It's not backbone. Age cards, enforcement, etc. takes manpower, time, money, etc. Look at the NCAA. It is hard for them to investigate/enforce all the rules.
Unfortunately, college coaches want to look at Rising 9th graders, so there is no push to go back to age based youth lacrosse (and many obviously support grade based because it helps with recruiting).
Its called integrity. Coaches can email in a list of players to USALAX with photos. An ID card is issued with the photo. Could take 15 min per team and interns do it. Not hard at all. It actually can be done while getting your USALAX number.
Play in year you were born, play up, but not play down. Its that easy. Don't care if you are going to re-class or PG you play in the year you were born. Youth Soccer and Men's League does it. There are over 3 Million registered youth soccer players compared to approximately 750,000 in youth lacrosse.
It not that they can't do it, they dont want to do it! US LAX doesn't have the backbone to stand up to the top clubs. Soccer has had the picture ID in place forever. I'm in my 40's and grew up playing soccer, we had the picture ID's when I was young, early 80's young.
Either US LAX doesn't want to enforce rules, or they aren't intelligent enough to incorporate age groups.
US Lacrosse office is located at Homewood Field on the campus of JHU. Crabs are in bed with JHU. JHU one of the biggest offenders of early recruiting, mostly holdbacks and re-class kids. Other Big 10 and ACC programs are also offenders. Is the picture getting clearer now??? These schools want the oldest most mature "freshman" they can get. When you are getting 20 year olds instead of 17and 18 year olds in as freshman, it is a huge advantage, this is why the Coaches recruit them.
Yes, college coaches, all things being equal, want the 20 year old frosh over the 18 year old. But a move towards age based youth competition does not stop the college coach from doing this. The double hold backs can still happen, and these boys can still enter college at 20 if they choose to. They will just be playing club lacrosse vs boys born in their same year. With earlier and earlier recruiting no one on this site has ever offered a logical explanation as to why coaches wouldn't prefer age based for evaluation purposes. If I am looking to offer a rising 9th grader after watching him all summer, and the kid is 16, I would rather he have played vs only 16 year old. Then I know he is good. But watching him dominate teams made up of mostly 14 year olds. This tells me far less, and as such, my offer is riskier. I would think the club coaches would prefer it as well. I think they get more kids and have more teams with an age based system. This means more money. Yes, many of these teams will be B teams - oh my god, the dreaded B team - but more families I think would sign there kids up for summer lacrosse in an age based world.
