After refereeing hundreds of games across Tennessee, I kept noticing something: the teams playing on the nicer fields, in the better-established neighborhoods, tended to perform better over time. I wanted to know if there was any real signal there, or whether I was just pattern-matching what I expected to see.
So I matched each of the 343 programs in the TSSE dataset to U.S. Census Bureau data for its ZIP code, built a composite socioeconomic score, and measured whether those two things move together. They do — to a degree. The relationship is real but it is not a strong one, and the exceptions are as interesting as the pattern. What follows is the geographic picture first, then the methodology, then what the numbers actually show.
The Socioeconomic Index (SEI) is a single 0 to 100 score built from four Census Bureau variables for each school's ZIP code: median household income, the inverse of the poverty rate, median home value, and the share of adults with a bachelor's degree or higher. Each variable is percentile-ranked across all 343 programs and the four ranks are averaged together. A school at 100 sits at the top of every dimension. A school at zero sits at the bottom of all of them.
Two schools that have played each other 45 times since 2008 put some human context around that scale. Morristown Hamblen East High School is in Hamblen County, where manufacturing accounts for roughly 24 percent of the local workforce.1 The economy there is built around factory employment that has been contracting since the mid-twentieth century, with textiles, furniture, and food processing all having shed jobs over the decades. Median household income in its ZIP code is around $48,000. Its SEI score is 14.2, placing it in the bottom 5 percent of all 343 programs in this dataset. The Hurricanes currently rank #176 in boys and #255 in girls.
Jefferson County High School sits about 25 miles to the southwest, where residential development from Knoxville has been spreading east along Interstate 40 for the past two decades. The county is suburbanizing steadily, with growing property values and a workforce that has shifted toward professional and service employment. Median household income in its ZIP code is around $68,000. Its SEI score is 61.1, placing it in roughly the middle of the distribution. The Patriots rank #102 in boys and #182 in girls.
Neither school is in a particularly wealthy area by national standards. The 47-point SEI gap is less about wealth than about structural trajectory — the difference between a community still anchored to industrial employment and one that shifted alongside broader regional economic growth. In 45 meetings since 2008, Jefferson County has won 87 percent of matchups across both programs, outscoring Morristown East 55–21 in boys goals and 121–11 in girls goals.
Performance is measured by ELO rating from TSSE. The model initializes every program at 1,500, then adjusts after each game based on opponent quality, result, and goal margin. Because it accumulates across seasons, it reflects long-run program quality rather than any single year's record. Boys and girls programs are rated in separate pools.
There are 541 programs in that chart. The regression line is real — r = 0.37 for boys and 0.39 for girls, where r (Pearson correlation coefficient) measures linear relationship strength from 0 (no relationship) to ±1 (strong relationship) — but look at how wide the scatter is. ZIP code socioeconomic score accounts for about 13 percent of the variance in ELO ratings. The other 87 percent is coaching, player development, school culture, individual talent, and everything else that goes into a program over 17 years.
The line is there. It is not a steep one, and plenty of programs sit well off it in both directions.
Programs in neighborhoods with a median household income around $46,000 win about 39 percent of their games over the full dataset. Programs in neighborhoods around $100,000 win about 52 percent. That 13-point gap is consistent across both boys and girls programs and holds up when you look at the median ELO rating rather than just win percentage.
Put it in matchup terms: a median program from the bottom income quintile playing a median program from the top gives the higher-income school about a 3-in-4 chance of winning based on their ELO ratings. That 3-in-4 edge is roughly what the ELO gap between those two groups predicts.
The overlap between groups is real — plenty of lower-income programs outperform the trend, and plenty of higher-income ones underperform it. The direction holds for both boys and girls.
An SEI of 79.0 puts Bearden in the top quarter of all programs in the dataset. Its West Knoxville ZIP code scores in the 68th percentile for income, 63rd for low poverty, 94th for home values, and 92nd for educational attainment — an established neighborhood with high property values and a well-educated adult population, though the income figure is more middle-of-the-state than true top-tier. There are a dozen or more programs with stronger neighborhood numbers who are not ranked first in the state.
The gap between expectation and outcome comes down to coaching continuity. Eric Turner built the program over 18 years and five state championships before his retirement, with the school's field named in his honor.2 Ryan Radcliffe, who played under Turner, took over in 2014 and added state titles in 2016 and 2019.3 Over 25 uninterrupted years at the top of the same program is unusual in high school soccer anywhere. That kind of institutional stability compounds in ways no Census variable captures.
It is also the clearest evidence in the dataset that the zip code correlation, real as it is, does not determine outcomes.
The two largest negative outliers in the dataset are worth looking at alongside Bearden. They are not rural or low-income schools struggling with limited resources. They are schools in relatively wealthy ZIP codes that sit near the bottom of the state standings.
East Nashville Magnet sits in a ZIP code that scores higher than 83 percent of programs in this dataset, driven largely by rapid real estate appreciation in the 37206 area over the past decade. The school's student body demographics and its competitive record on the field have not followed that neighborhood trajectory. The SEI is measuring the surrounding market, not who enrolls.
Whites Creek demonstrates that a high-income neighborhood does not automatically translate into program investment, coaching resources, or school culture around soccer. A school in an affluent area that has not built the infrastructure around the sport will underperform on this index. The SEI is a ceiling of potential, not a floor of performance.
There is a lot missing from this analysis. The zip code does not tell us which families were able to afford competitive club soccer before high school, what individual school athletic budgets look like, how much access programs have to quality training facilities, or how coaching tenure and stability varies across districts. The SEI picks up a real signal, but it is a proxy for those underlying factors rather than a direct measure of any of them.
There is also a stronger version of this question that would require tracking both socioeconomic data and ELO ratings over time, watching whether programs shift as their neighborhoods change. That is a more involved data construction problem and the subject of a future update to this series.