Elite girls soccer development is a tough business.

The nation’s top developer clubs have a significant amount of work that perhaps some of their boys coaching counterparts do not. The biggest is no doubt the fact that elite girls players deal with scholarship offers as young as 13 and 14 at times, which adds an entirely different layer of maturity to the process. And then there’s the fact that coaches have to carve skill out of a coaching tree that’s historically been constructed on athleticism.

But there are certainly pockets of the country that produce elite girls players with more regularity than any other. A brief glimpse at any of our IMG Top 150 rankings lists should reveal that, with a few well represented thanks to their stocked larder.

But it’s become clear that Southern California is distancing itself even further from the rest of the pack in terms of elite girls soccer development. That topic takes up this week’s Top 150 Spotlight.