We'd like to tell you that calculating national rankings was magic, but you would not believe us and we'd be doing you a disservice. One of the more difficult challenges is to determine where teams should appear in the rankings relative to all the rest. Two teams could each have records of 5 wins and no losses and one might be the best team in the state while another might be three levels down.
The problem is well handled with older teams by seeding teams that participate in the National Championship Series. A solution for the younger teams (U13 and younger) that is both comprehensive and objective is more difficult to accomplish. The USA Rank team proposed a solution. We could fly them across the country so they could persomally rate all the teams. Needless to say, that idea did not "fly".
Fortunately, once we made a commitment to have the USA Rank team enter full results from thousands of events across the country a solution presented itself. Tournaments that present multiple divisions at an age level are used for seeding. If they have three levels, the first is seeded Gold, the second Silver and the third is Bronze. Two level age groups are seeded as Silver and Bronze.
What if you don't participate in a large event? You are still covered.
- The seeding is kept to a smaller percentage of the ranking
- The seeding never lowers a ranking so it can never hurt you for lower seeded divisions
- The highest seed reached is used
- When you defeat or tie a team that is seeded you get the benefit of that seeding for your ranking
US Youth Soccer/US Club National Championships
Every team has accomplishments during their tenure that reflect their efforts and provide them with those incredible moments of joy for earned successes. We don't believe that any of those moments necessarily have any more value than any other and each team can take pride in those successes and broadcast their achievements.
The Championship banner
The two big challenges in Youth soccer that are available to all competitive youth teams are the US Club and the US Youth Soccer National Championships. We do our best to enter all results for those events and use them to seed the rankings. We create a banner for each team that achieves success in those events at the State, Regional and National Level.
We hope to see your team there!