Originally Posted by Anonymous
Same old garbage on this forum on all threads. Tell it to HoCo. Lacrosse: Derek Ludlow - Masters & Grand Masters - 410-313-4706 dludlow@howardcountymd.gov

This isn't advocating either way but soccer made a drastic and immediate change back to age based a few years ago and participation dropped immediately and hasn't recovered. They found parents overwhelmingly sought activities where their kids could play with classmates. The immediate change to calendar year birth date broke up long standing teams and those kids moved on from soccer and have not come back to the sport yet.

I'm not particularly happy about my kid's team having to compete against teams with rosters compositions of 50% and more kids born prior to 9/1 and 75% before 1/1 but it's hard to complain when his team's roster has 4 or 5 summer birthday kids too. And I wonder how I'd feel if a nearby club disbanded and the roster gained a few more displacing even more of the younger birthdays. They'd be better but i'd be even more of a hypocrite.


Soccer drop has absolutely nothing to do with grade base, NOTHING.. All sports besides two have had a drop in numbers. Main problem with drop is that club soccer is taking over in many areas and cost along with other factors, none to do with garde base.

The age thing that soccer did was change from school calendar age Sept 1 to Jan 1 birth year for all programs like the rest of world does. They gave programs two years to clean the date up. Nothing to do with grade. I see same thing happening in lacrosse with cost and clubs . Club explosion has hurt many rec programs, soccer and lacrosse.

Soccer has a strict age requirement with cards at elite level and has had that for years. The elite level players and the other 5 million soccer players can figure out how to go by age in USA .