Originally Posted by Anonymous
The age reason is legit and was a tough decision for some. Many of the non-attending teams could field great on age squads, but you don't want to break up training for grade based programs for one tourney that people don't care much about. My son is on age, but 5 on his teammates are not (4 august and one july bday...4 stared kindergarten late and one repeated K) so his squad is not attending. They could have easily brought up 5 kids from the 26s and not lost anything talent-wise but then you mess up practices for all the other summer tourneys as you need those kids to play in qualifiers and a couple other tourneys before WSYL.

Really, your 2026 kids are on par with your over-age 2025s? In that case, it sounds like your club did them a massive disservice by not bringing them up and giving them a shot. Especially, when this tournament is within driving distance.....

It would be much better for the sport if all tournaments had standardized age-verification. Then we could stop with all the back and forth about who is bringing older kids down, who is playing over-aged kids, etc.