Lawsuits happen all of the time - unless you're living under a rock, our society is very litigious, to the point that personal responsibility is almost passe! The threshold will be when a lawsuit or series of lawsuits comes where multiple parties - think club, tournament, locale, AND USL, etc - are all party to the suit, and they find for the plaintiff with damages for a significant amount where an age difference is a significant contributing fact in the case. That will be when the insurance carriers dictate that this practice will stop - no one will be able to get reasonable coverage without mitigating the risk, which means age-based play only. And while most on BOTC advocate for that need to only be for pre-HS ages, the reality is that if age-based play comes about via the insurance side of things, they will insist upon that for all ages. Too many tournaments and/or organizations have both pre-HS and HS ages brackets and it will be simpler for one type of insurance policy for all levels of play.[/quote]

How could any reasonable parent argue with that quote.[/quote]

I will try.... oh, never mind, you said reasonable and in that case I do not qualify.

But the point is that if it is in fact a grade based tournament and the older kid is in the correct grade I am not sure USLacrosse and even the others would be liable. if they knowingly allowed older aged kids maybe but I am not sure what additional exposure they would have.

PAL still have combined grade leagues (3rd/4th or 5th/6th) so how would that be any different than a 5th grade tourney having 5th grade players that have repeated a year?

there are no simple fixes to this [/quote]

"One day, in the very near future, lacrosse will be an age based youth sport - and 5 minutes after that happens there will be parents on this site saying that youth lacrosse needs to have weight and height limits because it just isn't safe "my kid is XXXXX and they mature late and he can't compete with those 10 year old XXXXXXX kids already in puberty", and about a year later people will be saying it needs to be split by kids born in the first half of the year and kids born in the second half of the year because the January and February kids are just to big and strong to compete with. I know I am being snarky but the point is people will always complain no matter what." While snarky, it ignores the concepts of reasonable and feasible - age-based play is both reasonable and feasible. Do you know how I know this? Because EVERY.OTHER.SPORT.HAS.ALREADY.DONE.IT!!