Result of yesterday’s Game of the Day:
Ladue Horton Watkins (Mo.) 4, St. Louis Visitation Academy (M0.) 2
Today’s Game of the Day:
St. Louis Lutheran South (Mo.) at Ballwin Parkway West (Mo.), 4:15 p.m. CDT
It’s a light schedule, nationally, but this could be a competitive matchup as the Lancers and Longhorns enter the season with optimism.
This website is going to try something new this year: a weekly toteboard of the nation’s leading goal-scorers. We did a one-off last year when enough people asked who was leading the nation in goal-scoring.
Lots of newspapers around the country, and their writers, are committed to good record-keeping. Perhaps not as detailed as Jim Davis’ ledger books in his Trentonian office, but they’re enough to be able to compile a pretty good list of national goal-scoring leaders.
I thought that, if things went well, we could have top assist-makers as well as goalkeeper saves, shutouts, and possibly goals-against averages, thanks to my network of journalists.
But there was one significant hurdle: if we were able to get comprehensive goal-scoring numbers and assist numbers, how would we combine them?
Very few newspapers compile records for assists, much less assign them point values relative to goals when it comes to determining an all-round scoring champion.
Chip Rogers, the guru of NCAA field hockey statistics, found himself one time having to change his entire records tabulation system to assign two points per goal and one per assist for the purposes of determining an overall scoring champion. It had been one point per goal and one point per assist until the change was made back in the early 90s, if I recall correctly.
Having grown up in the era of Wayne Gretzky, where an assist was equally important to a goal, I always used the one-point-per-goal, one-point-per-assist method. There was a method to the madness: when you added a player’s goals and assists, you know how many goals the player was responsible for in a particular year.
So, how does a list like this get started? Well, aside from the hard-working writers across America, we also get input from you, the gentle reader. Just email us here at topofthecircle@gmail.com if you see someone missing from our weekly lists, and let me know who to contact to confirm the number.
So, as a down-payment to what we think is going to be a pretty good enterprise, let’s look back a few years at the last few national goal-scoring champions (that we know of):
2006: Kaitlyn Hiltz, Virginia Beach Frank W. Cox (Va.) 50
2005: Kelly Fitzpatrick, Palmyra (Pa.), 66
2004: Amie Survilla, Mountain Top Crestwood (Pa.), 64
2003: Shaun Banta, Voorhees Eastern (N.J.) 49
2002:
2001: Tiffany Marsh, Marathon (N.Y.), 57
2000: Erica LeBar, Newark (Del.) and Colleen Barbieri, Centereach (N.Y.), 42
1999:
1998:
1997:
1996: Carla Tagliente, Marathon (N.Y.), 51
1995: Kim Miller, Frank W. Cox (Va.) 63
1994: Michelle Vizzuso, North Caldwell West Essex (N.J.) 69
1993: Melissa Pasnaci, Miller Place (N.Y.), 60
1992: Diane DeMiro, North Caldwell West Essex (N.J.), 56
1991: Denise Nasca, Centereach (N.Y.), 56
1990: Shelley Parsons, Waterfall Forbes Road (Pa.), 50
1989:
1988:
1987: Kris Fillat, San Diego Serra (Calif.), 53
1986: Dana Fuchs, Centereach (N.Y.), 57
1985: Hope Sanborn, Walpole (Mass.) and Sharon Landau, Mamaroneck Rye Neck (N.Y.), 53
1984: Michelle Vowell, Garden Grove Santiago (N.Y.), 56
1983: Tracey Fuchs, Centereach (N.Y.) 82
TopOfTheCircle.com 
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