It's a weird thing when the #1-ranked team loses and stays #1. In this case, with this week's HS Club Rankings, Royal Irish lost by 2 points to the #1 Single-School team, so, really, there's nothing in it and they stay at the top.

In fact, you might look at the top group of clubs and see some losses to single-school teams and concluded that the single-school teams are stronger. That is sort of true and sort of not-true. The single-school teams at the top of the heap tend to start better, because they are able to gather their resources a little better. But ... as you go down the list, you'll find that the difference between, say, the #10 HS Club and the #30 HS Club is much smaller than the difference between the #10 Single-School team and the #30 Single-School.

So in the club rankings this means we see a lot more movement from out of the rankings into the middle of the rankings. And, because recruiting is a fickle thing, we also see some of those teams jump way to the top.

We've decided that Red Mountain is for real. We want to see more from United. Tampa has done an outstanding job in Florida and deserves to be in the Top 10. South Greenville has dominated, but in a league we're not sure is super-strong. We'll see.

Good early results bump Peninsula Green, Back Bay, Santa Monica, and Fort Hunt into the rankings. Same goes for Tempe and West End, West Valley, Chapel Hill, and Sierra Foothills. All of these teams go in because they beat good teams, sometimes ranked teams. Many of the teams that dropped down have done so because they're not playing right now. It's easy to move up - just win games.