Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
football, for the most part, is not as skilled as lacrosse. if your a 5'6" 130# 6th grader in football your on either the offense or defensive line. run into the kid in front of you and take up as much room as possible, and he's very successful. Put a 4'10 85# 6th grade kid against the same 5' 10" kid in lacrosse and the big kid is left in the dust. Add stick skills and awareness to the smaller kid and it's a total wash. Put the same 4'10" kid against an equally skilled 5'5" 95# 8th grader and bad things are going to happen.


Unfortunately some parents cannot face the fact that their kid is unable to compete against his own age cohorts, so they hold the kid back. The irony is they run around claiming parents and kids who are younger need to man up and deal with it, yet they do not expect their kids to man up against children their own age so they have to play with and take classes with younger kids.

I would have some sympathy if the holdbacks were unusually small compared to players of the same age or had learning difficulties instead of pushy parents.


Even more unfortunate is it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy when you keep seeing kids who are reclassified getting the spots. If you were not a strong 2016, go 2017. If not a strong 2017, go 2018...and so on. Do college lcarosse coaches really believe the Lorenzo's Oil is to get a kid a year older in their early 20s ?!? Frankly, give me the kid with the stones who plays up or takes a varsity spot as a 14 year old trying out against 16 year old classmates. I think back to when I did sports as a kid and nothing was more admired in my generation over playing up. Playing down in that era would have been laughed at. I don't know where this sport went so wrong, but this epidemic is a pretty pathetic one. I have a work colleague who has a son being recruited by mid-level D1 recruit. The way it works in basketball is pretty simple. Jungle rules, you get to go to AAU tournaments and play. Then you can get invited direct to camps from there, then you play against the best of the best. You can play or you get made and everyone can see it. Lacrosse seems to avoid at all costs getting the best of the best together in my opinion. My son's club has a lot of mid level D1 commits who can hide away as contributors on a great club team. The preppy system seems to like it this way, and the club owners love the PR attached to commit lists. Seems to be all they care about.