Maybe this is already happening I haven't looked at the ranking app in a while. But breaking things out by regional league is much more useful than by state. By State is ok but there isnt really a correlation because thats not how Leagues look at a map. The downside to this approach is youd have to figure out how each national league breaks out both its boys and girls clubs into regional leagues which would be annoying and constantly changing / evolving. The upside to this approach is leagues would better know which regional leagues to send more or less clubs from to finales based on some form of power ranking. It would also quickly show which regions are developing and which are just cashing parents checks.
Youth Soccer Rankings ?
- Thread starter dawson
- Start date
I personally like and get a lot of value from the app, despite the perceived lack of "perfection" due to the age change. So much so, in fact, that I'm considering getting the Pro subscription (which, for me, would be significant, as the total I've spend on mobile apps in my lifetime is well under $100).
The ability to compare two teams from different leagues, areas, playing circuits, etc., has a significant amount of value to me as a parent, and perhaps would have even more value to a coach or team manager (eg: for evaluating tournaments to attend, scrimmage opportunities, etc.). It also lays bare the fact that most "letter leagues" are not unequivocally better (in terms of player skill, team success, etc.) than perceived "less prestigious" leagues, which might have less access restrictions, travel requirements, etc. For example, MLSN-AD isn't really much better than EA/EA2, ECNL-RL isn't much better than NPL/NL, etc. While I'm sure access to that information aggravates some people (and particularly the people with vested interests in those "letter leagues" being superior), I really appreciate the availability of relatively unbiased rankings in general.
Anyway, just wanted to chime in here (again), with some appreciation for the app as-is, even with perceived issues with the age range changes and such.
The ability to compare two teams from different leagues, areas, playing circuits, etc., has a significant amount of value to me as a parent, and perhaps would have even more value to a coach or team manager (eg: for evaluating tournaments to attend, scrimmage opportunities, etc.). It also lays bare the fact that most "letter leagues" are not unequivocally better (in terms of player skill, team success, etc.) than perceived "less prestigious" leagues, which might have less access restrictions, travel requirements, etc. For example, MLSN-AD isn't really much better than EA/EA2, ECNL-RL isn't much better than NPL/NL, etc. While I'm sure access to that information aggravates some people (and particularly the people with vested interests in those "letter leagues" being superior), I really appreciate the availability of relatively unbiased rankings in general.
Anyway, just wanted to chime in here (again), with some appreciation for the app as-is, even with perceived issues with the age range changes and such.
You should have seen what it was like before the ranking app. It all became a matter of who your club doc knew. Tournament flights were based on perception and who the host club wanted to win.
This is where people talk about the "good old boy" group of docs. If you were in the club your teams would get a chance at playing in the highest levels. If you weren't in the club you didnt get a chance to play at the highest levels and the good old boys would pick off your top players one by one.
All this still happens + is half the reason closed leagues exist. But, at least you can prove that its happening now with the ranking app. This is why I suggested the ranking app do regional league breakouts and college commitments. These seem to be the last areas that parents and whoever argue about online. If there was a quick and easy way to end the nonsense bickering it would be nice.
In addition, I'd venture to say the app is saving some parents real money, by being aware that they do not have to "chase" letter leagues in order to be on competitive teams. While the absolute top is still dominated by MLSN-HD (and the second tier is fairly clearly ECNL proper), below that there really isn't much stratification between the rest of the leagues and designations (NPL and flights in SoCal League are fairly ordered, but NPL is broadly competitive with any of the other letter leagues below the top 2).
With that in mind, the value proposition from moving (for example) from a NPL team to a MLSN-AD team is pretty minimal (on average), as I see it, unless the app indicates the individual team is significantly stronger. In some cases, knowing that might save time, money, stress, etc. If your kid is in that range (not top tier, but above F1), then you are probably better off just focusing on the coaching, team, convenience, etc., rather than chasing any of the other "mainly for marketing" leagues, because the expected results are broadly similar (on average), and you can see if a prospective team is actually a significant step up or not. Without the app, that would not be nearly as obvious.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
I think adding different views of the data to rank by different attributes, including by region or by league, would certainly be helpful to look at the same data in varying ways. You can imagine that some (but not all) of them would just be recreating the league standings view, which already exists elsewhere. Anyone can take the SR rating, add it to their own spreadsheet, and rate teams however they'd want to see how the regions compare - but doing it automatically with a click would be helpful.
I think there may be too many data issues with this to make it workable at scale. Just figuring out which league a team is in isn't trivial. Some are in more than one, many tournaments aren't affiliated with a single league. League regions change every season with teams added / lost, and sometimes vary by age classification. Keeping an up to date map of those while applying them to team entities isn't trivial. It's not impossible - but doing it at scale for thousands of thousands of teams is daunting.
This would be awesome. Unfortunately, it seems this isn't data that is ever going to be freely given or available. I know there are a couple people that try and keep track of it manually and post up in instagram, but there isn't anything close to an "official" list that people can refer to when tracking these things.
Yea I can see that because tournaments arent really in a "regional league" that it would be hard to decide where to place them. By state makes things easy. Also if you take out the tournaments you're just recreating what the leagues already provide. But you would be able to compare regional leagues against each other which you cant do now.
