If your son is a high level goalkeeper, I suggest you go to Chicago Fire. They have a reputation of developing goalkeepers and Igor Dimov is an excellent coach.
That's evidently the plan. I'm quite curious to see how it's going to be attempted. It's an objective view of how a team is doing, and how a team can be expected to compare to upcoming opponents. It does a very good job of forecasting whether an upcoming game is going to be a gimme, a challenge, or a nightmare. In league play - it's not terribly novel information, as you can get similar just by looking at the league standings. But for tournament play, it can give usable insight on where teams might stand and what can be expected. And after the game, it provides usable information on how the team did. Did they beat expectations? Did they just barely best a team that shouldn't ever have been on the same field? Did they play extremely well despite the score not reflecting it? It's another data point that has more info tied to it, other than just did the team win or lose. Not sure that's their purpose. Assessing whether a player is on the right team for their development and potential encompasses much more than just wins and losses. But it's probably helpful for that player to know whether the team is performing as expected for the team itself to meet its goals, which direction it's headed, and if other teams may become better options at some point. Tournament hosts use all of the above as you've described. In a recent tournament we entered, I ranked the brackets by SR ratings to see where they stood, and it looked like a carbon copy. Whether the ratings were used to create them, or the director had other info that in turn ended up with an order that echoed the ratings anyway, isn't something that can be known. For what it's worth, YSR came to be many years ago when the developer's kid's team kept, in his view, being placed incorrectly in tournament brackets so often and so badly that there had to be a better way. The audience for the tool was primarily for those tournament directors to have better information to seed teams properly. Makes sense - I'd be annoyed as well. If they were that much better than the other teams in the third bracket, that could have been confirmed pretty easily well before the brackets were set, let alone before the first game. They were punished by the crappy GS ratings. SR pulls the game data right from the league or tournament results. All it pulls is enough information to identify the teams and the scores. If it can tell that it's a forfeit - it identifies that and blanks the results - they don't affect the team's rating in any way. There isn't a penalty for non-games played - the only things that affect ratings are games played. BTW - while it's $10/year, there is also a 30-day free trial before the app store or play store charges you, so you can play with all of the features for quite awhile before deciding to keep or drop the yearly subscription at 30 days.
Authoritatively calling a team top 10 in state on one hand while also saying that rankings don't matter on the other is a bold choice, if the team is showing #12 in state. The team is having a phenomenal year and should be incredibly proud of their accomplishments. It looks like they are predicted to best Chicago Empire 3-1 in the last fall game on the 20th, which could help their ranking slightly if they overperform. But the undefeated CFYSC should remain in #1 in Prem if/until they lose (while also being ranked #15th in state right now).
Nothing bold at all about it. Been in the 06/05/04 groups at clubs and playing the same coaches/teams/players for 12 years. I know the competition - when a player leaves, where they go and how that ends up. I don't need an app to tell me where my kids team is at all. I'd argue I know even more in this case, for the sole reason that I know when players move - where the go ans so on. At this age there are a ton of injuries + kids missing games for college visits which happens more often then you may think. That can change the trajectory of a team - not just one game.
So looking at the 04/05 Group in YSR... - The same Sockers Team is listed as #1 and #6 - The same FC United team is #5 and #9 - FC United is listed as #11 and #12 - And Inter Red is the same as Inter 64 Yeah that's workin.
If you look at the game data sources tied to each team, I'm confident you'd figure out what's going on. Here are the images, with some before/after. The issue you're seeing is because they really are different team entities, but are sometimes merged in a way that can lead to unexpected outcomes. These teams have been around for years, as 2004 teams, and 2005 teams, playing separately. But this year, once in the new 2004/2005 bracket, this causes clubs to handle how that works in different ways. In some cases, there is a new 2004/2005 team, made up of girls from both years, and stops registering both the 2004 and 2005 teams. In some cases, (like in yours I believe), the club just continues to call it a 2004 team, and puts some 2005 girls on it. This means for some clubs, there are 3 distinct entities - all with a unique game history, and therefore a unique rating. (The 2004/2005 team, the 2004 team, and the 2005 team). So there are couple ways to deal with it. The "cleanest" way is probably to separate out only the team that is playing right now (often the 2004/2005 team), and keep the game data for the 2005 team where it is, and game data for 2004 team where it is. The outcome of this is that if the 2005 and/or 2004 team have game data within the last 7 months, they still show up as teams in the rankings - even though they aren't playing any more. These are the "duplicates" you are seeing. They aren't actually duplicates, they really are separate team entities with separate game histories, but I think you get what I mean. Keep in mind that game data can only be assigned to a single team entity; only one team will ever get credit for a particular game result. The advantage of this method is that the rating most closely matches what level the team is playing right now, and predictions of upcoming games will be most accurate. The disadvantage is a complication about confirming which team is the "real" team