It's partly because girls who dominate pre puberty might not be as dominant if they aren't growing as much as other girls at that age group. A lot can change from 11-13 or 14 years old physically and strength/speed wise. Especially for girls, it seems.
The Sockers U19 MLS Next team is considered one of the best teams in the nation. Inside the top 10 nationally anywhere you look. Sockers had 4 former players drafted in the 2025 MLS draft, including the Number 6 overall pick. The U16 MLS Next team recently advanced pretty deep in the Generations Adidas Cup. I believe they were the first non-academy team to qualify and they beat a rock solid FC Dallas squad to advance and were eventually beaten by Santos FC in the quarter finals, I believe.
It's also because girls who dominate at 11 or 12 based on strength, speed, size but also the skill and vision that starting soccer early gives some of them, often get passed up as kids who started at 7, 8 or even 9 catch up in terms of touch, distribution and field awareness.
This was brought up a few pages back and then GA deleted the post and now it is back out ... curious on how many of these clubs are their clubs 2nd teams and how many would be 1st team clubs (and I don't want to get into an argument if they are good enough to be in GA, I just mean that the club in that league will have their first team in the league, while others would have their 2nd or maybe even their 3rd team). The reason I ask ... if the league is designed to as a development league for current GA clubs, having their 2nd or 3rd teams play against possible 1st team clubs seems counter-productive ... unless the league feels those 2nd and 3rd team are just as or more competitive then the other clubs 1st teams.
Based on which teams are playing their 1st team in the Girls Academy top league, I would assume that the 1st team vs. 2nd team in the Great Lakes region will look like this… Galaxy - 2nd Team FC United - 2nd Team Sockers - 2nd Team Wheaton United - 1st Team Michigan Jags - 2nd Team Midwest United - 2nd Team Michigan Stars - 1st Team Elmbrook - 2nd Team Wisconsin United - 1st Team Midwest United FC SCOR - 1st Team Northshore United - 2nd Team SC Wave - 2nd Team
it is my understanding that Midwest United FC SCOR is part of the Midwest United family, but a separate location all together. Their top team at this location has been competing in E64.
Spot on. The question from me is, were the teams who are GA Aspire (only) told if they win that they would get promoted?
From what I understand, they were ... which makes no sense. How do you judge them based off a mix of 1st and 2nd teams? And you are asking them to basically run up the score if they truly want to show they don't belong. So a team that does not believe in that, are they punished when they may look at it and say " you won 4-0 only" ... and how can you promote more teams into GA. GA would have to split the Midwest at some point ... and how would WI get 5 GA teams - cant see it. Would Michigan get another GA team or Chicago area? I can't see GA sending teams down... it looks like a mess.
It also probably depends what GA and GA-A allow for club passes guest players ... I believe Mich Jags had two GA teams at one point (maybe they still do or maybe their 2nd GA team is now a GA-A team) ... Galaxy's 2nd team won the USYS National Championship last year at one age group (but i believe some of their GA players guest played)...I noticed that same Galaxy 2nd team lost in the USYS Quarterfinals this past January (when their GA team was at a showcase). So does Galaxy have the option to have players play in both? I know a lot of those GA teams played their kids on their 2nd teams as well in the past ... would it be like a situation a few years ago in ECNL when Eclipse was playing their teams in both leagues or a good amount of players in both ECNL and ECNL-RL. I don't mean to bog down the forum on this league ... just it is what is wrong with youth soccer. I saw this graphic posted this weekend on twitter and just laughed ... it sums up the whole system and shows its a joke.
Galaxy played GA players on both teams last year. It was pretty bad because a lot of the 2nd team players didn’t get to play in big games because the GA players came and played those games. But this year I don’t think the GA players played down, at least for the 2010s. Last year it was the same coach both teams, this year I believe it was two different coaches.
Michigan Jaguars do this as well and not just big games, however it doesn't seem to help them too much.
I've seen teams do this in the past and generally speaking they do it vs better teams in the league (which those teams likely would rather have a good game than a blowout)...the issue comes then if they only do it vs better teams and say the game is then closer and then don't do it against other teams and send their actual 2nd team and those games are blowouts, it messes up the league and makes results look different and in a possible promotion it could hinder that (since the league likely will not know if they did or didn't bring them).
Not sure about Michigan Jags, but last year Galaxy had GA player pools of around 30 players in some age groups. Typically, when Galaxy GA players played on second teams they were not the GA players who were getting minutes with the top team, but rather pool players who may not have even been rostering for GA games. I believe they made some changes this year and locked their GA rosters at 18-19 players and made a true second team. Regarding team promotion from ASPIRE, Wheaton United would be an interesting move for GA. They are geographically directly between Galaxy and Sockers. Their home fields being a 5 minute drive from North Naperville. With the Chicago Empire/Sockers player development partnership, you have five clubs offering GA options in the western/northwest suburbs. There are currently Wheaton kids playing for Sockers, Galaxy, FCU, and Empire.
