My experience is that private schools skim the top 5 or 10 % of the players who would have otherwise gone to public school (scholarships and help with admissions). When you combined that with the fact that lax already skews to the upper end of the income distribution (ie players that are going to go private anyway) a disproportionate amount of the lax talent concentrates in a relatively few private schools (ie relative to the many public high schools in Maryland and northern Virginia).

The college recruiters know this and would rather go see a team at a private school that has multiple D1 quality players on the field and sometimes even on the bench rather than go to a public high school game that might have one or two D1 worthy players.

This creates a natural feedback loop where the best kids wanna go to where the coaches are and the best coaches want to go with the kids are. There’s no conspiracy or corruption it’s just a natural fact of life that advantage accuses to those who already have advantages.

The real problem I see is that the public school kids are given the message early on that there’s no future in public school lacrosse and the act accordingly (eg drop out of travel teams, skip showcases etc.). This drops their chances of playing college lacrosse to 0 and gives even more opportunities to the privates.

The way to handle this problem is to create a lax combine event where interested kids could be evaluated on an even playing field (no pun intended). You could have regional events a couple times over the summer and coaches wouldn’t have make a decision about where to go. It wouldn’t be a perfect solution but it would give the kids outside the lax industrial complex a chance.