I hope you had a wonderful holiday. Thanks again for your support of the World Series of Youth Lacrosse. We look forward to your participation in what is shaping up to be a very strong regional qualifier round throughout the country.
Over the past few months we have received very helpful feedback from each of you that we have used and will continue to use to make sure we provide the most fun, safe and fair format for all of your players and the rest of the WSYL participants. One particular bit of feedback that we often receive relates to the merits of enforcing both age- and grade-based restrictions on player eligibility. From the outset of WSYL’s conception, our intention was to create a purely aged based event. At the request of participating teams in our inaugural year we added the grade restriction to keep teams together. We are finding that, as we grow and try to be more inclusive, the grade restriction is prohibiting a number of age eligible players from competing in this special event. Age and grade conventions can vary drastically from state to state and region to region, so this restriction can negatively impact some teams more than others based solely on the school districts of their players. For these reasons we have decided to drop the 2021 graduating year restriction in lieu of an age-based-only cutoff (born on or after 5/1/2002). We will continue to require birth certificates for all players to make sure that this rule is strictly enforced. We feel that this slight modification should make the eligibility rules the most fair and transparent for all participants not only for all of the U.S. teams, but also for the international participants, which follow entirely different conventions altogether.
While it likely that this modification will have no impact for most of you, please let us know if you have any questions or would like to discuss further.
We look forward to seeing you in April! Happy New Year!
