Originally Posted by Anonymous
Maybe it is a Canadian thing. The APEX teams from Canada who played this past weekend had many kids who were in the grade a year older than the published division. 2019 grad years playing on the 2020 team - they openly discussed it on the field and saw nothing wrong with it. What they said on the field was easily validated as a few weekends before the same team played Hogan and self reported grad years of 2019. Their stick skills not too great so they tried to make up for it by brute force and physical play. It will take a life changing injury and lawsuit to make them think twice about not validating grades and ages in the youth divisions.



It is easy (as many have done) to dismiss the age differential that is now showing up due to non-age based teams as a relatively minor matter. After all, the argument goes, good players play up etc... the risk of injury also seems to get discounted as just a "risk of the game".

As the parent of a 6th grader playing on a AA 20/21 team at the Autumn Classic last weekend I saw the Apex 2020 team and it was very good with very, very big, and very physical players. Only by the luck of the brackets did my son's team not play Apex and for that I am thankful. Otherwise 6th graders would have been playing big 8th graders (who were all 4-6 inches taller and 20 to 30 pounds heavier). A player is going to get badly hurt. I am seriously considering pulling my son out of lacrosse, a sport he loves, and have him play soccer.

This is a big issue that is changing youth lacrosse as I write this and it is not going to go away.