I am a parent of a 2017 player, and I am as disgusted frustrated as many others on this early recruiting process. Lacrosse is an expensive sport, and club dues for most of us run $2K to $5K per annum before any apparel or travel expenses to tournaments. I have heard some horror stories of club does running over $10K a year and really have no idea if that is true...maybe another poster could take that one. Add a private school tuition and it is a lot more. It should be sufficient to play for a good club and play competitive high school.
I am impressed and a bit jealous that on LI you have so many top flight public school teams and a very competitive league unlike anywhere else for public schools.
But everyone has the additional problem of too much is never enough with the showcases. As a parent, I could easily fill a dozen weekends with camps and showcases and club owners and coaches are tied to encouraging this to the kids to get noticed. A dozen more things at another $400 to $700 for 1.5 to 3 days of lacrosse to get noticed. If your kid is a Turtle or an LI Express or a Crab, is this really needed? Just me asking if there is anything empirical to validate the showcase business model. For a California kid, I get it that they would flock to these constantly. Is it worth it for a LI or MIAA school kid do that?
I took our son to our first two "prospect" days at universities in the recent weeks and have to say this does it for me without anyone's advice. For $200 or so a try, you can go to a school you are targeting for prospect day and at that day there will be a range of coaches from other schools that are D1 non power ranked to D3. That makes sense to me that the NCAA coaches know that a coach from a D3 school is not taking dinner bread from a UVa or a UPenn, so let the kids perform all day long in front of the audience they and the families want with the full attention of the coaches all day long. We have all been at showcases where the coaches have no choice but to move their lawn chairs around at each halftime to see every team or player, and then it becomes a sordid lottery whether or not your kid is on the field or is in a competitive game when the coaches they want to impress are watching. At one Fall tournament my son's team went up 6-0 quickly and the coaches filed out quickly and that is understandable...hard to evaluate kids beating up on a lesser team.
I think these prospect days are a big game changer. Already we have been in touch with two of our top choices and the coaches have each corresponded with us directly about the recruiting process. That is more than we had three weeks ago waiting on the club owner to arbitrate what players he wanted to showcase which sadly involves a lot of politics and nonsense that fills this thread up with repeat complaints. Long live prospect days.
Excellent post and something that should be cross-posted onto the college forum. BOTC agrees with your assertion that a year of private High School, combined with the costs of a full season of lacrosse and travel can certainly be in the $20,000-$25,000 range which begs the question : exactly how much scholarship money do you actually expect lacrosse to deliver for you?
Your last paragraph is extremely compelling. Lacrosse parents are now finding out what soccer parents discovered a decade back. Parents can actually control their child's recruiting cycle with carefully planning showcase days and targeting those college prospect days where they know that their student-athlete's target coaches are in attendance. While team showcasing will always have value, the fact is that parents should no longer be depending on the club coach to determine the trajectory of their child's recruiting arc.
