The first report in this pair showed who Tennessee's private schools are: old endowed prep academies on one side, a 1970s founding wave on the other. This one asks the blunter question: if you pay more, do you win more? And the answer, it turns out, depends on which team you're watching.
I pulled the 2025–26 figures for every private school I could match to a soccer program (yearly tuition, the share of faculty holding an advanced degree, total enrollment, average ACT) and correlated each against the program's current ELO rating. ELO is the all-time strength rating from this site; r is the Pearson correlation coefficient, running from 0 (no relationship) to ±1 (a tight one). Here is what came out.
This is the headline. For girls, tuition and ELO move together at r = 0.53, a genuinely strong relationship for messy real-world data. For boys, the same tuition figure correlates at 0.36: real, but noticeably looser. The pattern repeats for faculty credentials (girls 0.51, boys 0.31) and for enrollment (girls 0.49, boys 0.32). Whatever resource I throw at it, the girls' side responds more.
I don't think this means private schools care more about girls' soccer. The likelier story is supply. Boys' club soccer in Tennessee is deep and well-funded across income levels, so a public-school boys' team can assemble real talent without a tuition check. The girls' development pipeline is thinner and more pay-to-play, which means the schools that can fund facilities, coaching, and a large enrollment to draw from end up with a sharper advantage on the girls' side. The money isn't buying boys' soccer outright. What it buys is the conditions the girls' game depends on more heavily.
The priciest schools cluster up and to the right, but the scatter is wide: plenty of mid-tuition programs outperform schools charging twice as much. The most expensive school in the state, McCallie at $66,590, fields a strong boys' side; the second-priciest, Baylor at $62,370, has the state's number-two girls' program. But Briarcrest reached a boys' ELO over 1,800 at under a third of that tuition. Money raises the floor; it does not lock in the ceiling.
Faculty credentials surprised me. The share of teachers holding a master's or higher tracks ELO almost as well as tuition does (girls 0.51, boys 0.31), and the two are clearly related, since the schools that can pay for credentialed teachers are usually the same ones that can pay for everything else. It is less a finding about teaching than a second fingerprint of the same underlying thing: institutional resources. But it is a cleaner, less crude proxy for "this is a well-run, well-funded school" than the tuition sticker alone.
Not everything I tried held up, and the misses are worth stating plainly. Test scores were weak. Average ACT tracked ELO loosely (girls 0.38, boys 0.21), and the SAT sample was both small and noisy: barely a dozen schools report it, so I'm not putting any weight on it. Selectivity barely registered: a school's acceptance rate correlated with ELO at around −0.17, the expected direction (more selective, slightly better) but far too weak to lean on. And the Socioeconomic Index that drove the first report mostly doesn't apply here: private schools draw students from across a metro area, so the single ZIP code their building sits in says little about who actually enrolls. Only nine private programs even had a usable SEI, so I left it out rather than over-read nine dots.
The honest summary: among the things I could measure, money and the size that money buys are what move the needle, and they move the girls' needle most. Everything else is either a restatement of money or too thin to trust.
School metrics (yearly tuition, share of faculty with an advanced degree, enrollment, average ACT/SAT, acceptance rate) were parsed from PrivateSchoolReview's 2025-26 statewide directory pages and matched to our soccer programs by name and city (97 private programs matched). Enrollment and SEI are cross-checked against the NCES Private School Universe Survey and U.S. Census ACS.
For each matched school we took its latest value of each metric and computed the Pearson correlation (r) against its current ELO, separately for boys and girls. r runs from 0 (no relationship) to ±1 (a tight one); each chart shows its own sample size (n), which varies by metric because not every school reports every field.