It is the same program as YSR, with Mark, same guy. I think with the last few seasons being odd with Covid and so many teams changing over the last couple years, it is going to take some time to sort out. But it is way way better than any other ranking program and I have found it to be pretty accurate. So much better than Got Soccer Ranking, those are ridiculous
Youth Soccer Rankings ?
- Thread starter dawson
- Start date
It is the same program as YSR, with Mark, same guy. I think with the last few seasons being odd with Covid and so many teams changing over the last couple years, it is going to take some time to sort out. But it is way way better than any other ranking program and I have found it to be pretty accurate. So much better than Got Soccer Ranking, those are ridiculous
SoulTrain
BRONZE
As someone who misses YSR, the app is a great addition and, as others have said, $10 a year for the PRO version is a bargain. For those talking about the accuracy, as more data comes in, the better it will get. Mark is also super responsive so if you see something that needs to be fixed, there is an easy tab on the app to send an email inquiry. If you fix inaccuracies with your team and merge teams if needed you'll make the app better for everyone. Without YSR, bracketing at tournaments this year suffered, I know tournament directors everywhere will love having a factual-based ranking system back in place. Pay the $10, sign up for PRO, keep small and innovative businesses thriving!
Soccer Dad & Ref
SILVER ELITE
For the love of god, why do coaches enter the teams into tournaments with different names?
SoccerFan4Life
PREMIER
I paid $10 and surprised to see how up to date it was. Don’t get caught up on the rankings accuracy. Look at the millions spent on the bcs computations and yet people still complain. Just saying
Code
GOLD
Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results. If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it. The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly. I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments. Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1??? Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole. Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from.
Soccer Dad & Ref
SILVER ELITE
Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results. If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it. The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly. I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments. Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1??? Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole. Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from.
US Soccer should require a Team ID # that must be used. Got Soccer has some sort of ID number, but this new app doesn't.
Agreed, but... sometimes the teams that go to tournaments are legitimately not the same as the ones that play in league. There's a lot of shuffling to fill a tournament roster because not everyone can go - especially for the Thanksgiving and Easter tournaments. You'll see kids from lower and younger (and sometimes higher) teams from the same club guesting. And sometimes just purely random kids. My son has done this a lot over the years.
Some coaches use a team name to indicate what level they are even if the entire roster has turned over. For example,. Legends will rank its team FC, Gold, Black and White from strongest to lowest. The roster and coaches on those teams may switch titles from year to year. In some instances, and entire roster may leave (such as going from 9v9 to 11v11) and essentially its a new team but with the same team title. That team should not get the ranking of the old team and its roster that are no longer present (I'm specifically talking about scenarios like where 10 of the 12 on the roster have moved on).
Probably because they do not want to be associated with the results. If things go well, they claim it; goes bad, they hide it. The higher performing teams are usually consistent in identifing the team and coach clearly. I've noticed a trend that a lot of GA and E64 teams leave their league designation off the team names at the smaller, local tournaments. Leaves everyone wondering if it's the clubs GA team? The NPL team, Flight 1??? Then there is the affiliates rabbit hole. Sometimes they let you know there is a distinction, other times, there are 6 "Legends" or "Rebels" teams in one age group bracket and you can't tell where any of them are from.
More often than not it's the Team Manager, not the coach, doing the tournament registrations. Usually the higher performing teams have managers that are more aware and/or experienced and/or detailed oriented enough to keep it consistent. Most tournament platforms identify the coach with the team so it can be figured out, it just takes a little more effort.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
Soccer drama on the field has made it to this rankings app! A progressively rougher game this weekend kept escalating without much ref control and ended with a fistfight between two players. The field was stormed by parents pushing and screaming at each other, and the ref called the game with just a few minutes left. Multiple red cards, and dispute filed with the league, which will almost certainly be in our favor.
Noticed this week that our ratings kept getting messed up (by somebody incorrectly adding data sources for game results). I would revert them the next day, but the same problem repeated itself twice. The app owner investigated, and someone was intentionally and maliciously merging all the data into one team incorrectly to remove us from the ratings. That same user has primarily made edits for the club in question from this weekend. That user is now blocked from edits in the app.
I was hoping for the development of a web interface once again, which made it easier to interact with the data on a larger screen with a keyboard/mouse. But I can see the advantages of an App here from the development/maintenance side, especially for cases like this. The developer doesn't have to worry about managing accounts, authentication, or any other user-specific information - apple/google just issues a unique and anonymized ID that effectively ties a device to a user (and their subscription). When one of the ID's misbehaves, it can have its privileges curtailed. That same individual would need to sign up from a different phone - and pay for another subscription - to continue to misbehave. While that's certainly not impossible - it's much less likely than in the prior world, where anyone could edit the rankings on the website with no authentication, no cost, and no consequences.
Noticed this week that our ratings kept getting messed up (by somebody incorrectly adding data sources for game results). I would revert them the next day, but the same problem repeated itself twice. The app owner investigated, and someone was intentionally and maliciously merging all the data into one team incorrectly to remove us from the ratings. That same user has primarily made edits for the club in question from this weekend. That user is now blocked from edits in the app.
I was hoping for the development of a web interface once again, which made it easier to interact with the data on a larger screen with a keyboard/mouse. But I can see the advantages of an App here from the development/maintenance side, especially for cases like this. The developer doesn't have to worry about managing accounts, authentication, or any other user-specific information - apple/google just issues a unique and anonymized ID that effectively ties a device to a user (and their subscription). When one of the ID's misbehaves, it can have its privileges curtailed. That same individual would need to sign up from a different phone - and pay for another subscription - to continue to misbehave. While that's certainly not impossible - it's much less likely than in the prior world, where anyone could edit the rankings on the website with no authentication, no cost, and no consequences.