Reguarding the committments I think that feature actually has wings. It wouldnt be hard to add a committemnt detail upload screen for a couple of the people currently doing it with spreadsheets. I would just suggest that only the paid version says the player names + college + level. The free version just lists general committment numbers.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
Send them your ideas. It's how I imagine they get many of their ideas for upgrades/modifications. I'm skeptical that it's the type of data that they'd be comfortable just taking from one or two sources and reformatting/reposting it, as the source data itself is pretty sketchy and incomplete by its nature. But I had similar concerns about parent-entered real-time player data, and they went forward with that.
You have to give the people contributing something back for entering data. If only certain people can upload data it gives them the ability to brag online that they just updated X number of new data points.
Or you do the crowdsource thing and give everyone access.
Because under 18 names are involved its always a difficult thing + you'd probably get a better result only letting a limited number of users upload committment data.
If someone wants to submit this be my guest. Im not going to. I just like the potential for tears this type of data would cause. Theres so much "ignore the man behind the curtain" nonsense going on. Leagues and docs think parents are dumb and marks. This is not the case unfortunately parents arent organized.
Just thought of another data point to track. Talent ID invites and USM/WNT call ups by club. Shine a light on the nonsense and watch the cochroaches scatter.
Just an FYI on what i had said earlier about the age change and adding to why it is not only "SoCal Soccer League" that has jumped the gun with their spring league being based on the new age groups that are supposed to go in to effect Aug 1st and how that has a huge host of teams in the unranked section and/or in the wrong age group.
We are coming across this with multiple tournaments hosted through spring and summer in multiple states:
This specific screenshot is for a tournament in May.
We are coming across this with multiple tournaments hosted through spring and summer in multiple states:
This specific screenshot is for a tournament in May.
The development of this is actually fairly straightforward and simple. It does add to items the devs have to consider in updates, changes etc, increasing their maintenance overhead. However from a development standpoint and coding perspective the logic is straightforward and simple. I am not just randomly tossing assumption out there but basing it on years of experience in the industry.
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
And where is that tournament? SoCal is not uniquely wrong in this case, and there certainly may be other instances where leagues/tournaments are jumping the gun. But they are by far the largest problem, and the only one evidently being considered to just be dropped and restarted if necessary.
Either way - it will be mainly sorted by the fall. The affected teams are going to likely have to live with the problems until then.
The concept is straightforward/simple. The data that you want to use for it isn't, and likely never will be. Spend some time thinking about the type of data that SR can grab from scraping gotsport and other similar sites. The data entities like score, team name, team age, game location, game time, club, state, coach, etc. are all pretty straightforward and can be aggregated easily. On the back end the hardest part is connecting this team name to that team name as the same. If the app can to it, it does it, and if it can't, the data goes into unranked. Then you sort and process that data in to a few different views (age, gender, state), and provide different views to it. That's really it.
There is no additional data map or anything else that tries to keep track of various league structures, season differences, or anything else, that would change how game data is pulled in or processed. If you think through what you're asking it to do - you'd need to fill in how it would ever be able to grab all of that additional data, and keep it updated at scale as it continuously changes.
Is there a reason why teams aren't still being referred to by birth year?
For example, a G2015 would be G14/15 instead of U12 (or U11 before a certain date). B2012 would now be B11/12.
This would allow teams to keep their age designation from year-to-year instead of having to change every year from U6, U7...U19. This seems like it would be a simple/logical change. What am I missing?
For example, a G2015 would be G14/15 instead of U12 (or U11 before a certain date). B2012 would now be B11/12.
This would allow teams to keep their age designation from year-to-year instead of having to change every year from U6, U7...U19. This seems like it would be a simple/logical change. What am I missing?
RandomSoccerFan
PREMIER
You're not wrong. Naming the teams by birth year, or combination of birth years - compared to naming them by current age - would make it much easier for a team name to remain consistent from season to season. It certainly would make it easier for tools like SR.
I imagine from an alternate view, it's much easier to describe different age groups in a league with 1 identifier. It may seem more intuitive if brackets in a tournament are named U12G, U13G, etc. rather than every bracket having two birth years. (2014G/2015G, 2015G/2016G) or (14/15G, 15/16G) - and then having people have to translate whether it means birth year or age. In a few years the two will diverge far enough from eachother that it would be clearer what they represent. When you think about rule books or any other documentation that refers to different age groups, it makes sense if you're able to keep them consistent year on year - and don't have to reprint/publish them every year because the team identifiers change. The rules for U11 will always stay consistent, even if each year the U11 team is a different team.
I imagine from an alternate view, it's much easier to describe different age groups in a league with 1 identifier. It may seem more intuitive if brackets in a tournament are named U12G, U13G, etc. rather than every bracket having two birth years. (2014G/2015G, 2015G/2016G) or (14/15G, 15/16G) - and then having people have to translate whether it means birth year or age. In a few years the two will diverge far enough from eachother that it would be clearer what they represent. When you think about rule books or any other documentation that refers to different age groups, it makes sense if you're able to keep them consistent year on year - and don't have to reprint/publish them every year because the team identifiers change. The rules for U11 will always stay consistent, even if each year the U11 team is a different team.