One of the features we thought would be entertaining to have on this site was a ranking of teams across the various age groups in the state of North Carolina. This idea, however, has some inherent limitations which make it an exceedingly difficult task to do well. We’d like to be transparent about how we develop these rankings, and also open up the comments for suggestions on how we can do better. With that said, we want to reiterate that these rankings have absolutely no bearing on your team, and they are merely meant to be fun and informative. The hope would be that having access to someone’s opinion on who the best teams are might also help coaches in how they schedule and who they might target as opponents. We are firm believers that the best teams and players will only improve by seeking out and playing the best competition.
Limitations
First, many of the teams across the state will never play one another (or even play common opponents). It becomes very difficult to draw comparisons between teams when they’ve never played each other or played common opponents. Second, the personnel on these teams can change from weekend to weekend. We all know that guest players are utilized every weekend and this has benefits to both individual players and teams. If some team uses more guest players more frequently than others, it becomes less clear which team we are actually ranking. Third, we cannot and will not be able to see all of these teams play. This is a serious limitation and one we freely admit to. While we’d love to see more baseball each weekend, it’s not feasible. We would be open to receiving scouting reports from readers if you thought it might be helpful. Fourth, we all know that winning is not (or at least should not) be the only goal for these youth teams. Sometimes that means you don’t go with your best pitcher or defensive lineup in order to give a child a chance at a different spot. Finally, we know that youth teams develop at different rates and the best team at the beginning of the fall is highly likely to not be the best team at the end of the spring season.
Methodology
So here’s how we do it. We have access to essentially all results from all age groups across the state. We can get these from a variety of sources including gamechanger and the specific websites of the various tournament organizations (NC AAU, Top Gun, USSSA, Nations, Perfectgame, etc.). We review the results from every tournament played and even incorporate how teams have performed in the prior season to a small degree. We review the scores, pitchers, day of the game (e.g. Sunday vs. Saturday), etc. to try and make some assessment on who the better teams are overall. This means that these rankings should be more accurate as we get more data/results. We also talk to lots of coaches around the state to hear what’s going on in their regions. We want to know how the best teams are from the people actually at the games. We’re going to try and update the rankings each week after incorporating the weekend’s results. Rankings will attempt to be reflective of the entire season’s results, not just the previous weekend’s tournament results. In addition, we’ll try to make some assessment about which direction teams area headed based upon the trend of results.