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I give a lot of credit to WM, especially their coaching. My son plays for Northport and we played them in the 2nd round of the playoffs last year. It was 5-3 at the half and we were right in the game when they came out the 2nd half, made some adjustments and just blew the doors off. We never won another face-off and they just kept coming. Funny is when we played them during the regular season, it was pretty much the same scenario. We were right i the game when they just made some changes and although we only lost 12-8, we still lost regardless. A lot to be said for really smart coaching that knows how to use their players.

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I think that you make a valid point about a good program and them making adjustments yet I also believe it has to do with depth of a program. Could it be that your players were playing at their absolute best and 110% of their ability during the first half and in the second didnt have much left in the tank. Great players and teams know when and how to play at 110% when it counts. When a program has more depth they have the ability to run more players at 110% over a longer period of time. As a result as the game moves on they start to separate themselves from the teams that are not as deep. Their star player played 15 min at an average of 90% where your star players played the whole half at 110%. The only reason that this occurs is that they have a few more players at each position they can put in that are not that much of a drop off from the 1st line. As a result they can rest their players just enough that they are fresh in the second half. This not a knock on your program but an observation from watching a lot of lacrosse and seeing teams that looked evenly matched in first half of games then have one of the teams blow the other out in the second half.[/quote]

You make a good point that gets overlooked a lot when people label players from teams as being not as good as other , and it probably translates more in club than HS, especially within the whole A, B, etc thing. At any age, there are top teams that no one argues are the best, and then there are other teams that are dismissed as not being at the same level, and those teams' players are explicitly categorized as such as well, even when such a team plays that top team to a near tie for one half of a game. In reality, many of the top 10 out on the field for the lesser team are right on par with the top team's 10, but it is the depth of the top team that creates the difference.