If you watch enough high school soccer you absorb a rule of thumb: a senior-laden team is dangerous, a young team needs another year. There's something to the physical side: a 17-year-old is bigger than a 14-year-old, and at this age that's real. But when I worked out the age and the program-experience of every team-season since 2014-15 and lined both up against win rate, only one of them moved the needle.
It wasn't age. A senior who joined the team this fall and a senior who has played since eighth grade are both "seniors" on a roster sheet, and they could not be more different as players. This report is about that difference.
Read the grid corner to corner. A young but experienced team, sophomores and juniors who have been in the program since middle school, wins more than an old but green team of seniors who mostly just arrived. Age barely separates the columns; experience clearly separates the rows. Statistically it's the same story: roster age correlates with winning at essentially zero, while program experience, modest as it is, is several times stronger.
This is why "we have a senior team" tells you so little. Roughly a quarter of all seniors are in their first year of high school soccer (kids who came out for the team as upperclassmen, often because their friends were on it), while the largest group, around a third, have played all four years. Two seniors, same grade, same line on the roster, with completely different value to the program. When the quadrant above credits "experience," this is the raw material it's measuring.