Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
If the response to "Here's the only real data-driven difference in athletics experience that ML and Hawks dads are looking at" (D1 recruiting success) leads you to call the poster drunk, LOL the post maybe hit close to home. That post brings up some interesting and booooooooo boring concepts like that maybe ML and Hawks kids don't have more fun at HS, don't have happier marriages, and don't make more money than some random kid playing at Greene Turtle or FCA AAA.

ML and Hawks are fantastic destinations for 45-50 of the country's top athletes. But it's a good straw man type argument that the rest of the 200? kids playing HoCo AA, AAA and Elite ball have a decent chance of living out those dreams too at a smaller stadium or a new program. Most of those kids parents can pick up a big chunk of college costs anyway, because it's MD lax parents.

Describing that post as "data-driven" is a massive stretch; it was almost entirely anecdotal. If the point was that it's not crazy for lax dads to be arguing on this forum because being on a top team guarantees elite college admission, then at a minimum the author would need to figure out how many kids playing for elite teams when they're 11 are still on those teams when they're 18. From what I've seen, the rosters turn over significantly as the kids age.

The author also notably name-dropped Harvard. Okay, but Hawks post 7 years of commits online an in that time they have sent more players to, for example, Furman (3) than all Ivy League schools combined (2). MadLax seems to do much better on that measure, but that suggests that, all else equal, when it comes to getting into super-elite colleges growing up in McLean with parents who can send you to elite prep schools may matter more than lacrosse.

Look, this isn't to criticize Hawks or MadLax -- they're both great programs and should be proud of their success (or Furman, which I'm sure is a great option for lots of kids, despite the OP disparaging small schools) -- but if your kid's 6th grade sports team placement, let alone your propensity to talk bout it on message boards, is a big part of your college admissions planning, well, I hope you have a plan B.

You may be forgetting that Cornell is in the Ivy League, and that Georgetown, UVa, Army, Navy, Air Force, Carolina, Hopkins, Lehigh, Lafayette, and others on that list are pretty tough schools to get into — and those Big 10 schools are pretty good too — but I understand your point. The best thing to be is be a gamer who fits the academic profile. Even better, hit the books at a great school and you won't have to worry about anything.

The biggest thing the better teams offer are the opportunity to practice and compete against great players. If you're a beast and you spend practices tooling on weaker players then why wouldn't you try to make the jump?