diamondcoach
SILVER
Any thoughts or surprises? Noted Slammers HBK teams are 16-0-2 through pool play. Unfortunately, those two ties were both from the ‘09s, which knocked them out. U19s in the final.
ECNL Girls Playoffs 2025
- Thread starter diamondcoach
- Start date
Bay-tastic
BRONZE
I am pretty impressed by how well Solar Soccer Club from Texas (I believe this club is near Dallas) has performed at ECNL Nationals this year. While they’ve consistently had a strong presence at the highest levels, they were exceptionally solid across every age group this time. That kind of across-the-board success speaks volumes. Credit to their ECNL Director, coaches, and the club as a whole! They’re clearly doing a lot right when it comes to player development, recruiting, and strategic club management. The foundation they’ve built is clearly paying dividends at the Nationals.
diamondcoach
SILVER
Just took note of the brackets for the girls ECNL finals in Richmond. One age group (2011) has all three southern CA teams on the same side of the bracket. Two SoCal teams, from the same conference, having to play each other in the quarterfinals? Similar set up in other age groups as well. Tell us you hate west coast teams without telling us you hate west coast teams….
davidnunez
BRONZE
the brackets for Virginia are set up prior to the pool play and round of 16. There isn't a re-seeding or re-draw. If 3-4 teams from SoCal make it to Nationals, and there are only 8 teams total, there are going to be some SoCal vs SoCal games early on. Stinks for sure ("we coulda just gone to Norco"), but it's not an anti-west coast thing. In fact, SoCal gets more teams into pool play than any other conference, so folks could argue the opposite
All three teams on one side of the bracket is more likely than you'd think. Odds are about one in seven.
Sounds low until you remember that every year SW sends 3 teams in almost every age group. Over the 5 years your kid might go to Richmond, you'll probably see it 3 or 4 times.
Therefore, if you don't want to meet each other in quarters, just stop sending so many teams to nationals.
Sounds low until you remember that every year SW sends 3 teams in almost every age group. Over the 5 years your kid might go to Richmond, you'll probably see it 3 or 4 times.
Therefore, if you don't want to meet each other in quarters, just stop sending so many teams to nationals.
They know what they are doing when they make the group pools for National playoffs. Sorry but they try to get SW teams out.
If one of the Socal teams wins it all. Socal teams will remain at the top of the rankings. If a team from somewhere else wins it all by beating a Socal club then they'll rocket to the top of the rankings. But not because they beat all the Socal teams, its because all the Socal teams canceled each other out. In this situation beating one Socal team is like beating 3-4 of them.
I believe the ranking app counts number of goals only.
It would be interesting if clubs could back out of finals without getting forfeits. Because if this was the case clubs could just bow out to maintain a high ranking.
Its also interesting if a forfeit was/is recorded as a one goal loss or a 3 goal loss. If only 1 goal it might make sense to lose to a highly ranked team by only 1 instead of 4 or 5.
Its also interesting if 2 highly ranked teams that never get scored on tied 8-8 or some other really high score. Would this maintain a buffer to keep rankings high? As long as nobody else scores those kind of numbers on either team.
rainbow_unicorn
PREMIER
Why are soccer parents so freaking dumb?
Reviewed the ranking app rules a little more closely https://usasportstatistics.net/
Looks like if the competition organizer marks a game as forfeit they do not count the results. What this means is that in the situation where ECNL is making Socal teams gauntlet each other instead of playing other clubs. If a club skipped out on finals instead of attending there would be a forfeit. But the forfeit wouldnt count against their ranking. Im not saying anyone will skip on finals but if you're highly ranked the incentive is there to skip out especially if you get a poor seeding.
Ties only count goals scored for rankings not the deciding PKs if theres a shootout. This is reasonable but I've seen events put PKs in the final scores. Which means they likely get added to rankings because the ranking app wouldn't be able to tell that the game was a tie with PKs. If a parent manually adjusted the score the PKs wouldn't count. (Something to watch for)
Big ties (like 8-8) dont matter because rankings are determined by goal difference not number of goals. What will make teams ranking go up is a big goal difference win over a highly ranked team. This benefits Socal teams that consistently stay together and win. Teams that go up and down (though player movement and beating high ranked teams outside Socal) help consistent winners rankings stay up. *
* To put this more in a Socal perspective. Surf + a few others consistently win locally and nationally. Blues + a few others are are up/down locally but consistently win nationally. This is the perfect way for Surf to maintain the highest ranking possible because Blues sometimes plays well enough locally and nationally to rank highly but theres times when they completely fall apart which allows Surf to run up the score creating a huge difference in the expected outcome. GA clubs like City or Fram play each other and most games are close but other Southwest GA clubs aren't highly ranked. This means City or Fram have to consistently beat everyone else in their league by much more goals than a Socal ECNL team does. It sounds all logical when you math it out. What GA needs to do to push up its top clubs rankings is to add a lot more middle level clubs that go up and down in results so the top clubs can consistantly score more than the expected difference.
Correct. And I've seen forfeited games, where the rankings app reports it as a 1-0 score, and also where tied games are reported as having a final score of whatever the pk shootout result was. For teams that play a lot of games, it shouldn't make a huge difference, but lots people care about little differences, so sometimes it gets corrected.
davidnunez
BRONZE
someone drove this thread off the rails.. Who has predictions for Virginia?
