Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss

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08/19/2016 12:47

Subject: Travel Soccer teams around NOVA let's discuss

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Anonymous wrote:Can we get back to soccer? There are plenty of other forums for people looking for people with dirty mouths, etc.

No kidding. Geez.

Here's one. What is the general consensus on the impact of the age group change for U11 and above? Are there a lot of completely new teams out there where families used the change to find a new club? Are there teams who kept most of the group together and are playing some kids up a year? Fall season should be interesting.

youth soccer rankings says it's impossible to track teams under the old system to the new so they are discarding all rankings before Aug 1st. NCSL and any other league that has pro/rel is probably going to take a long time to get sorted out correctly.

http://youthsoccerrankings.us/

I read a lot of soccer forums and sites and had never seen youthsoccerrankings before you linked to it. It doesn't seem remotely accurate for region 1, at least for the boys' age group I'm most familiar with (2000s/U17 for the coming year). Gotsoccer is flawed, but seems more on target. It is letting teams keep points if they have a sufficient number of returning players.

A lot of people think youthsoccerrankings is more accurate than gotsoccer, maybe your perspective depends on where your team is ranked ?

My perspective comes from being familiar with many of the listed teams through years of league and tournament play, and puzzlement over the site's ranking methodology.

Using the group at http://youthsoccerrankings.us/index_2016.html as an example, it appears that the VA Rush team gained the ranking of the number 1 team in Region 1 solely based on the fact that it creamed a lot of teams in what appears to be a mostly weak group in a very weak league (VPL). Their record in VPL places them far ahead of several national league teams (including the U15 McLean team that just won the USYSA national championship (#9 on this list), the Baltimore Celtic Dynasty, FPYC Fury, and the HMMS Eagle FC Titans). They are also ranked far above many excellent pre-academy teams, including PDA and Philadelphia Union.

If you know anything about soccer, you will understand that those results are completely absurd.

Or maybe your real motive is you have some financial interest in Gotsoccer, they have their hooks everywhere so I wouldn't be surprised that is why your acting puzzled. A national championship is just another tournament, usys and us club both have their versions, don't tell me a team should be first on some list just because of that. At least this site is reputable enough to say it's not possible to track the teams from the old system to the new. Gotsoccer is a trainwreck right now with the different age groups, but they will never admit that, too much money at stake for them.

You, sir or ma'am, seem more than a little paranoid (not to mention unduly invested in youthsoccerrankings.com). My "real motive" is to share my thoughts on youth soccer in our area, since I have a lot of experience and knowledge on the issue, and a keen interest. With respect to Gotsoccer, as I said in my original post, I think it is flawed in many ways. Awarding teams extra points for participating in Gotsoccer-sponsored tournaments seems like a form of corruption to me, and I have seen first hand many teams that spend too much time going to tournaments, some of them quite weak, in a quest for Gotsoccer points. This takes away from time that should be spent on giving kids good training, and results in unnecessary outlays of parents' money. I wouldn't argue with someone who felt that Gotsoccer is evil. It also doesn't include results from DA or pre-academy leagues, and has incomplete or missing results from other leagues and tournaments.

I am also not claiming that the USYSA national championships are a great barometer of a team's relative quality, because in general the teams that compete in that league are second tier below DA and ECNL. But you cannot do well in that league without being a very strong team, and it's absolutely absurd that a team could be ranked above you just based on its performance in some hyper local league that looks like it may have some teams that are a step above rec. For a ranking system to work, it simply has to have some weighting for league or tournament strength incorporated into its formulas.

All that being said, I am guessing that you have never been an age group coordinator for a big tournament? I have, and it's not easy to sort teams by ability at the younger ages. Gotsoccer is definitely a helpful starting point for that, though you still have to do a lot of additional due diligence to figure out which teams really do have the better record. The site you defend, at least in the age groups I'm most familiar with, would not be much of a help at all.

There is no perfect ranking system, just look at the BCS. So stop with ones motives or better nonsense. Gotsoccers purpose is pretty much for seeding tournaments and not much more. Parents get all into the rankings but the precision of any system that attempts to tier so many teams without any or very little direct relational connection is inherently inaccurate.

GotSoccer or youthsoccerrankings are only loosely accurate in terms of relative blocks of competitiveness. You can't game the system enough to be ranked number one, but just being ranked number one doesn't mean that teams two through five are not just as good.