Rankings Champions

RIA Champions Awards

What Are the RIA Awards?

The GotSport RIA Awards recognize the top-performing youth soccer teams in the nation. Named in honor of Ria Owen Thomas, one of the original architects behind America’s first national youth soccer rankings, the awards celebrate a legacy of data-driven excellence dating back to 1999.

Each year, the RIA Awards highlight the GotSport Ranking Champions, the boys’ and girls’ teams from U10 through U19 who earned the highest national rankings over the full calendar year. Powered by thousands of league and tournament results across the country, the awards shine a spotlight on the teams that consistently rose to the top.

The RIA Awards are a prestigious honor, recognizing the nation’s most accomplished youth teams for a year of exceptional performance.

How It Started

The RIA Awards trace their roots back to 1999, when Ria Owen Thomas helped create the first national ranking system for youth soccer teams in the United States. At a time when youth soccer lacked a unified way to measure competitive performance across leagues and tournaments, Ria worked to build a rankings model that brought consistency, transparency, and credibility to the sport.

Her early work laid the foundation for what became the GotSport national rankings, now powered by data from thousands of competitions nationwide. As the rankings evolved, so did the desire to spotlight the teams who consistently rose to the top over an entire year of competition.

What began as a groundbreaking effort to organize youth soccer data has grown into the RIA Awards—an annual celebration honoring the nation’s top-performing boys’ and girls’ teams and the legacy of the person who helped make it possible.