Checking on St Anthony's parents. Darien is public HS so don't believe they have holdbacks so what's todays excuse for yesterdays loss?
Connecticut has a 1/1 cutoff date for schools and don't pretend that they don't hold back in Darien and New Canaan and other "wealthy" towns up there.
When our 2022 was a freshman, his team played the Darien freshman team. One of the Darien moms was complaining that her son, Winston the Third, had to run laps after practice because he was five minutes late one day when he had to park in the back lot - there were only 100 spots in the front parking lot and it was all full when he got there. I asked her how that could be and she said "we have three teams, so not all of the freshmen can park in the front lot." Then she said "oh, wait, we can drive at 16 up here, not like you New Yorkers, where you have to wait until 17." I told her that most of my son's team was 15 years old and she said "Oh, we have one or two TRUE freshmen on this team who can't drive yet."
And losses happen. This one had nothing to do with holdbacks. One thing that's obvious this year is that it's all about offense with most of these teams. Coaches seem to expect to simply put up 12-15 (or more) and outscore their opponents and rarely make any adjustment on defense or care about how poorly they are doing on that end of the field.
I sure would like to see a best of LI tournament in June where all the semifinal teams from the four Suffolk conferences and four Nassau conferences and the two Catholic AAA teams play each other to see who really is the best. If St. Anthony's really is 3-5 goals better than everyone else, so be it. Just make sure you get decent officials (who can actually run the length of the field and know the rules) to call all of the games - maybe they should come from college or the PLL.
