Every team in the Development Academy is on an unforgiving sliding scale. Either the team is improving or sliding backward. You can’t be neutral on a moving train.
More than most, these five teams have grasped the opportunity to improve this season and done a fair bit with it. From mediocrity to the postseason in a year, each of these teams turned a losing record into a postseason berth in 2015. With the playoffs just around the corner, these underdog stories will be something to watch for once they start up in earnest in June.
Texas Rush U18
It isn’t that the Rush were bad, per se, in 2013-14. Their 9-10-8 record was just below the .500 meridian, and most of their numbers fell along the midsection of the league’s statistical bell curve. But at eighth place in a 13-team division, Texas Rush missed the postseason by a relatively sizable margin. Ten points, to be exact, since the Rush’s 35 points fell short of the 45-point cutoff by the time the regular season closed.
