Thank you Sage. I hope to see this thread be a forum for lacrosse parents to download data and make some sense of the landscape for each other. Club owner bashing is funny and popular, but not useful information. I don't know much but learned a lot in the recent weeks and wish someone had told me earlier. I went to one November Baltimore area showcase that I and many other parents concluded was a complete waste of time and money. And that is infuriating to drop $600+ into the till to stand there in 30 degree weather wishing you were somewhere else behind coaches who were wishing they were anywhere else too based on the body language.
For the low cost of $200 you can learn all you need to know about where you stand by going to a prospect day. There will be a lot of great players there and there won't be any club politicians there doing the work for the kids THEY want noticed. You can play or you can't. Yes, a lot of the players who are hyped by major clubs are great players, but some of them are not. And then there are kids from New Hampshire or something like that who are great players who I would guess would be at risk to not have the opportunity to be otherwise noticed while playing among great players. I am sure that every 2017 lacrosse parent could likely tell a line about how some kid on their team got an appointment to Jake Reed, and he is very average but his family is an ATM machine to the club owner or there are private school biases on that club, etc.
If lacrosse is going to be a "real sport", and I don't think it is yet insofar as the maturity of the sport development on the business side of things, a 6'1 190 pound 14 year old lacrosse man-child from Texas or Chicago should be evaluated next to the MIAA kid whose father played at XYZ back in the day. Maybe in the end I won't like the results for my kid on a level playing field, but I like seeing and believing the playing field can be level. At least I have a reality check on what level of D1 my son is a candidate for, and what to expect in terms of timing and commitment if he indeed passes through their process. Obviously not every family can showcase their kids for $10,000 and up a year, but they should not have to.
