When a freshman shows up to tryouts, the program is making a four-year bet. Most of those bets don't pay off, not because the kids aren't good, but because they don't stay. I tracked every player from season to season and school to school, which lets me ask two questions a roster sheet can't: how many freshmen actually make it to senior year, and where do the players who switch schools end up?
About half of all freshmen are still with their program as seniors; the rest drift away, get cut, or move on. And it matters: the programs that hold onto their freshmen reach a clearly higher ceiling than the ones with a revolving door, and the relationship is real, not faint. Growing a class up together, the same group of players maturing side by side in one coach's system, turns out to be one of the more dependable ways to build a strong program. Use the toggle above to see how boys and girls differ, and click any bar to see exactly which programs sit in that band.
Here's the surprise. The programs pulling in the most players are not, mostly, the private schools you'd expect. They're brand-new suburban public schools like Green Hill, Rockvale, and Battle Creek, which opened their doors and absorbed players from the schools they rezoned. You can see it in how lopsided their intake is. All 9 of Battle Creek's arrivals came from Spring Hill, and 14 of Rockvale's 26 came from Riverdale. A roster sheet cannot tell the difference between a family moving and a boundary moving.
Take those out and the poaching story mostly evaporates. The biggest net importer among schools that already existed is Baylor, at 20 in and 3 out spread across 11 separate seasons, and its largest single source sent three players. Nothing in the state looks like a pipeline. The most persistent one-to-one route I can find is Hillcrest to Whitehaven, five players over three years. Across 445 programs and 12 seasons the whole file holds 1,264 moves, which is about one player per program every four years.
There is one move that would look like recruiting if anything did: three years in a programme, then a change for the season that matters most to a college coach. I can follow 13,791 players who spent ninth, tenth and eleventh grade at a single school. 13,726 of them finished there. 65 spent their senior year somewhere else, about one in 212. The school that took the most of them took three, and Baylor, the biggest importer in the state by any other measure, took two. Twelve of the sixty-five moved to a private school and ten moved away from one.
Private schools are not the engine either. 153 players left a public program for a private one over that window and 156 moved the other way, so the private side of the ledger runs negative. Chattanooga Christian is the third-heaviest exporter in the state. Bringing players in does track with winning, but loosely: the ten biggest importers gained a median of eight rating points on the year against zero for everyone else, on ten schools. The steadier signal in this report is still simply keeping the freshmen you start with.
One last thing I couldn't resist. Tracking players by name surfaced how often soccer runs in families: I count roughly sets of likely twins (same rare surname, same graduation year) and trios or larger. The cleanest example is at South Doyle, where the Straussfogel brothers Finneas and Jude graduate together in 2026 with older brother Liam having come through before them. A few more below. This is for fun, matched by name, so take the big clusters with a grain of salt.