Today we release another new Players To Watch National Top 150 Ranking on TopDrawerSoccer.com This time it is the 2014 Girls class we’ve been investigating.

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 2015 Boys.

Topping the list this time around is Sarah Robinson, a midfielder from Northern California club team MVLA lightning. Robinson seems to have cemented a starting spot on the U17 Women’s National Team, which travels this weekend to Guatemala for the CONCACAF World Cup Qualifying Tournament. She has verbally committed to Stanford (as has #2-ranked Andi Sullivan of the Washington DC area) and also qualified for the national cross country championship, an event she couldn’t compete in due to soccer commitments.

As far as how we arrive at the rankings, it’s no simple task.

We keep a national database of players as the starting point for our rankings (if you’re not in it, create 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 (recruiting interest shown is a major factor). 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. Check out the first version of the rankings here. As always, thank you for reading TopDrawerSoccer.com