IL doesn't seem to know who is committed. My kids club team has a ton of committed kids. IL shows about 25% of who is committed.
I’m familiar with a few of the top HS teams and top 2024 club teams on LI. IL has missed no commits on any of the 2024 club teams. IL is only missing one commit regarding all the HS teams that I have knowledge of. And that player isn’t what you’d call “top tier”, so my guess is they may miss “lower profile” players. Doubt they miss any higher profile kids. Does that make sense, based on your experience?
How does Inside Lacrosse assign stars to the player?
It represents a combination of Ty Xanders personal opinion and natural bias toward MD prep kids, and the frequency in which he sees a particular player. If he doesn’t see/evaluate a player, player has no shot at making his rankings (obviously). He doesn’t get to any LI games unless it’s playoff games. If your kid gets to a playoff game or two, that could be huge, if he does well. Conversely, Ty goes to a lot of MD prep games and know the landscape they’re intimately, which gives those players a huge leg up on anyone outside of MD. Hey. It’s lacrosse. Nothing is fair and equitable. Absolutely nothing.
Ty saw my kid once and gave him a very high Eval rating that he very rarely gives out. Based on only that score, he should be a 5 star, comparatively speaking. But he never saw my son play again. So he gave him an unranked 4 stars. That how it works. Not really that big of a deal when all said and done. My son got a great offer from a great school and program, since any self respecting college coach will do their own evaluations. That said, a higher ranking would definitely had a big impact. Moral of the story: Does the IL ranking matter to college coaches? Most definitely. But it’s also not the end all, either. Coaches will do their due diligence. Having the NLF rankings definitely helps to give an additional perspective on the players. And the NLF doesn’t have the MD bias that Ty has.
NLF has a Matt Chandick bias and you need to put money in his pocket to get ranked.
Stop the BS. There is no ideal algorithm here. It’s not science. It’s opinion which is based only on the players that are evaluated and how many times they have been evaluated. Xanders lives in MD and is an x-prep school kid, so he spends more time in MD than outside MD. Prob like prep school kids since he was one. Chandiks is more tied to the northeast,!lives in the NE, so spends more time with NE teams. If your kid lives in the NE, it’s more likely that he will be seen far more by Chandik than Xander. Based on that, he should get a more fair/accurate Eval by Chandik, than Xander. Of course, that’s based on the assumption that both Chandik and Xander are equally competent evaluators. Rankings aren’t perfect. No where close. They just give a basic framework of talent, but even that isn’t accurate. After sayin all that, one might assume that, if they aren’t at all accurate, then they can’t be too important. Unfortunately, that’s false. While rankings aren’t the end-all, and coaches will usually do their own due diligence on their recruits, these rankings are hugely important in the recruiting process, from my experience. They very literally mean big scholarship bucks and admission to elite schools. Yes, they create huge demand for top players which equals big time opportunities, scholarship and NIL dollars and the potential of long term high paying employment after graduation.