when doing those predictions. The other way to deal with it is to just say "screw it", and merge all of the game data together into one team entity, even if going backwards as recently as 2 or 3 months ago, they really were separate teams. After they are merged, you can see this by the team playing multiple games on the same day. Last year the "Superbananas 2004" and the "Superbananas 2005" had completely individual schedules, but now as the "Superbananas 2004/2005", would glom all of that game data together into a single team. The advantage of this method is it appears simpler in a list of rankings; there are no obvious "dupes". It bumps everyone's ranking up, as the "dupes" all become a single entity. The disadvantage is that the game history isn't completely accurate for the team entity, which means that the ratings calculated for the team entity might be off by a little, or even a bit more than expected, if the strengths of the 2004 and 2005 teams significantly vary for a club. A compromise between the two might be to merge all of the data right now as long as it's still within the last 7 months, so there are no dupes shown as ranked. But then once it is past 7 months since the last game of a particular team version, unlink those particular game results from the current team. That would keep the game history correct, and better represent the current ratings. There is no right or wrong answer here, it's up to whoever cares about managing a team's game history in the team entity to do whatever they feel best fits their needs. Any user with a sub can edit team data (by adding/deleting game results), if they are confident they are doing it accurately with trusted information. No changes are permanent, so at any time, if someone sees that their game data no longer matches what they believe to be accurate - they can update it to better represent the actual game history. What you're seeing in this particular area is that teams are doing it differently, which causes some of the weirdness/apparent unfairness. Specifically - Sockers for their top team, had their 2004/2005 team data, tied to also their very strong 2004 team data, but had none of their 2005 team data tied to it. That second team shown in #6 was just their 2005 data. At the time, Eclipse only had their 2004/2005 team data alone tied to their top team. In that configuration, Sockers showed #1, Eclipse #2. But if the Sockers then do re-add all of the data into a single entity (including the 2005 team), they go back to #2. Eclipse stays #1 whether they add all the 2004 + 2005 data or not. Here are some screenshots of the various data sources, to show how some of the teams were solely 2004 or solely 2005. Since the top 2 teams now had everything merged into one entity, it seemed reasonable for the rest of the top 10 to do the same. For at least these top 10, they are now all on a level playing field. Previous ranking: Current ranking: Keeping the teams separate can highlight some significant differences. Check out the Chicago Rush teams below. The Select 2004 and Select 2005 teams are very close in rating, so merging them at some point probably wouldn't cause much harm or distortion. But the FV Premier 2004 is 21st in the state, while the FC Premier 2005 is 59th in the state. Those two FV Premier teams are a full 3 goals apart in strength, which is an extremely wide gulf. Merging them together into one glommed together entity would make the 2005 team look much better than it really is/was, and would make the 2004 team much worse than it really is/was. The last point is that this really only applies to the 2005/2004 section in the app, as that is now the only age group where teams that were just 1 year apart are now teams that encompass two years. It's much easier in all of the other age groups to determine and represent when teams of the same age are actually merging or splitting apart.
I guess you have to look at YSR as it's not going to be perfect, but it's probably the most accurate rankings we have available. I use it as a gage when playing teams we are unfamiliar with. It just gives you an idea what the competition will look like. Now this doesn't factor in when teams show up with four ringer guest players. My daughter's team has the problem playing games in ECNL-RL and then having some, if not all of their regular ECNL players show up with their patches duct taped over. So when we beat a low level "ECNL-RL" teams only by two goals, it drops our ranking. It gets recorded as RL even though it was the opposition's high level ECNL team. It skews the data, but oh well. Nothing is perfect.
YSR is dead, long live SR. I think you're right, it's never going to be perfect, but it is still incredibly predictive - as youth soccer is predictable. Our games this weekend were predicted to be a 1-1 tie, a 6-1 drubbing, and finally 3-1. Best way to interpret that is that the first game is going to be close and competitive, the 2nd is going to be a snoozer, and we should do OK in the third if we play well. Just driving back from the third one, and the actual results turned out to be a 1-0 win, a 7-1 win, and a 6-1 win. Predictions on how the games would go were spot on for the first two, and we performed a little better than expected in the third when the other team started to fall apart once behind. If a team always performs at a certain level, then for one weekend they do decide to bring in 4 ringers from an upper team, it makes intuitive sense that the team might do better than expected/predicted. But if that same team tends to bring in a few of their upper players for many, or even most other games, then the performance of the team and the rating of the team will reflect that higher performance, whatever they call themselves. However closely the game results can be tied to the actual team that actually played those games, is directly related to how well those game results can calculate a trustable rating for that team. If it's a random set of kids every weekend, the rating is going to reflect that randomness.
These teams normally do not bring in their regular ECNL team players, but a few have against our team, which I’m thinking because of our high ranking on SR. But whatever, it skews it, but not a lot.
