Youth Soccer Rankings

SZ, he shut down the site last year and everybody freaked out. He said it was too overwhelming and he was doing it for free and for fun. Some posters reported that they had offered to help or even "buy in" but I dont recall what happened to those offers or if they were even true. So after the public outcry he started it back up. But my guess is it's still an overwhelmingly task to maintain. Maybe someone can volunteer to help him invest in a staff ?? It's a great service he provides.
 
It is a great resource and shows how irrelevant gotsoccer rankings are. The predictive power of YSR is uncanny, although there are some assumptions such as boys v girls and age v age that I think are inaccurate.

I am sure it is an overwhelming task.

There have certainly been offers to help or get involved from posters here and probably elsewhere.

I'm guessing the guy who runs it is either integrating some of those offers or forging ahead solo and that is why the site has been a little more spotty than normal.

But big cheers to him regardless!
 
Coach_JimmyZ said:
I noticed today that the application for Surf Cup asks for team info from youth soccer rankings site
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That's new...so basically if some teams don't participate in the higher ranking tournaments chances of getting the necessary points to have a go ranking stance will not give teams opportunities. Yet at the same time this will be great for the higher ranking tournaments and more money for them as well. Just a theory for making more money perhaps for those clubs that have higher ranking tournaments.
 
Deadpoolscores! said:
That's new...so basically if some teams don't participate in the higher ranking tournaments chances of getting the necessary points to have a go ranking stance will not give teams opportunities. Yet at the same time this will be great for the higher ranking tournaments and more money for them as well. Just a theory for making more money perhaps for those clubs that have higher ranking tournaments.
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I am not sure it is the tournament specific as it is more just playing and results versus higher competition. get you higher ranked. The Surf application also asked for the 5 results against higher level competition. That was new.
 
Deadpoolscores! said:
That's new...so basically if some teams don't participate in the higher ranking tournaments chances of getting the necessary points to have a go ranking stance will not give teams opportunities. Yet at the same time this will be great for the higher ranking tournaments and more money for them as well. Just a theory for making more money perhaps for those clubs that have higher ranking tournaments.
Click to expand...
Youth Soccer rankings does not go by tournaments even though it list them. He goes by head to head competition against a opponent, he's got a algorithm which figures either you should win or lose ,and your rating goes up and down even within the same tournament. I think our team has barely won a game and our ranking score has goes down because the algorithm calculates you should have defeated the team by a bigger margin
 
Deadpoolscores! said:
...so basically if some teams don't participate in the higher ranking tournaments chances of getting the necessary points to have a go ranking stance will not give teams opportunities.
Click to expand...

Actually, this is precisely what Youth Soccer Rankings did not do, and why I like that site so much and wish it had the resources to get current.

It is not a point based ranking system like GotSoccer. Instead it is a form of power ranking that only takes game results into account. It doesn't care whether those results are from a regular season game, or a tournament, or what kind of tournament. It simply looks at the game score and the ranking of the opponent. By having a giant database of recent games, it can look at results between common opponents, and common opponents of opponents, etc, to build a mathematical power ranking that is more accurate than the point based system you mention and which is used by GotSoccer.

The point value assigned to teams by Youth Soccer Rankings is not a reflection of how many tournaments the team entered, or the perceived quality of those tournaments. Instead, the point value assigned to the team is a power ranking value that can be used to predict how two teams will fare head-to-head. Simply subtract the value for the two teams and that predicts by how many goals one team would beat the other.

I discovered it last year and followed it for the teams in our regular season bracket, as well as the tournaments we entered and I was quite surprised and impressed how good its predictive value was.

p.s. I am not associated with the site in any way. I am just a fan who thinks highly of concept and the implementation.
 
Mackerel Sam said:
Actually, this is precisely what Youth Soccer Rankings did not do, and why I like that site so much and wish it had the resources to get current.

It is not a point based ranking system like GotSoccer. Instead it is a form of power ranking that only takes game results into account. It doesn't care whether those results are from a regular season game, or a tournament, or what kind of tournament. It simply looks at the game score and the ranking of the opponent. By having a giant database of recent games, it can look at results between common opponents, and common opponents of opponents, etc, to build a mathematical power ranking that is more accurate than the point based system you mention and which is used by GotSoccer.

The point value assigned to teams by Youth Soccer Rankings is not a reflection of how many tournaments the team entered, or the perceived quality of those tournaments. Instead, the point value assigned to the team is a power ranking value that can be used to predict how two teams will fare head-to-head. Simply subtract the value for the two teams and that predicts by how many goals one team would beat the other.

I discovered it last year and followed it for the teams in our regular season bracket, as well as the tournaments we entered and I was quite surprised and impressed how good its predictive value was.

p.s. I am not associated with the site in any way. I am just a fan who thinks highly of concept and the implementation.
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Sounds good to me.
 
I wish there was a way to get some of the errors fixed. I see that you can manually fix some of easier issues such as team name or age, but as an example my daughter's 2007 team won a big tournament over Labor Day (3W & 1D) but the site confused the results with our club's 2008 team which was playing up in age (1D & 2L). So my daughter's 2007 team dropped down 10 spots into the teens and the 2008 team jumped way up to the top of the Region. It's also thrown a bunch of other teams results out of whack because it looks like they beat a very strong 2007 team or lost to a weaker 2008 team, while the opposite is actually true.
 
Surf Zombie said:
I wish there was a way to get some of the errors fixed. I see that you can manually fix some of easier issues such as team name or age, but as an example my daughter's 2007 team won a big tournament over Labor Day (3W & 1D) but the site confused the results with our club's 2008 team which was playing up in age (1D & 2L). So my daughter's 2007 team dropped down 10 spots into the teens and the 2008 team jumped way up to the top of the Region. It's also thrown a bunch of other teams results out of whack because it looks like they beat a very strong 2007 team or lost to a weaker 2008 team, while the opposite is actually true.
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You can fix this automatically. Go to correct team then remove games played by another team. And vice versa, do report missing competition. Wait a few days for changes.
 
I actually tried that but it only shows games played by my D's team. When that happened in the past it was an easy fix, just like you suggest.
 
The new site manager, Ryan, has been sending notes back about fixes that I suggested (some of Coast Soccer league games were duplicated into different age groups), so he's working on things. The problem I noticed was just fixed.
 
I was able to remove some games that were posted to us but played by another team in our club, as well as add some tournament games from Labor Day. The changes we enacted by the following day.
 
rocket_file said:
It is a great resource and shows how irrelevant gotsoccer rankings are. The predictive power of YSR is uncanny, although there are some assumptions such as boys v girls and age v age that I think are inaccurate.

I am sure it is an overwhelming task.

There have certainly been offers to help or get involved from posters here and probably elsewhere.

I'm guessing the guy who runs it is either integrating some of those offers or forging ahead solo and that is why the site has been a little more spotty than normal.

But big cheers to him regardless!
Click to expand...

I've emailed him a couple times about some problems and he's always been pretty responsive. The one thing I'd like to see them do is break out the USSDA teams into their own category. DA and non-DA never get to play each other, so in my opinion, putting them in together muddies up the rankings. They emailed me back recently and said they were looking into doing it, which is great news.
 
A question. Why is the ranking so important?

Just think about it beyond the obvious for moment. Does it really matter?
 
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