Originally Posted by Anonymous
The problem with this debate and the arguments over aged based versus school year based teams with the safety or competitive factors all taken into account is still just that, an argument. US Lacrosse is in no position to tell prep schools what to do, and no body should make rules for prep schools if they want to keep it that same that kids who repeated grades can play school sports in their grade. There isn't anything wrong with that because there are examples of youths held back for health or academic reasons, and I am a parent of a kid in that category. It is unfair to prejudice those kids, so you can't prejudice anyone including kids who do it for sports reasons.

For now the club owners run things and want grade based club teams. I am on the side of US Lacrosse best practices that club lacrosse should be age based to promote safety and equity for the participants, but that is just my argument. There are reasons why ice hockey and soccer are age based for sanctioned non-school competitions, and the winning argument wasn't fairness to make that happen it was safety. The three leading concussion incident rate sports ten years ago were football, soccer and ice hockey. Now it is football, lacrosse and soccer. Soccer has high concussion rates because of head ball collisions and goalies hitting heads on goal posts. Many goalies have started wearing head gear and the sport does debate field player head gear. But the rule to go to age based was safety, get the older versus younger kids issue off the board and do single year age based teams by rule. Ice hockey did this same thing long before soccer for the same reasons, and concussion rates in sanctioned leagues events went down substantially following that.

Lacrosse has two problems. First, growth rate of head injuries and the growth rate of soft tissue injuries at a greater rate of growth than any other sport in the last decade. The first we have to blame on the way the game is played and not the equipment, the second may or may not be a casualty of sports specialization and overuse syndrome injuries. These growth rates are also highest at the youth levels with less physically mature and developed players. Second, we don't know what the growth rate from six months ago is yet because there isn't enough data to make any valid conclusions. The advocates of grade based teams are correct, you can't prove that lacrosse is less safe today because of grade based teams and moreover last year there were age based teams with two year spreads. So the argument that a holdback kid 18 months older is moot since we used to have U-11, U-13 and U-15. Thus grade based teams could not be any less safe than a year ago and according to the birth tables and rules that say you can't reclassify over and over again because players over the age of 19 are not allowed to play high school sports. Just my opinion that those are not BAD arguments, but they are also not GOOD arguments in support of grade based club or recreation lacrosse.

What isn't an opinion but is a fact is that soccer and ice hockey rules bodies realized after pouring over data that single year teams are better than two-year bracket age groups for these youth contact sports and that single year age based teams are best practices. If we can accept soccer and ice hockey as a model -- and some of us again argue against that -- then lacrosse eventually goes that way. Clearly US Lacrosse pushed it and for now the club and recreation leagues pushed back and we have grade based club and recreation lacrosse leagues. For now there isn't injury rate data in yet to denounce the grade based system, and quite possibly with the prior system of two-year spread age based teams it may very well be impossible to have any looking backwards data that says "here, lacrosse is so much more unsafe today over a few years ago"...the best hope for those who want age based is that relative to ice hockey and soccer, that lacrosse is trending higher and higher with head trauma injuries, therefore there is a relative data set to make the argument from. Again just my opinion, but I do see that happening and weakening the grade based system to a point where clubs and recreation leagues will need to go to U-8, U-9, U-10, etc. My argument is that lacrosse is not a large or mature enough sport to come to its own fair bargains, and it also has a very weak governing body in US Lacrosse, so the time it will take to sort this out with safety data versus other comparible head impact trauma risk sports like soccer and ice hockey in the years to come. I don't see this happening anytime soon because the science needs years of data with cases of head injuries to make a different conclusion.


Nicely well thought out. Like you I think a single age base team is best for Lacrosse like soccer. Maryland had no reason not to go age base teams besides accommodating these select group of holdbacks. And in non hotbed areas 2 year age based teams are best. Frankly besides isn't fair play what we constantly teach our kids at the youth level. Once you get to HS it is a different world as it should be.