BL did take top kids from other programs last year which is why several players left. the owner could care less about how it hurt other competitive programs in the Phila Area....new parents didn't care either. That all said, it didn't work as evidenced by their disappointing performance at WSYL. All that money and stress for what? Hopefully the boys on the team have learned a good lesson for life.....when they are NOT playing lacrosse.
Seemed quite obvious to me that the BBL team that went to the WSYL was not a "regular" BBL team. First, they were a lot better than the regular 2024 team. Second, the team was enormous. I'd say that close to 90% of the team was 5'11" or better. Their "regular 2024 team" is not nearly that big. And they were definitely not bean pole kids. That's usually a pretty good indicator that something is up. I don't know many 6 foot 7th graders. Having 20 of them, is definitely strange.
But the real truth came out when the team played. It's a good team. Very powerful (older), obviously, but skills were good for the most part.
However, their offense was NOT good. The only offense was either an isolation or an isolation with a draw and dump. That's it. No plays. Basically a two man game at best. No ball movement at all.
Why would that be, if a team has big strong and talented players?? There are only two plausible explanations for this. The first one is that the coaching staff is absolutely horrible. They don't implement any plays, and they basically don't coach. The kids just go out and "play". While this is certainly one of the possibilities, I don't think this is the reason. I'm quite sure that the coaches are quite capable.
The only other reason why the offense is not near as good as it should be is because the team doesn't have any plays, or formations, simply because the team hasn't had any practices to put such things in. It's simply a team of as many 2023 age-eligible kids they can find, and some from their 2024 team, and other teams too. It's a WSYL-only team.
The idea is they get the biggest and best age-eligible (Fall 05 babies) players they can find and go with that, and forego the practices, since all of the players play on different teams, coordinating a few practices would prove impossible.
Mystery solved. Good 2023 team for the most part. I'm sure there are a few 2024's too, to be fair. But everything adds up to a WSYL-only team, that has had basically no practices. The older/bigger team will do well against mid-tier AA teams, but not true skill "TEAMS" that play like a TEAM.
I highly doubt they broke any rules, and I'm sure that most other WSYL teams did exactly the same thing, but just not as well as BBL did it. But not quite well enough.
