When a freshman shows up to tryouts, the program is making a four-year bet. Most of those bets don't pay off, not because the kids aren't good, but because they don't stay. I tracked every player from season to season and school to school, which lets me ask two questions a roster sheet can't: how many freshmen actually make it to senior year, and where do the players who switch schools end up?
About half of all freshmen are still with their program as seniors; the rest drift away, get cut, or move on. And it matters: the programs that hold onto their freshmen reach a clearly higher ceiling than the ones with a revolving door, and the relationship is real, not faint. Growing a class up together, the same group of players maturing side by side in one coach's system, turns out to be one of the more dependable ways to build a strong program. Use the toggle above to see how boys and girls differ, and click any bar to see exactly which programs sit in that band.
Here's the surprise. The programs pulling in the most players are not, mostly, the private schools you'd expect. They're brand-new suburban public schools like Green Hill, Rockvale, and Battle Creek, which opened their doors and absorbed players from the schools they rezoned. Private schools show up among the importers (Baylor is there), but they're barely over-represented overall: private programs are 13% of transfer destinations against 11% of all programs. "Poaching" in Tennessee soccer is far more a story of where new schools get built than of tuition. Bringing players in does track with winning, but more loosely than growing your own does: the pull of a transfer class is real, yet the steadier signal in the data is simply keeping the freshmen you start with.
One last thing I couldn't resist. Tracking players by name surfaced how often soccer runs in families: I count roughly sets of likely twins (same rare surname, same graduation year) and trios or larger. The cleanest example is at South Doyle, where the Straussfogel brothers Finneas and Jude graduate together in 2026 with older brother Liam having come through before them. A few more below. This is for fun, matched by name, so take the big clusters with a grain of salt.