PrepStarter's SCVA Top 50 PowerRankings - 18's
January 27, 2009

1	TCA 18-Black
2	Santa Barbara 18-blue
3	Coast VBC 18-Ozhan
4	Laguna Bch 18-MS
5	Sports Shack 18-Asics
6	Sunshine 18-Premier
7	Impact 18-Kevin
8	Wave 17-Jeanne Spalding
9	SVVC 18-Ki
10	Rancho Valley 18-Danny
11	Mizuno Long Beach 17-Mizuno
12	Club West 18-1
13	Sports Shack 17-1
14	Laguna Bch 17-KK
15	Sunshine 18-Hot Shots
16	Mizuno Long Beach 18-Mizuno
17	Bkfd Club Jamba 18-Tom
18	Golden West 18-Asics
19	South Bay 18-1
20	Coast VBC 17-Luis
21	Sunshine 17-Sunshine
22	951 Elite 17-1
23	951 Elite 18-1
24	Coast VBC 18-Davis
25	Laguna Bch 18-Tuan
26	OCVBC 18-Nike
27	Surf City Girls 18-Black
28	Cal Jrs 17-m
29	SMBC 17-Alicia
30	SG Elite 18-Roshambo
31	Club West 18-2
32	SDVBC 18-1
33	951 Elite 18-2
34	Temecula Vly 18-Dana/Kelly
35	Arizona VA 18-Mizuno
36	Central Coast 18-Claudia
37	SG Elite 17-Roshambo
38	Club Vegas 17-Jeff
39	Ripcurls 18-blue
40	Channel Islands 18-Premier
41	Club West 17-1
42	SCVC 17-1
43	Surf City Girls 17-Black
44	Wave 18-Brennan Spalding
45	Santa Barbara 18-White
46	SVVC 18-Jed
47	Redlands Tiger 18-1
48	SCVC 18-1
49	SMBC 18-Nabil
50	SDVBC 17-1

***

We noticed last season that rankings and seedings held little weight when it came to pool assignments. It seemed that other variables were considered, such as distance teams had to travel or avoiding two teams from the same club having to play each other as well as other unknown variables. We considered how these pool selections might influence the overall rankings and discovered that some teams benefited from an easier schedule while others had to play more difficult teams. We wondered if the course of a team could be determined by one or two improper seedings throughout the season.

To satisfy our curiosity as to which teams were really the best we began an experiment and devised a method to track teams according to their rank and performance and the rank and performance of their competition. Bonuses and penalties were given according to wins and losses. For example, beating a high ranking team resulted in a larger move up the scale. Losing to a low ranking team resulted in an appropriate drop in rank. The method also took into account the number of games played so that taking a game from a high ranking team yielded an appropriate reward and punishment.

This season we will continue to track what we are calling PrepStarters PowerRankings. We recognize that this is by no means a perfect system. We offer our results to the volleyball community simply as a source of interest to spark discussion. We hope that you will find our results as interesting and revealing as we have.

Toward these ends we recognize the following limitations:

Initial Seedings: we begin our own rankings according the seedings provided by SCVA. We do not know the means they achieved their rankings and are limited to their method. There are, obviously, some errors though we believe that our system will correct for these as the season progresses.

Information: we are limited to the information published by SCVA. From time to time some pool results, games and scores are not posted to their website or are incomplete. Without this data we cannot properly consider those teams.

System: we admit that our model is imperfect. We will continually endeavor to modify it to better reflect valid rankings. Our goal, however, will be to make few changes as each adjustment lowers the continuity of ranks from tournament to tournament.

Human Error: we are dealing with a lot of data that must be entered by hand into a complicated spreadsheet. From time to time an error might be made. We trust our statistician to minimize these errors through careful diligence and also trust our common sense to notice when a ranking might be skewed because of such an error. What about those errors that we do miss? Consider it providence and forgive us for not being perfect.

Thank you SK for helping to devise our method and taking on the task of entering the data!