After several requests and a lot of soul-searching, we give you an end-of-season Girls HS ranking.
This Top 40 was difficult in part because leagues played 15s, 10s, 7s, or some other combination in an effort to get games going. We decided to rank teams regardless of the type of rugby they played. We judge those teams based on how they did in the version they played, so you could have a highly-ranked team that played a lot of 7s, and wouldn't necessarily beat a much lower-ranked team when they played 15s.
From our observations, though, in girls HS rugby especially, good rugby teams are good rugby teams. We also saw a mixture of results, especially in Ohio but elsewhere as well, such as Utah, where one team beat another which beat another. So we did our best.
One surprise might be Belmont HS out of Massachusetts. But we got to see them a lot on video and saw several other teams on video or in person, and concluded that despite the fact they didn't play outside their state, they would handle themselves very well. It is a subjective ranking, to be sure, but hopefully fans will take this ranking as it is intended—a celebration of the return of the girls HS game and the hope that it will continue to rebuild for 2023.
And you will see below we made a mistake and fixed that, but it makes the numbers weird - two teams at #12.