SoccerFan4Life
PREMIER
I wonder what these parents that create problems will do once their player is done with sports. Clearly they don’t have a life to go to these extremes of manipulating data. Call them out.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
Latest app version for iOS has added some new features. Teams now have distinct ratings for offense & defense (as well as the existing overall rating), and Clubs are now ranked as well. From the Club page, it shows all the teams associated with it, along with individual ratings. It's unclear, to me at least, how the Club rating is calculated. It's clearly some aggregation of the ratings of the individual teams, but I don't know how it's weighted, or how unranked teams within the club affect or don't affect it.
Ranking Clubs is VERY interesting...
Right now "the best" clubs in socal have created their own insulated leagues to insure wins (and losses) against predetermined opponents. This does not benefit players + specifically does benefit clubs because it allows them to control outcomes + make players that want to play at the highest levels jump through hoops.
Also most parents might know a single age group or two on either the boys or girls side but not the overall status of the club. This is why you end up with all the ECNL/GA/Next/bla/bla/bla pissing matches.
Showing which clubs consistently have wins across all age groups and genders puts DOCs + club presidents on the hot seat for performance.
It's out. I have it. Works well. It's called "Soccer Rankings" in the Google play store.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
Soccer Rankings on Google Play
Soccer Rankings on Apple Store
His main site: https://usasportstatistics.net/
It looks like he is prioritizing feature release on the iOS platform; I imagine he has more installs on that side at the moment. The Android version has gotten the same features over time, but it has been delayed a bit for each release.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
As someone who isn't in the socal area (just a bit north of you folks), looking at the socal clubs is quite confusing. Many of what appear to be the top clubs have a billion teams with very similar names, making it very hard to figure out which team is which, and how to attribute particular results to the right team over time. If you look at many of the top individual teams, it's typically a single team that has a single data source that has had an amazing past 10 games, and no history past that. That's why ranking the club should normalize some of this, and weight all results of all teams in a way that is meaningful - but there are certainly many reasonable arguments about how to do that calculation in a variety of different ways.
I agree it's annoying. Once you're in the middle of it all everything "makes sense" if you want to call it that.
The groups that lose out by the way things are curently structured are players that never get a chance to compete at the highest level and clubs that also never get to play against the highest level teams.
What ends up happening is that clubs with access to highest levels of play simply recruit from everyone else that's boxed out. While this does produce a very limited set of high level players sometimes that group can be swayed by $$$. Also if everyone in socal just played each other youd end up with much more high level talent that what's currently produced.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
OK, I have clarification on how the Club ratings are calculated. It's the average of the ratings of the top teams, as if two clubs playing each other all brought only their single best teams in each age group, then aggregated the scores to see who's on top. Any second or lower team in any age group should have no effect on a club's rating.
Knowing this - it looks like there is some weirdness in the data currently that doesn't seem to match this explanation, but I'm sure it will be ironed out over time as examples can be reviewed/corrected.
Knowing this - it looks like there is some weirdness in the data currently that doesn't seem to match this explanation, but I'm sure it will be ironed out over time as examples can be reviewed/corrected.
Youth Rankings are like a "box of chocolates... "never know what you're going too get:
Fun stats or whatever for parents but I rarely remember youth players mentioning or carrying on about rankings only that a team they where facing where past or current tournaments or league champions.
Youth soccer can be unpredictable at times, past doesn't predict the future and ratings don't play the games.
For parents or coaches seeing trends can help in some areas so ranking data can be helpful. Improvement as the time go by can be a positive+
Perpetual top (10) billing seems to happen each year for a certain set of clubs teams so it's just a way to see that in some cases. Seeing a team in the top 5 for a long span can be a plus for recruiting but in youth sports it's about how you finish each tournament or season that's more valuable.
Fun stats or whatever for parents but I rarely remember youth players mentioning or carrying on about rankings only that a team they where facing where past or current tournaments or league champions.
Youth soccer can be unpredictable at times, past doesn't predict the future and ratings don't play the games.
For parents or coaches seeing trends can help in some areas so ranking data can be helpful. Improvement as the time go by can be a positive+
Perpetual top (10) billing seems to happen each year for a certain set of clubs teams so it's just a way to see that in some cases. Seeing a team in the top 5 for a long span can be a plus for recruiting but in youth sports it's about how you finish each tournament or season that's more valuable.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
This is true to a point, but it understates the predictive value. It turns out the youth soccer *is* quite predictable based on past results. With multiple seasons to point to now while using these ratings, in just my kid's case - I can look back to 65 individual games with ratings. The team overperformed 7 times. The team underperformed 10 times. And performed as expected 48 times. They have lost exactly one game, that they were predicted to win. They have won a handful of games that they were predicted to lose. (for clarity, they have a few hundred games of experience - it's just the data only goes back 65 games)
Just look up a team that you were aware of, look down in their history, and you can see the overperforming (marked in green) or underperforming (marked in red).
We went into a tournament a few weekends ago against some talented teams, with the prediction to lose 2 of 3, for varying amounts. Walking out of that tournament with 3 ties means the coach has objective data showing how well the kids performed, and whether they are continuing to improve.
Clearly anything can happen on any day, and sometimes there will certainly be surprises. And there are the larger arguments, that since winning isn't the primary goal of youth soccer - predicting winning is even less important in the grand scheme of things.
But fallible humans like knowing a little bit about what's going to happen tomorrow, from the weather to the markets to sports to reality TV results. This app does a damn good job of feeding that itch.