As the Players To Watch National Top 150 Player Rankings continue rolling out, next on our list is 2014 Girls, the current sophomores and soon-to-be juniors.

These players are in prime time as far as college recruiting goes and we’ve been making our lists and checking them way more than twice. The 2014 Girls ranking will come out next Tuesday. In the weeks following that we will unveil our 2015 and 2016 national lists for boys and girls.

As to how we arrive at our rankings…

We keep a national database of players as the starting point for our rankings (if you’re not in it, enter a profile here). We track an extensive list of selections to national team camps and other honors including USSF Development Academy, and U.S. Youth Soccer National League event and season awards, plus U.S. Soccer Training Centers, ODP, id2 and other player identification programs.

From there we look at additional signs of top player performance in a club environment, with the help of an extensive network of observers around the country, and of course college and club coaches on the ground. As a matter of policy, we never share which coaches said what about whom. Another policy is that parents’ opinions about their own children are not considered, but you are welcome to provide feedback about honors and other details that may be of help to us in sifting through thousands of players nationwide

In the end, there’s always some level of subjectivity about players, because after all, how good someone is relative to someone else is largely a matter of opinion, but we do our best to make our rankings as educated an opinion as can be.

The rankings will now be updated every quarter. Keeping current rankings for 8 classes of 150 players each is no small task, and it is counterintuitive to think the rankings would change daily or weekly. We will announce each update.