None of it is cheating - bending the rules YES, cheating NO
These parents do it simply to get the child into a school they would not otherwise be able to attend.
Think about it-- 4 years in CHSAA mostly riding the pines behind an upperclassman Finally senior year you get to play but your league has only teams in it. 50/50 chance of a CHSAA championship. No arguements over brackets and seeding when there are only two teams. Instead, you travel the northeast for a regular season of out of conference friendlies which mean nothing.
You then get to Duke only to ride the pines again or maybe if you are truly good you see the field. NONE of your classmates care. The attendence is tiny despite the strong performance of the team. Heck Duke football (normally a joke - yes they were good this year) draws tens of thousands of fans but lacrosse less than 1,000 for most home games
Five/Six years later your son graduates with a Duke degree thanks to your willingess and resources to bend the rules. I do not see a problem with this - BRAVO
I don't see any rules being bent let alone broken. What rules? Free will baby.
I guess in the above scenario it would have made zero sense to attend a D3 school with a better academic pedigree. The benefits are plenty, play a lot as a freshman, maybe start your last three years, save the extra $30-50k. By the way, while the commitment is heavy in D3 it is not nearly the year round full-time job lacrosse has become at a top D1 program. Hence your student will be able to spend far more time on academics. Which in the end is the very reason we all do this, to get our kids the best education, Right??? Or perhaps it's just the crazy parents that have to say "Johnny is going D1". On the other end of spectrum you have the kid that has great grades and only gets offers from some of the more obscure D1 programs, schools that the student could have gained acceptance to without lacrosse. As a parent, how do you allow this? It's like playing down academically just for lacrosse...
