My name is Fernando, and thanks for stopping by my data project.
I was born in Brazil and have been a lifelong fan of the game. I moved to Knoxville back in 2022, where I currently officiate as a proud member of the Tennessee Valley Soccer Referee Association (TVSRA).
After refereeing hundreds of high school games, I couldn't find a centralized hub that tracked historical performance, so I started gathering the data myself to dig into the questions I kept wondering about: who's actually the best team right now, whether a rivalry has always been this lopsided, and how much a school's zip code really decides what happens on the field.
That digging turned into a pile of reports on Tennessee's regions, the role money plays, and what football quietly tells us about soccer. You can find all of them, published and in progress, in the Research tab.
The Methodology
To answer these questions, I built the Tennessee Soccer Stats ELO System, TSSE for short. The engine aggregates historical results sourced from MaxPreps, TSSAA, and CoachT, going all the way back to 2008.
TSSE evaluates boys and girls in strictly independent pools using a custom ELO rating algorithm. Ratings update after every game based on opponent quality, the result, and a capped goal-margin term, so running up the score stops paying past a point. New programs enter with a bounded prior built from their class, division, and neighborhood profile, then settle quickly through a fast-learning window over their first 20 games. Each offseason, ratings regress toward the mean by an amount that reads the roster: heavy graduation and a coaching change cost more than a returning core under the same voice.
As of July 2026 the engine runs its second revision, applied retroactively across the full history, and the exact constants are private. The full structure, the constraints it always obeys, and the rough weights are published openly in Newsletter 2026: The First ELO Change, along with the research findings that drove them. The final v1 rankings are preserved in the ELO v1 archive.
Note: This project is a personal, independent endeavor and is NOT affiliated with TSSAA or any school.