Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
To the fool that wrote, “there is no precedent for a safety outcry” and then again wrote, “If a minority number of your customers hate your product, but stop in everyday to buy it anyway, is there precedent for change”… I would suggest you look up the meaning of the word precedent and then go and find me another contact sport (at the youth level) that doesn’t have some limitation or control for size and/or age. Do you think that was always the case?

Here are a few tips for you moving forward - a) don’t use words you don’t really understand the meaning of and b) don’t cite examples of things that actually argue against your point.

Business is business and this whole thing is real $ for the people that run it. So, no - it won’t change overnight. That doesn’t mean that consumers of the product (with as much right to their opinion as you have to yours) shouldn’t make the case for why there is a better path forward. Parents of left-back kids exploit a system that is deliberately set up to be exploited. Sorry, but Jr. is just older than his opponents, he is greatly advantaged by that fact and the left-back parents know this is true. Rationalize away!


Sorry, in your over-thinking and under-explaining, you forgot to cite the precedent. Oh, and it would be, "for which you don't understand the meaning", or some other correctly-written variation. You wouldn't finish that thought with a preposition.
You would make a better case if you would just concede that the grade-based system has certain flaws, rather than essentially accusing the majority of private school parents with some type of mass exploitation. Seriously, most elementary school parents, whether new to the game or not, are not putting much thought into the system at time of registration; if their kid is in 3rd grade, they are probably compelled to check off 3rd grade! Sure, there are those parents of older middle school kids that are smart enough to realize they could play their kid up, probably to his benefit developmentally, but those folks aren't the baseline for all kids that are in a different school curriculum. Just comes off as complaining when you start criticizing a large share of the market base, rather than the leagues that control the rules. At the end of the day, the people that you criticize would sign up legally under any rule without much fanfare, but folks like you would just find another reason to whine and complain, so who gives a crap anyway. Keep crying, but don't forget to send that check in, please.



The precedent is all the other youth contact sports that have limitations/controls around age. Sorry - next time I'll use a spoon.


At the rec levels, youth lacrosse has always had 2 year spreads, because rural areas can't sustain a team for every birth year. It's just not big enough of a sport to use the same model as youth football, where you have millions of participants. Clubs are able to essentially put together one, or sometimes two, teams per (grad) year, because private clubs draw kids from many communities. If you changed club to birth year, it would still be a different system than recreation councils can sustain. The complaint with the U system at rec, is whenever a team wins at the B level, everyone complains it is an A team playing down, which is about as nauseating as the holdback argument.



3 points:

1. maybe you're not involved in with youth football of late, but the numbers there are dwindling. Fielding a team for a 1-year age group is getting harder and harder outside of the biggest towns. As an example of the decline, Massapequa used to have a whole slew of intra-town teams above and beyond their travel teams at all/many age levels. As I understand it, now they only have the travel team.

2. USL already addressed the issue of rural/non-lacrosse hotbed areas by allowing teams to have 2-year spreads - other mature youth sports (including football) already do this via allowance for boys to play up but never down from a designated age group. (https://www.uslacrosse.org/sites/de.../player-segmentation-task-force-recs.pdf)

3. In addition to the age-based system being implemented, as has been mentioned, a clearer skill designation system should also be implemented. With an age-based system, this would be much easier to do. Teams at the edge of any band of skill designation will always be a point of contention, but you need a better system to start with.