Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
There is only one thing about age verification and standards that we as parents should care about, and that is safety. The competitive advantage of kids who may be a year older is a sportsmanship debate but one that belongs low on the ladder. The indignation should be that it is unsafe and indefensible to put small for age kids out there with older/bigger kids playing down a year due to the school year math. Best of all worlds is for parents of smaller kids to have the limited discretion to put their kid out with kids same age who are bigger. No s&*# some kids are big for their age. That doesn't argue a point or validly diminish my point. 99% of us should not give a hoot about early recruiting because it won't be in play for our kids. But 100% of us as parents should agree our first duty is for kids to be safe. Why should a lacrosse parent really care about the sport of lacrosse? I don't know if I speak for everyone, but I won't have much if any interest in following lacrosse with much interest after my kids are done playing. Most of us would not stop the TV on a college lacrosse game if not for our kids playing the game and stoking some casual and temporary interest in it for the time being. We are failing to do that. We are failing the kids. We are basically rolling over and playing dead for club owners who would otherwise be middle school p.e. teachers who happened to be at the confluence of the easiest buck on earth to do these events.


Very well said. One of the reasons that parents of the holdbacks don't understand the frustration is that their kids are not at risk.


There is a market for kids that want to play with and against the best kids of their graduation year regardless of how old they are. There are some club owners who are serving that market. My us lacrosse qualifying u13 son plays with 15 year olds on his middle school team in the spring. I am fine with him playing against 15 year olds in the summer. The websites of the tournaments he is going to state that the AA 2020 division is not for most U13 teams and they have A and B divisions for the other teams. There is no cheating. There simply is no age requirement.

One responsibility of a tournament director is to match like teams. If a tournament director is misrepresenting or not enforcing the divisions or otherwise doing a poor job of ensuring a good experience for all the teams that come than the solution is to not go to those tournaments.

There is no need for some sort of age police. There is a need for club directors to make sure they are going to well run tournaments where there kids will be safe. Problems arise when the club directors try to save money by going to cheaper tournaments or find it easier to say that the other teams are cheating than to say that they should be playing in a lower division or the other teams were just better.


That's right, there's no need for age police because we can count on the club and tournament directors to start putting safety above dollars. They are going to miraculously arrive at that conclusion and all will be right. Astoundingly naive!!