You're not annoyed that ECNL is making Socal teams fly out to Virginia just so they can play the same Socal teams the play against in League games? (Likely so Socal teams will cancel each other out and not win every bracket they're seeded into. Because theres some agenda to give East coast teams wins.)
You dont see why there would be incentive to forfeit and not fly out to Virginia just to play against the same teams you'll be playing again every week starting next season? Especially if forfeits arent counted against your ranking?
Make more sense now?
Seems like Koge yet again for 2010, but I’m rooting for Hawks to knock them out.
So for you, position in the rankings (as interesting but unofficial as they are) is more meaningful than winning the trophy? Like having the best professional league record but losing in the playoffs......
Would not be my analytic. But to each their own
Koge - with the proviso of three peat..... the house is against you. Legends hungry and rebuilt. Solar - woff - have all cylinders and an amazing culture mix of competitiveness and personal quality.
Bay-tastic
BRONZE
My outlook is as follows:
U13 HB Koge 1-0 win over San Diego Surf
U14 So Cal Blues 2-0 win over Michigan Hawks
U15 Solar SC 2-0 win over Bay Area Surf
U16 San Diego Surf 3-1 win over XF Academy
U17 HB Koge 3-2 win over PDA Blue
U13 HB Koge 1-0 win over San Diego Surf
U14 So Cal Blues 2-0 win over Michigan Hawks
U15 Solar SC 2-0 win over Bay Area Surf
U16 San Diego Surf 3-1 win over XF Academy
U17 HB Koge 3-2 win over PDA Blue
The rankings app is easily accessed and reviewed by players, parents, coaches, recruiters, club owners, etc. They use it to determine all kinds of different things.
Yes, your ranking is much more important than being 4th best in the nation (this is just an example it could be any result other than national champion).
Normally forfeiting wouldn't be considered. But travel is expensive. If ECNL is playing with brackets to pick winners maybe it should be.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
I'm not sure this is an accurate characterization. It's one way how people supporting City and Fram can convince themselves that their ranking "should be higher" because of factors out of their control. But if you actually pencil out the brackets - the ratings bear out that the differences between teams in a bracket at the ECNL level and at the GA level (and across many other leagues), is surprisingly similar. It's just that the leagues have a different baseline - and one is made up of stronger teams. Here's the U15G for ECNL Southwest and GA Southwest. If you look at ECNL, there's a range of ~5 goals from the top teams to the bottom teams. The top teams are ahead of the mid-pack teams by 2-3 goals. And if you look at GA - there's also a range of ~5 goals from the top teams to the bottom teams. And the top teams are ahead of the mid-pack teams by 2-3 goals.
So yes - it matters that City is playing an average schedule against a #124 team, while Koge is playing an average schedule against a #2. But City doesn't have to "beat their opponents by more" than Koge to maintain their rating - their differences in league compared to their peers is pretty similar. Yes - if the goal of City or any other GA club is to somehow cause their rating to improve, they have to either play better-ranked teams, or beat the current teams they are playing by more. Same for every other team in every position.
Ultimately, the SR rating itself doesn't matter much, either week by week or season by season - its only use is when comparing a team on one side of the field to one on the other on a certain day - the higher rating should best the team with the lower rating. Everything that can be done mathematically to keep that as true as feasible is essentially all that SR does - it's just also a fun pastime to compare those ratings. A team can validate their own current rating just by looking back in their own game history - and identifying games that they overperformed the rating, underperformed the rating, and ended up reasonably close to the expectation. Since the rating is directly derived from these results - it's always going to accurately represent that game results, but it can also identify if the team is very often over/under performing, or instead is more consistently predictable.
The goal of any championship team isn't to get a rating high score (or certainly shouldn't be), it's instead to continue to triumph over other championship teams.
So if a league put all the top teams in one bracket (to play each other / cancel each other out) and all the worst teams in a different bracket. Its fair, and not manipulating things so the worst teams are able to advance farther than they normally would? This is when I'm hinting that a forfeit might be justified.
Reguarding City or Surf what I'm saying is to maintain a high ranking what you want is to consistently win. Which is logical. But you also want to play against teams that go up and down in rankings and catch them when theyre up in rankings in a blowout before they go down in the rankings. What I've seen is Socal ECNL tends to have a couple of very stable teams that win a lot. The other teams tend to rotate players in and out.This leads to the ups and downs in the rankings. In Socal GA the not as good teams dont change that much and tend to stay lower ranked. This means City would not only need to beat the not as good team they'd also have to beat them by a bunch of goals which most coaches tend to pull back from once the outcome is inevitable. Also some events dont allow more than X number of goals to be recorded.
Im not complaining just pointing out that Socal is an ideal location for consistently winning ECNL clubs when it comes to rankings. Specifically because the not as consistent clubs are highly ranked and sometimes provide high goal losses.
The chances of anyone forfeiting is zero. Especially due to cost. These are wealthy families. Youth soccer figured out how to exclude the regular folks a loooooooong time ago. $$$ As for rankings, everyone goes to Virginia expecting to win! They aint gonna forfeit to avoid losing.