I think the "too many teams" issue is certainly not unique to Long Island. It exist in Westchester/Fairfield as well and probably in the other "Hot Beds" as well. I am not sure how to control the problem other than you need to be an educated consumer. I happen to agree with the post the focus now seems to be on "winning" tournaments as opposed to developing players. If you are from LI and go to a tournament in Baltimore, you probably spend 12 hours driving to play probably 3 productive hours of lacrosse. Don't you think the kids would be better off having 2 productive 2 hour practices a day with another LOCAL team and then scrimmaging?
It also comes down to the needs to get noticed, hence the drive to MD to play our club and others. If course the kids would be better players having a higher density of training and local scrimmaging. Dom, Petro and all say "doin' my job to find the best players at these tournaments, and have to keep doin' it earlier and earlier to keep my program up at the top" so we all do this thing. I privately wonder when it is going to occur to the D1 coaches that they are watching a lower and lower caliber of play each season with this class and the ones after it. Programs like UVa and JHU will do well so long as they grab the best RELATIVE SCALE players in the 2017 class. My point is that kids after that 2014 and 2015 HS class year era just seem to be on a regressive scale. The landscape in lacrosse keeps changing fast as many IL Preps and other gurus like to note. When will the landscape move to adjust back to truly ELITE club play again? I miss seeing the quality and feel bad that my 2017 and his younger brother won't experience it. It just isn't enough to play a couple of 2 day smash and grabs like Showtime or JR to get high level play back into the blood of these boys.
There are a couple of problems with your theories. Here's the first one, the talent in my opinion is growing in leaps and bounds all over the country. My older son was a 2014. When he started playing travel lax in 7th grade there were 3 or 4 travel teams on LI. All the best players played on those teams. Their second and third team would beat many of todays "A" teams. Not because of lack of talent or skill training, but because of the watering down of the teams. There are 20+ clubs on LI that claim to have an A team. There is much more talent today just too many teams. Kids who are really good players won't play on the second attack line at club ABC they will go to club XYZ and be the starter. Lastly, I don't know about MD, but there are more options today to get intense skill training than there ever was back when my 2014 was playing, and no, it was not happening at the youth level leagues. So I disagree with you, more talent today just dispersed like never before.
