Top 10%. Top 50. Elite. The labels get thrown around at every tryout and on every club website — but a percentile is only meaningful once you know what group it is measured against. Here's how to read them without getting fooled.
Being in the top 10% does not describe a team's rating in isolation — it describes where that team sits relative to everyone else. A top-10% team is simply better than 90% of the teams it is measured against. Change the group it is measured against, and the label changes with it.
Rankings only make sense inside a cohort: one age group, one gender. A U14 boys team is ranked among other U14 boys, not against U17 girls or the local rec division. So top 10% nationally in U15 girls is a very different achievement from top 10% of one regional league — same words, completely different bar. Always ask which pool the percentile is drawn from.
A national rank places a team against the whole country in its cohort; a state rank places it against teams closer to home. Both can be true at the same time: a club can be the best in its state and still sit mid-pack nationally. Neither number is wrong — they answer different questions.
Rank is your position in line. Rating — an Overall score from 0 to 100 — is how strong you actually are. They are not the same. In a deep, talented cohort the gap between 5th and 25th might be razor-thin, while in a thin cohort ranks can spread far apart. Reading the rating alongside the rank tells you whether a jump in position is meaningful or just noise.
A percentile is only as solid as the pool behind it. If a cohort is small, or only partly covered, a top-10% label rests on shaky ground. The youngest age groups in particular are sparsely ranked, so treat any percentile there with extra caution.
Every team gets an Overall score from 0 to 100 plus a national and state rank within its own cohort, so you can see both how strong a team is and exactly which field that puts it at the top of. Browse the rankings or read how the ratings are built.