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.