High school rankings are inherently controversial. Every coach, parent, and fan has an opinion — and they're often shaped by the teams they've seen play. The "eye test" is real, but it's also subjective.
We wanted something different: a system that looks only at game results and lets the math speak for itself. No voting, no bias, no preseason hype. Just outcomes.
The result is a model built on one core question:
That number is called the Adjusted Efficiency Margin (AdjEM), and it's the foundation of every ranking on this site.
AdjEM stands for Adjusted Efficiency Margin. Think of it as a team's "true strength" score, measured in goals.
A team with an AdjEM of +4.2 is expected to beat a perfectly average team by about 4 goals. A team at -1.5 would lose to that same average team by about 1 or 2.
The key word is adjusted. Raw point differential doesn't cut it — beating a weak team by a wide margin shouldn't count the same as beating the #1 team by a slim one. AdjEM accounts for who you played and how you performed relative to expectation.
Home teams have a built-in edge — familiar surroundings, crowd support, no travel fatigue. The model accounts for this by subtracting a fixed home-advantage value from the home team's score before computing the margin of victory.
For Girls Lacrosse, we subtract 0.85 goals from the home team's score. So if a home team wins 9–6, the model treats the effective margin as 2.15 goals rather than 3.
This ensures that a dominant home performance and a dominant road performance are evaluated fairly, and teams aren't rewarded simply for playing more games at home.
Here's where it gets interesting. Every team's rating depends on the strength of the teams they've played — but those teams' strengths depend on their opponents, and so on. It's an interconnected web.
To untangle it, the model runs 50 iterations. In the first pass, every team starts at zero and ratings are based on raw results. In the second pass, those initial ratings inform a better picture of opponent strength. By the 50th pass, the ratings have stabilized into something meaningful.
This is why schedule matters so much. A team that beats three Top 20 opponents earns more credit than a team that runs up the score against weaker competition — even if their raw record looks identical.
Winning big matters — but only up to a point. The model limits how much credit a blowout is worth so that teams can't game the rankings by running up the score.
For Girls Lacrosse, the model uses a hard cap on margin of victory at 10 goals. Any margin beyond 10 is simply ignored.
Whether you win by 10 or by 30, the model sees the same result. This keeps the focus on winning convincingly rather than running up the score.
This means the model rewards convincing victories without letting teams inflate their rating by pouring it on late in a lopsided game.
The Contender's win is worth far more because the model recognizes the difficulty of the opponent. That's the power of combining strength of schedule with margin controls.