Random, are you somehow involved with YSR? You seem to have more than a casual knowledge of how the app works. My general feeling (admittedly a few years ago) was that all the rankings were at best a coin flip as to their usefulness but you have me wondering if YSR is worth another look.
Two or three seasons back, I was turned on to YSR by a friend whose kid was playing in MLS Next. He was pretty into it, and got me curious. I started playing with it a bit more, and took the time to update/correct some of the game histories for local teams that I was aware of. It was almost immediately evident that the predictions were pretty useful for the teams that our kids were playing for. Then when SportsEngine / NBC killed YSR back in May, it was a bit of a shock. Going back to GotSoccer or any of the other ranking sites quickly made it clear that everything else was essentially useless by comparison. I did have some communications with the developer at that point, and sent various messages to NBC folks to encourage them to just give the site back rather than kill it - but to no avail. After 5 or 6 months - the developer sent out that mass email, letting folks know that it all had been rebuilt anew as an app called Soccer Rankings. (I believe that email is copied earlier in this thread). I quickly got it up and running on both iOS and Android devices, and it's been immediately useful once again. The rankings have helped inform which tournament brackets would be appropriate, which tournaments might be more challenging, and how to prepare/plan for various upcoming games. Once again I did spend the time to connect game data sources to the right local teams, to make sure that the ratings that were most relevant to my use had the best chance of being accurate. I have been in touch with the developer for various bug reports and suggestions as the app matures, and he's quite responsive. Only reason I'm here on this local site is that google search for "youth soccer rankings" had this thread up on the front page of results, so figured it would be useful to let folks know that it was back up and running if they were interested; I did the same for a few other sites. If people are interested, it's just a few clicks and it's up and running on their phone. (Apple App Store / Google Play Store) It is somewhat limiting without a paid sub ($10/year), as you can't see game history for any team, the game data sources, the actual ratings, create predictions, update any info, etc. - you just see the rankings. But even then - there is a 30-day free trial, so you can actually test if it's worthwhile before ever actually spending any $, and cancel if not. Looking at the download numbers on the play store / app store, I can't imagine the developer is making significant dollars compared to the work put into it, but I'm very grateful that he has. Only thing I wish for is that other youth sports we're involved in had a similar resource. It is a completely different world in basketball, for example. The teams are so fluid, and the leagues/organizations/tournaments are so fragmented and disjointed that it is much more random what kids you'll actually see on which teams each weekend and how each will perform.
FC1974 2006 girls scrimmaged the top 2006 Eclipse team and won 3-2 with Eclipse only scoring on PKs. Heard there was a lot of yelling from one coach and tears from some of the Eclipse players who came out of that 1974 team a year ago. Goes to show that being over-confident can bite you in your ass.
I believe 1974 won at 2007 too. Not sure if all the best from the eclipse were there but definitely jarring to those girls that left 1974 for the eclipse.
it was a mix but all their top ECNL team members played the majority of the game. Rumor is Eclipse was trying to make a point that no regional teams could complete with their top teams but it didn’t end well. FC1974 has some outstanding coaches that are likely superior to whatever Eclipse is dragging out these days.
You can see the roster they brought on their Twitter page and compare it to both their ECNL and ECNL RL rosters to see how many first team players there were at the game (hint: it was a lot) along with some play by play... oops, that one stings a bit I bet. Hopefully those at the TOP of platforms such as ECNL take notice that there is plenty of talent in Chicago. The Chicago clubs taking part in ECNL RL can hang with a lot of teams at the top and for the most part they've got things Eclipse doesn't have (facilities and good coaches). Call this my welcome to the party post. This thread looks fun.
I meant this comparison in regards to Eclipse. Chicago Inter and FC 1974 each have their own facilities (Eclipse renting from Northbrook park district while Evolution is similar but in Naperville). There are a lot of good clubs, teams and most importantly players in this area that deserve to be showcased at the highest levels.
The problem is Eclipse doesn’t invest in their players. There is no developing going on. They depend on outside forces to make their players better. The facilities, coaching, training are dismal at best. Hopefully this along with other issues is a wake-up call for Eclipse. But I doubt it, their egos are out of this world. In the 06 game there were several D1 committed athletes, all from Eclipse, I don’t believe 74 has any (I might be wrong). That is the power and prestige of ECNL.
How does owning a facility make it any better than renting a facility? Eclipse use lighted turf fields for games and practices. Kind of hard to beat that with Chicago weather.
Having access to your own facility/fields means that you do not have to share with others or cram 6-8 teams on a field regularly which should lead to better training which should lead to better players... if you have coaches that can coach.
It happens, that is the beauty of having turf. Some only do it on rainy days while there are clubs out there cram them in. Field space is in high demand.
A rainy day is one thing but not one a regular basis. An 11v11 team has at least 15 players. You are not putting 90-120 13-18 year olds in a field more than one time before the parents lose their mind.