The ENCL Regional League operates in a similar way to GA Aspire. Eclipse and Chicago Inter have their 2nd teams in these leagues playing Evolution and Libertyville 1st teams. The idea is consistent performance in the ENCL RL or GA Aspire league will help you eventually get promoted to the top league. So, I agree with you, both these leagues are basically saying their 2nd teams are top clubs regionally. The idea being finish, towards the top of your regional development league and earn your way into the top league eventually. I am not saying it true, but I think that is the thought.
Not much in this thread on the boys side obviously consistently as we all mostly just seem to have daughters! What's the word with Chicago Inter getting promoted from Regional League into ECNL. Do they have strong boys teams?
I can't speak for Chicago Inter but I can say with certainty that the alternative boys ECNL program in the area (Eclipse) is awful. It's run by coaches that don't understand the game, it's very unorganized, they like to make false promises just to get your money, they don't improve soccer IQ, lack of leadership, lots of favoritism - especially if you're family of the coaches and CEO. It's just ashame that the elite level players are being let down so much. I'd be interested to see if Chicago Inter would be a better option because it just can't get any worse!
Here are boys clubs in IL, ranked by strength of top team U11-U17. Both Inter and Eclipse are roughly 2 goals weaker than Sockers (#1) at the moment, which is quite a gap. But of the 73 clubs in IL, they are #8 and #10.
Here are just the top teams of the two: Magic: FCU: FCU gets hurt because they don't have a 2014B team under that club. They have it under Trevian SC. Not sure the relationship between that and FCU, it looks like it's a similar sister club - but there still are teams in the FCU club as well as the Trevian club as per SR. With 2014B showing as a blank, it gets a "30" in that score, which hurts the average significantly. If instead the Trevian SC 2014B was there - it would be 42.86, and the average for the FCU club would show 50.45 instead - only 0.3 goals behind Magic, instead of over 2 goals behind. Clubs that don't have a full slate of 7 teams over those age groups (and only have 5 or 6 teams) do get hurt significantly in this calculation - it was even worse when they got a "0" for a blank, instead of "30". The problem with just not counting the blank, means the clubs that only have older teams are always sorted to the top over clubs that have younger teams at all - which wasn't optimal either, in ranking full-service clubs. That's one reason why these club rankings aren't gospel - there are legitimate reasons why one club might not show as well as expected - with the most common one being that they don't have all 7 age groups - but it doesn't mean they are inaccurate either.
I wish this app could take a snapshot and save data. It would be interesting to see if someone is falling, what the rankings were at the start of the fall season, and where they are after the spring season wraps up. I know it's been fun to see my son's current team climbing as they have hit their stride in the fall.
Yes - keeping history and tracking it over time would be awesome. We do it manually for many of the teams in the club, so we can keep track of things like that. For one of them, they were expected to be 8 of 9 at the beginning of the season, and with only 2 games left they are now on track to be 1st or 2nd in the bracket - it's been a season that they have improved the most ever (and some of the competition has backslid). There is that line graph on the details of each team, where it attempts to show the progression of the team over the past few years - but it's not a snapshot. It is recalculated every once in awhile, with all of the game data that is now assigned to the team. Which means the past ratings get recalculated for every other team as well, and the old ratings shift. I would greatly prefer for it to take a snapshot and keep it static forevermore - but when you start to think about how that can be done and the data requirements it would take for hundreds of thousands of teams - you realize why it's set up the way it is now. I don't think it's impossible, if they had something like a weekly snapshot. But I do think it would make the data requirements for the back end be 20X to 100X or more what they are now.
the best bet would be something like July 1, then every quarter after that. If they can keep the trend line, I would think a historical ranking can’t be much more data but not all teams get a trend line.
I've made similar suggestions. Hoping that it turns into a prod function at some point. One thing to keep in mind is that every single data source is its own team entity - until it gets linked to another team entity - and now there is just one. So carry that thought forward - and if one team entity has one history, and another has a different history - what happens when the team data comes together - which history do you keep? Both? Neither? Some calculation between the two? That's a key reason why just recalculating on the current data as is, whenever desired, is much easier to implement. Remember, they're currently not "keeping" a trend line, they are recalculating a new one each time - from the oldest data to the newest data.
Based on results, I am guessing that the Galaxy 2010's were the only age group that used GA players. The rest of their age groups (besides 2009) didn't have much success at the national events.