Today we release our first summer update for the Players To Watch National Top 150 Ranking on TopDrawerSoccer.com.  This time it is the 2013 Girls class we’ve been tracking.

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 updates throughout the summer. In a couple of weeks it will be 2014 Boys.

Summer Green

For the 2013 Girls, Michigan Hawks and U17 Women’s National Team standout Summer Green elevates to the #1 spot after her fantastic goal-scoring performance for the U.S. at the CONCACAF Championship, where she helped the U.S. team qualify for the FIFA U17 Women’s World Cup. The irony of Green reaching the top is that this will be her final quarter in the club player rankings at all, as she has opted to graduate early so she can begin her college career at North Carolina this fall (our policy on players graduating early is we typically leave them in their original class of rankings).

Elsewhere in the summer update for 2013 Girls we have some new entrants into the list and a lot of movement based on continued evaluation and feedback.

You can see the full Rankings List here.

The regional rankings for 2013 Girls will be unveiled over the next four days for our 16 regions in this class.

In July, we will resume the national 150 updates with 2014 Boys.

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 profile here). We track an extensive list of selections to national team camps and other honors including USSF Development Academy (Boys), ECNL (Girls), 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, especially college, club and other 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 keeping their profiles up to date and 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 read the newest version of the rankings here. As always, thank you for reading TopDrawerSoccer.com.

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