The 2015 Girls IMG Academy Top 150 Rankings winter update is out today. The top five remain unchanged with this update, but there are many changes to talk about as well as a slew of new players who are catching the eye of U.S. Soccer staff and college coaches.

Mia Hoen-Beck

Dallas Sting’s Kaycie Tillman climbs from #34 to #14 after getting a chance to impress with the new cycle for the U.S. U17 WNT, and showing that she deserves to be there. Tillman scored the tying goal with little time left on the clock in a scrimmage against a more mature German side. TSC Hurricane’s Ainsley Wolfinbarger jumps 36 spots to #37 after also receiving a call up to the U17 WNT’s recent scrimmages. The midfielder is a veteran of the U15 GNT as well as US Club Soccer’s id2 program and US Youth Soccer’s Olympic Development Program.

In addition to those getting youth national team call-ups, there have been quite a few players lighting up the ECNL stats pages, and receiving a lot of attention from college coaches in the process. Debuting at #50, Mia Hoen-Beck has been featured in more than a couple of TopDrawerSoccer.com articles this season due to her goal-scoring prowess. With 16 goals in 13 games, this forward from McLean Youth Soccer will have college coaches beating down her door soon, if they aren’t already. Others debuting on our list include San Diego Surf defender and Notre Dame commit Kelsey Irwin at #75, Internationals defender/midfielder Zoe McCormick at #110, and Heat FC midfielder Arden Holden at #131.

Not only has the IMG Top 150 received scrutiny, but the regional lists have been updated as well. Keep checking back this week as we unveil newcomers such as Gulf Coast Texans goalkeeper Gretchen Cagle, Ohio Elite SA midfielder Mattina Girardot, Freestate SA forward Taylor Love, Eagles SC defender Kelsey Kimball, and many, many more.

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, enter 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. The priority here is for club, college, national team and other select team coaches on the ground, but especially when we can gain corroborating opinions. The more layers of opinions we can gain accumulate the better, as our role is primarily to aggregate those viewpoints, rather than making our own determination as to a player’s quality.

As a matter of policy, we never share which coaches said what about whom so that coaches will be freer to share their assessments. 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 as well as our challenge of sifting through thousands of players nationwide. That kind of data can be helpful, but the: “How can you not have rated my kid? He is awesome” communique, while compelling, will be consigned to the virtual trash.

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 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.

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