LE has the NLF championships which are comparable!
Apples and oranges. NLF is not age based. Your kid can be competing against HS aged kids. And teams with most holdbacks are almost impossible to beat. Something LE is all too familiar with.
Holdbacks at this age are an enormous advantage. Most kids get their growth spurt at 14 which 8th grade for on age kids. That’s the year when most go from little boy to “man” where 6” in height and 35-40 lbs in weight in one year is commonplace. So quite literally, these holdback teams are “men” playing little boys. Holdbacks are mostly the product of boarding/prep schools. Long Island has very few holdbacks, relative to most other areas, most notably MD, simply because LI doesn’t have any real prep schools. MD, CT, MA are all loaded with them. That’s why when your sons on age LI team plays a MD team, that MD team likely has 80% of the starting lineup as holdbacks. I’m familiar with one 2024 MD team that played only one on age player, which, you guessed it, was the coaches son.
The funny thing is, even though the holdback advantage At this particular age is nothing short of flat out cheating. These MD, CT, NY, NJ teams need that “man” advantage just to be able to compete with on age “boys” from LI. Case in point: The 2024 91 Wolfpack team had one team, in 2019 when they went undefeated in the WSYL and crushed Legacy in the championship. That same on age team played all the holdback teams of the NLF and NAL that year, without a single holdback, and went undefeated that entire year. So don’t tell me the holdback teams are impossible to beat. They are inferior teams, with inferior players, from inferior regions that need to cheat by competing against boys, with teams of “men”, just to be able to compete with LI “AA” teams.
