This thread was forwarded to me by one of our parents.
As the Head Coach of 2023 and Co-Founder of Brotherly Love I take umbrage with the veiled insinuations of cheating. Our club just finished their second year since inception. Accusing a club of cheating primarily because two players had different colored shorts seems a bit overreaching. Ironically, the shorts in question were Brotherly Love colors, we simply have two versions of our game shorts. In future tournaments I am confident that you will never see BL players with the same shorts, instead we marshall our resources to wage a losing battle on wearing uniforms that don't reek.
Our club was founded on different tenets. All of our tournaments are a la carte and we encourage our players to play multiple sports, value their community team over their club team, and place a premium on family vacations over lacrosse tournaments. The player that didn't know the play that was called is an elite hockey player and had just driven back from a 10 day tournament in Minnesota. The two players (BL best poles) that left before the consolation game both held up family vacation plans and I thanked their families and encouraged them to get a head start on traffic as they both had vehicles packed and loaded with siblings. The other "large" guest player who wasn't there on Saturday and sleep walked through the first half of the semifinal game but finally woke up and started to dominate had driven all day to return from a wresting camp. None of these kids were guest players and every single one is both age and grade appropriate without a single player reclassed.
As a club we literallly have had a single season to improve and we didn't even start our tournament practices until June of this year. We expect our kids to honor their committments to their community teams. As cited, we will get better and will do it playing by the rules which judging by these messages there are alot of teams cheating.
Many of the teams on this list we have beaten. We don't beat them because we are better lacrosse players, that will come, we beat them because we have superior athletes.
We may be guilty of placing a premium on family, community, and encouraging athletic diversity, but we certainly aren't guilty of cheating.
Because hockey is very transparent at the youth elite level (like lacrosse should be), and BL has published player names on their website (to their credit), I have identified the elite hockey player this director speaks of and I can say his story is legit. I know the tournament he was at in MN and know kids who played there against him. He is a 2005 birth year player and plays up during the regular season, but plays on age for these elite summer tournaments. Kid is at the upper echelon for 2005s in North America in hockey, so he is as elite an athlete as they come, although I have no idea what his lax skills are. I know kids who play at this level of hockey (not mine, who are not good enough, which is no embarrassment mind you) and the year round commitment is intense, and leaves little time for other sports. The only thing this coach is guilty of is letting a part time player play on his team. That is all. (And before people freak out and tell me to "get a life", I am in a position where I know the elite hockey players at this age in the region and it took me about 5 seconds on google to figure this out - typing the post took longer)
