 levels and has a decent supporting cast. My final numbers will not be out until later this summer, but Missou's class should elevate it to about high 30s or around 40 in my top 50.
She has officially left UCLA - it is posted on their Twitter feed and the university issued a press release confirming.
In the version you have copied above, the answer is yes. That was my late February effort following the "official" NLI date earlier in the month. Later in the year (September) I finally got out the FINAL version for 2016. (Please see posts 188 and 189 above.) In the final version I decided not to include the players in the 2016 class who were for sure going to take the semester off and play for the U20s in New Guinea. This included Pugh and Canales which took UCLA's ranking down considerably. (See paragraph 6 on post 188 for an explanation.) Consequently, the Stanford 2016 recruiting class was clearly at the top of the heap. However, even as very strong as Stanford is for 2017, when we add back in Pugh and Canales to an already very strong class UCLA 2017 class, the Bruins should easily top the charts. Now ASSUMING that Pugh, Sanches, Canales, and Karina Rodriguez (and Jesse Fleming too) do not turn pro for a few more years, UCLA will clearly be expected to be at the top of the NCAA pecking order with Stanford as the top challenger in terms of pure talent. Penn State, Duke, (and maybe UNC, USC, Virginia, Notre Dame, and FSU if Mark scores more foreign talent this fall, plus a half dozen other teams) will have an outside shot too, but the two PAC-12 heavies should rule the roost if talent be the pure arbiter... ....pause..... HOLD THE PRESS!! I see just now (while I was composing the above response) that there have been several posts regarding Pugh going pro and verified by Cromwell and quotes from Pugh herself. WOW! That is big news, after all of the protests to the contrary for the past 6 months and even enrolling for classes and participating in spring games with UCLA. BUT I don't think that it changes the overall picture I am trying to paint in this post. UCLA has incredible talent left over. And Stanford continues to pull in top talent, so the big two will proceed as expected. Next question, Is Pugh going to join the exodus to Europe?