Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Originally Posted by Anonymous
Prefirst, 8th grade or 9th grade is just a conversation about what school year these kids will be when they play on a middle or high school team.

Head out of sand for a moment please...why should club ball not be age based? There is no valid argument against it. College coaches don't really give a crap, they will still come to Crabfeast and the other recruiting tournaments and will be able to evaluate 16 or 14 year olds if they want, and then check on the school and school year the kid is in the tournament program.

This debate is so silly. Just go age based club tournaments and let the private school strategies play out for high school leagues. One can't make a rule for the other. The only argument to keep club teams grade based is to "hide" kids who have held back to make them show better. Forget the moralistic arguments and I just say that is a phony strategy that will fail over time. Pretty soon Petro and the others will realize that the 16 year old beating down on 14 year olds in 9th grade looks a lot less nifty when it is 19 year olds versus 17 year olds. It catches up to the staged kids.


I'm a different poster. all clubs in Maryland including Crabs were age based until the past couple of years. Not a Crabs parent or fan but they were not the ones starting this. They may have fully embraced it but last year was the 1st year they had grade based youth and that was 2021 and 2020. Ironically the trend started up north with NY clubs and tournaments going grade. Not sure why they started doing so since they probably have less lacrosse playing holdbacks and have Dec school cutoff. The general argument is safety but the age based system has always been u11, u13, u15 - so you would have kids playing against each other with 2 year gap. Holdbacks in the age-based system got their advantage by being able to play 2 years of u15 while on age kids moved onto high school. I was not a fan initially of the grade based teams, leagues etc. But what I see is that most teams have a 3-4 holdbacks and the great percentage of them are born within a few months of the school cut-offs. These kids now become the oldest rather than the youngest in their grade, team, league etc so definite advantage to them. The ones who become further disadvantaged are the summer bdays who can't, won't get held back. My point to this response is that like or not grade-based keeps average ages closer together than 2 year age groupings. So until we go to u10,u11,u12....than all this is just hot air


Thats the point. Tournaments are going 2019,2020,2021,2022 brackets to accommodate the grade based teams. It could have been U9,U10,U11,U12,U13, etc . Pretty simple and straightforward. Maryland Lacrosse at the youth club level is wrong, plain and simple. Club Soccer has a pretty simple concept in the Maryland . U8, U9,U10,U11, etc..with cards, Somehow this seems to work with the MIAA holdbacks . They all play where their age is,, not grade. The HS school teams(very good) and recruiters don't seem to have a problem, but somehow youth lacrosse needs grade base teams according to the apologists . This is mainly a private school thing that has taken over all club lacrosse to accommodate all these holdbacks that attend them.


tournaments are following how the clubs are set-up. Maryland clubs followed how the LI clubs are set-up. If we're talking about youth teams it's about fairness and safety. The bottom line is that league and tournaments that offer grade A & B divisions give many teams as chance to find competitive brackets for their skill levels. And the age variances are a smaller window on average than with traditional 2yr age brackets. If you're going to throw out 13 yr old 8th grader playing vs 16 yr holdback I've not seen it. That's a double holdback and I believe that would extremely rare and there should some limit on ages. I have summer, spring & fall bday kids. We're public so no holdback even if we wanted to. Not trying to justify going to this system or keeping kids back for sports. But now were in it I'm not seeing where the crises is and I think most others don't either - whether their kids were held back or not. Until the outrage is more than a vocal group on internet forums than trend towards grade will continue. Personally I agree that single age brackets are the best and fairest. But I like the grade brackets over the 2 yr age brackets

And if we're talking about 9th grade up and the kids can't compete with older kids, then they are not ready to be recruited or play varsity lacrosse