18u for 2009 softball year

How rankings are calculated

We ingest as many games into the system as we can locate (currently just Tripple Crown Softball Tournaments, but more leagues comming soon), and separate them by softball year (September 1 - August 31), and age division. We use advanced statistical and Artificial Intelligence techniques to estimate the odds of each team beating any other team in a head-to-head game. We keep adjusting those odds until our prediction comes closest to matching the actual results from all the games in the system.

In sports, you never know what will happen in any individual game, and certainly two teams that have never faced each other should be ready for anything. But our system considers all the other teams those two new teams have faced, and how those other teams have performed against each other.

Teams that are close together in the rankings are typically very similar in performance, with the higher ranked team often having just a slight advantage over the next lower ranked team - this could mean that we expect the higher ranked team to win 51% of the games against the next lower ranked team. A higher ranked team is NOT necessarily expected to win every game against a lower ranked team, just to win more than half the time. The more separation in rank, the more often we expect the higher-ranked team to win.

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