Another Tuesday, another new National Top 150 Ranking on TopDrawerSoccer.com This time it is the 2014 Boys over whom we’ve been running the rule.

As part of our continuing effort to improve Players To Watch, we are now ranking four graduating classes each of boys and girls. We’ll continue unveiling these throughout the spring. Next week it’s 2014 Girls.

You’ll notice a number of professionals or soon-to-be pros on the boys’ lists. Our #1 player Junior Flores is definitely  planning to progress around the pro track, but we’ll keep ranking those players through their graduation year, even if they’ve long since left traditional schooling behind.

As far as how we arrive at the rankings, it’s no easy feat.

We keep a national database of players as the starting point for our rankings (if you’re not in it, enter a FREE 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.

So that’s it. You can see the newest version of the rankings here. As always, thank you for reading TopDrawerSoccer.com.