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.
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]
The liability will be couched in the use of a grade-base system - by virtue of using grades, USL, along with all of the other more direct parties, will have created an inherently unsafe and/or dangerous situation whereby players of disparate ages are playing against each other in a full contact sport. Further, despite USL age guidelines, there is no attempt to govern these guidelines, and any players who are more than one year above age for their grade are already in violation of the guidelines. And from practical application, no one (!) at any level attempts to validate even players' grade levels - not teams, not tournaments, not the USL. There are players playing down 2 years from their 'normal on-age' level based upon the proclamation that they "intend to" do a PG year![/quote]
Regarding town rec leagues in the spring (on LI they call this "PAL"), they will often have to combine years due to lower numbers and maybe just past practice and culture. Under an age based system, they can use a dual birth year set up, similar to what hockey does at many levels. The main point, though, is disclosure. When you sign your kid up and/or bring him to a game/tournament, you know the ages of the kids he is going up against. The parent can then make an informed choice. In the present system, the parent has no idea how old the other kids are.
