"TB made every A tournament championship. Yet they still won't be recognized as an A team"
Obviously you do not know what a real A tournament looks like, regarding talent level.
Losing to Express in a B tournament by 10+ goals, doesn't equate on any level being an "A" club. FWIW, Express was WAY below being "elite" this past summer.
And please don't start w. Coach cat sitting the best players.
Are you debating whether he did or whether it made a difference?
TB had a good team last year. Had a few really talented kids. They played well in some B tournaments. I'm sure they will be good this year too. And they could be one of the better teams on LI. But with the exception of Taz and WP, the rest of the teams are being watered down by the emergence of all these new clubs. So each team will have 2 or 3 really good players and then a bunch of good players and then the kids that are new or average. All these teams are creating a lot of turnover and will be harder for each team to hold onto the better players. That's really good for the top 2. But let's remember that other than us the parents and the guys making all the money. No one gives a crap about 5th, 6th or 7th grade lacrosse. And with the new recruiting rules. People care less about 8th or 9th grade lax now too. Maybe just pick a team, have the kids make some friends get better and worry about an academic scholarship.
No argument to much of what you posted - the parents (and I guess clubs) of the top three teams are caught up with their little 'club' that they think they own. The problem is that their club is the AA club, not the A club. No argument that they are the best of the best, but there is a group below their club that is part of the A level - no, those teams are not part of the AA group, but they are they are definitely way better than the B and C teams of which there are way many more of. Were this a locale that was not a hotbed of lacrosse, one could make the argument that there were only a few teams in "A", but this is Long Island, and there are and should be a lot more teams considered A than the handful these folks want to consider. In actuality, they do themselves no favors with how they assess teams - they actual water down the meaningfulness of being an elite team by only considering 5 - 7 teams as their peers. There actually probably are about `20 LI teams that should be considered "A", with the top 5 - 7 they currently call "A" being "AA". Thsi also pretty much true for most, if not all age groups on LI. With regards to tournaments and who has played in which, there are A tournaments and then there are AA tournaments - any AA team should win a general A tournament (or bracket); likewise a non-AA team would have a tough time in a pure AA tournament.
