There are legitimate reasons to start a child with a summer birthday a year later. The problem with the current cutoff date is it is close to a school year cutoff date but not inclusive enough that it is enforceable. The reality is that most kids want to play with their friends and most of their friends are in their grade. Making teams grade based with a maximum age makes sense. Using a 12/31 cutoff and not making any effort to make it grade based makes sense. Using at 9/1 date as a proxy for grade based leads to a system where everyone decides to go grade based instead and then you have no maximum age and extreme hold backs have way too much advantage. We have ended up with the worst of both options.
