You sound like someone who will not be playing elite anytime soon or at all. It starts now, sorry to burst your bubble
Ok so you know those nice kids who just like to play lax got shellacked by a mediocre AAA team and take from that that elite athletes are created by such beatings. Which means you don’t realize that the statistical odds of any of those NL Red kids - indeed, any kid at 12/13 playing A/AA/AAA ball ends up on the other side of puberty as an elite lax player are perhaps at best slightly better than winning Powerball. So rather than urge you to embrace the likely very nice kid you have for who he is, I surrender. You’re right, you’ve got Jim Thorpe over there. A whole team of em just waiting for enough abuse to emerge. I do hope there’s at least a decent inheritance at the end of that kid’s dark tunnel.[/quote]
I'm a third party in this confusing (on both sides) argument but it depends on what you mean by elite.
And just for fun, and to irritate the 3rd line elite-adjacent dads here, If you look at the horse trading that took place in Baltimore during tryouts this year, you would know that AAA/AAAA starters are basically interchangeable with 2nd and 3rd line elite kids - as angry as it makes the elite-adjacent parents. Kids on AAA teams (a few of them) are playing on national teams that are full of players from Hawks, Laxachusetts, 91 National, and so on. People are crowing about the improvement to Crabs and yet the two notable players they picked up were the #1 offensive mid from FCA White and the #3/4 attackman from Predators.
That said and to your point, the gulf between elite starters and AAA bench warmers is substantial and you're right, it's probably growing. And aside from the weird outcomes this fall, normally putting those AAA teams on the field against top elite talent isn't good for anybody.
I'd like to see most teams go 2-1, 1-1-1, or 1-2 at tournaments in all honesty. It tells you the boys are at the correct level of competition. Going 4-0 at an Aloha event is as much of a waste of time as going 0-4 at Naptown.....and tells me the coach or club director isn't looking at the right priorities for the team.
