Methodology

The current algorithm

For every team, we take the better (lower number) of two authoritative national rankings and use that as the team's blended rank:

We then group every team by gender × age group (e.g. 17s Girls), sort each group ascending by blended rank, and assign a 1-indexed SETT Rank within the group. The position within the group determines the tier.

This is intentionally simple. We don't (yet) compute our own ELO/Glicko score, weight by margin of victory, or shift points per match — see what's not in the algorithm below.

Worked example

Suppose a 17s Girls team has these rankings from our two sources:

On every team profile we show this same breakdown for that specific team — open any team page and look for Ranking Breakdown.

Tier system

Tiers are bucketed positions within a team's gender × age group. We use buckets — not strict integer rank — for tier display because club volleyball is highly regional and declaring one team exactly #42 vs. another exactly #43 implies a precision the data doesn't actually support.

Data sources & freshness

Rankings are recomputed daily as part of an automated nightly pipeline. The inputs:

• AES Power Rankings — the authoritative AES national rank for every team in every age × gender combination. Pulled directly from AES's public rankings page.
• USAV National Rankings — pulled alongside AES from the same endpoint family.
• Tournament results from AES, SportWrench, and VBSchedule — used for team profile pages, bid tracking, and search; not currently used in the SETT Rank computation itself.

Pipeline freshness is exposed at /api/health for monitoring tools. The same data is queryable via the public JSON API.

What's not (yet) in the algorithm

The current SETT Rank is a clean blend of two authoritative sources. It deliberately doesn't do these things — but we'd like to:

• Per-match shifts. We aggregate W/L per tournament but don't compute a rating that moves match-by-match. A future version will publish each match's effect on the team's score.
• Margin of victory. A 25-7 win and a 25-23 win count the same here. Weighting them meaningfully without inflating wins of dominant teams over weak ones is non-trivial.
• Strength of schedule. We don't adjust for the difficulty of opponents faced.
• Bid-bubble projection. We don't yet predict who's likely to earn a bid given remaining schedule — but /bids/upcoming shows every remaining qualifier's registered field sorted by SETT Rank, so the bubble is visible directly.
• High school / non-club events. Only USAV-sanctioned club volleyball is in scope.

Frequently asked

Why is my team's SETT Rank different from their AES rank?

SETT Rank is the team's position within their gender × age group after blending AES + USAV. If a team is unranked in one source, the other is used; if both rank them, we take the better number. So a team with USAV #38 and AES #42 will show SETT Rank #38 — even though AES alone would put them at #42.

Why don't you show match-by-match point shifts like other sites?

Because we don't yet compute one. Showing fake shifts derived from a blend of two pre-computed ranks would be worse than showing none. When we ship a real per-match rating, you'll see every shift — see the roadmap above.

How often does SETT Rank update?

Once nightly. AES typically publishes new rankings 2-3 days after a national qualifier weekend, so SETT Rank reflects new tournament results within ~72 hours of the event ending.

My team is missing or has the wrong club affiliation. Can you fix it?

Yes — see the contact page. Most discrepancies are inherited from the upstream AES record; we can flag corrections for the next ingest.