That is very misleading. Madlax is based in NoVa but is headquartered less than 4 miles from the Maryland border. It is a DMV club attracting from Va, DC and MD. And BTW, the holdback phenomenon is a DMV thing on all sides. If you add it all up over the preps these kids attend on both sides of the Potomac the holdback numbers are jarring. There are kids by the dozen playing grade based club for Madlax or Crabs that have done 8th grade twice at Bullis, Landon or Mater Dei (née Mater Delay). A decent percentage of those same kids live on the Virginia side. Those school buses leaving Tysons every morning for Landon, Bullis and Georgetown Prep are full. And they are full of kids who repeat a grade to play a certain sport we are also debating here. It is a minority of kids in the DMV playing high level club lacrosse who are on age. In Baltimore with the pre-first year as nearly a given nearly 100% of prep kids there are a year old for their grade.
I am from the area. I am informed. I have kids who play club, I had an on age kid at one of these schools and I am not making any of this up. I'm also not going to take any Madlax or Crabs defiant challenges to name names because all this is talk and not facts. I won't play on the kids. I'm embarrassed to be a part of a youth sports community this contaminated by serial lying and defiance. Let's just face it this way; there's no age rules in club lacrosse and there are people who can afford to game it for an advantage.
"In Baltimore with the pre-first year as nearly a given nearly 100% of prep kids there are a year old for their grade"
Not accurate. It's nowhere near 100% in Balt. Don't get me wrong it's a higher percentage than other areas. The pre-first is largely a function of summer birthday kids of kids that start at prep schools in elementary school. It is close 100% of those particular kids. Maybe 50-50 for spring bdays. But that's an uber-rich segment - ie paying 25K/yr starting w/ a pre-first. That group doesn't represent all of the lax playing kids in the area. For public school kids hold-backs are few and far between. For Catholics it might be around 20%. Then there's the handful of kids that repeat 8th when they transfer into some of these schools. This isn't to justify or say it's not a problem. But saying it's nearly 100% is false.
