Sounds a lot like the soccer landscape in SoCal. The elite clubs like Surf, Blues, Slammers get elite talent regardless of which coach is assigned. The next tier clubs get girls with high ceilings and/or average athleticism with excellent fundamentals, and coaching is what keeps them knocking on the door for the "super brackets" that everyone is striving to get accepted into for recruiting purposes.
I am hopeful that some of the better Western teams (Mad Dog West Elite, Team 180, Tenacity, Grit Dallas etc) can make more trips out East and have some success so that they might change the perception a little about Western lacrosse, and also get them an occasional invite to play against the M&D Black/Hero's/YJ/Monster (ie top 10) caliber teams. Right now it seems the best we typically gain access to is the top 10-20 teams, which is still awesome and significantly better than what we routinely see west of the Mississippi. The problem is that historically, other than the handful of Western teams mentioned above, there is not much depth, so typically when an average Western team comes out it either gets smoked or is placed in a very weak bracket.
