Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Oh so Quiet...

What would you like to talk about?


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!


As to liability issues, assumption of risk is part of the analysis. At present, parents are putting their kids on the field while having no idea how old (or young) their opponents are. So it would be hard to defend these claims with an assumption of the risk defense. There is never any disclosure as to the age of the opponents or those participating in an event. Moreover, as has already been mentioned, no one in travel lacrosse - not clubs, not tournaments - requests verification of grade or age. This appears to be negligent in and of itself. No one exchanges rosters. There are no game sheets. Youth lacrosse tournaments are completely lawless and quite seriously unlike any other youth sporting event I have ever known.

Moreover, the toxic environments on sidelines negatively affects parent's prospective of the legitimacy and transparency of the competition. Everyone just assumes that a big, fast and skilled kid must be years older, when sometimes he really isn't.

Something is wrong with a sport when teams are supposed to be at the same level, grade-wise, but almost to a man one team is bigger than the other. This NEVER happens in age based sports. You can travel up and down the east coast with your kid playing soccer, hockey and baseball, and teams from every state will have basically the same average size as every other team. Some teams will have some freakishly big kids, but its balanced out by the small kids on the team. And everyone is fine with the freakishly big kid because they know his birth certificate is on file with the national (or state) organization, his name is on the roster submitted to same, and it would be easy to determine if cheating were involved.

Youth sports certainly has a win-at-all-costs side to it, but you would be surprised at how little cheating really occurs when everyone has confidence that the rules are being followed by everyone and that there are controls in place making it likely that cheaters will be caught. Stated differently, coaches and parents that cheat in youth sports in issues of eligibility really don't want to do it. They just think they have to in order to balance out cheating done by others. Left confident that no one else cheats, coaches and parents rarely do.


Yawn...... no one cares.



The problem is that there is no enforcement because there is not incentive for that enforcement. If USL would not allow players on the national teams or such if they played in tournaments or leagues that are non-sanctioned and there was a desire to play on these teams, then there could be enforcement. They could require cards with birth year and current grade, backed up with transcript, or just move it to birth year teams like hockey and soccer.[/quote]

I may be wrong but the sports that have age requirements as mentioned in the original post are typically run by non-profit organizations with a board of directors and policies for which they adhere to. Other than PAL which, for most towns, is not super competitive, lacrosse is a for profit sport and the Directors are not a board and little to no governance. Don't get me wrong, the directors are smart business men who saw an opportunity and capitalized on it. Begrudge them all you want but the rules will not change until serious injuries take place and are well publicized. I don't think anyone really wants that.