BOTC - US Lacrosse Community Forum Forums NORTHEAST LACROSSE BOTC MAIN FORUM (LI, CT, WC) Age and Reclassification. The good the bad the ugly!

In NY, if you are in the public schools, being a holdback is problamatic. You can't play HS sports if you are 19 before the start of the season. So, anyone who is trying to play that game, must either go the private school route or pay the consequences.

US lacrosse should enact penalties against clubs and individuals that intentionally violate the USlax age and grade guidelines. Clubs and players found guilty should be prohibited from attending U-19 and USA World team tryouts.

Here is some interesting numbers from Under Armour Command Division (Rising 9th and 10th graders) last year. This year UA has decided to NOT post birthdays like last year. Wonder Why??

Out of 112 players that are 2019 last year,,,, 34 were heldback, prefirst, reclassed or whatever you want to call it .....Thats a bunch!!

So 30% of players couldnt play if they went by USL age guidelines of Sept 1 or like most schools of a Sept 1 start for beginning of school . I know its HS so age doesnt matter but it looks like reclass works.

Out of 15 players that are 2020 last year ,,, 5 were heldback, prefirst,reclassed or whatever you want to call it.

Thats 33% of players .......

So basically around ONE THIRD of all players in Command last year were heldback!!!!! WOW!!!!

And to add to that, around One third 33% of All players are born From Sept -Dec from both 2019 and 2020..So you have a good shot if you are on the older side for proper age of your grade.


Being older works according to this. At least for UA .. Strong conclusions that if your son is born between Jan and Aug and you/he is interested in lacrosse...Might want to hold him back!

These are for numbers after start of puberty for boys which does even things out some( doesn't look like a lot at this age) , can you imagine advantage at youth for older players prior to puberty.

MIAA in Baltimore has same rule.

All over country, public and private schools have varying curriculums, where private more likely to promote extra year, been going on for years. 16-19 year olds been playing varsity together and against each other's tfor years. No news, no story, just some libs grabbing a talking point in order to criticize others not just like them. My 16 year old rising sophomore has the same rights as your 15 year old sophomore, because says 'Merica.

That now has shifted down to YOUTH sports.. No one cared when the holdbacks HS teams usually played other holdback teams in HS..

Now we have select age wise 5th graders playing 4th graders.. When did the private schools dictate what goes on in ALL youth sports??

With the topic of prep vs public being brought up ... reclassification (and PG year) helps preps in a major way. It is stupid for national rankings hypesters to even include a school like Deerfield or Brunswick in same category as Cold Spring. Public schools cannot openly recruit 19 year olds to come play for free for a year. And don't get me started on including IMG Academy in the mix. Those "top" prep schools just want to brag about national rankings with their incredibly old and recruited rosters. They know damn well they are an unfair advantage and they love it.

In Westchester and Fairfield, the holdback fever has taken over the youth level because these ultra-rich kids know they are headed to preps where being older than others isn't just accepted, it is encouraged or even forced. It is the "get ahead by any means necessary" approach their parents embrace.

Can you imagine pulling your kid out of one of the best public schools in the country, paying $35,000 to have your kid repeat 6th grade, then relying on a Brunswick varsity spot where the pot at the end of the rainbow is admission to Duke? That is what these types call a plan, not a dream.

Breaking News, families of public and private school kids across the country pay lots of money to voluntarily play in a youth private club sports league that is grade-based, so they sign up appropriately by grade. This Just In - More Exclusive Breaking News, if the league changes to age-based, kids will appropriately sign up by age.

Thanks captain obvious! Hence the push by many to get lax to go age-based!

I have no problem with an uber rich Westchester/Fairfield kid repeating a grade. Many of these families decide at birth that the kid will be going to Brunswick or a similar school. Lax players or not, many of these kids are 16 or so as Freshman (especially by the end of the year). So its reasonable (maybe) that they don't want their kid to be the odd 14 year old. And if the kid proves to be athletic, all the more reason to repeat a pre-HS grade to advance the lax career and use it too get into an Ivy or Duke when junior's grades are only meh. None of this I have a problem with. Its just that when the kid plays club or town lax, have the kid play against other kids born the same year as him.

What a sane and rational comment. Holdback all you want, but you'll always be playing kids your own age. Who could have a problem with that? Unfortunately, many apparently...

All of the tryouts are grade-based again. Youth participation doubled last year, largest single-year spike in history of sport. What is the sell to change? Club is a private business, so has to be more than some complaining from parents that already paid for the year, and continue to do so every year.
Safety - not valid argument. Lacrosse is a very small sport, rural rec areas never sustained, and still can't sustain, single year age groups, always been average 1-1/2 year spreads at youth level. There is no precedent for a safety outcry.
Practicality - HS will always be by grad year, clubs don't want to rebuild or major shake from 8th to 9th, and they control the market. Clubs build 6th to 8th, represents product going into high school, and clubs market on success.
Fairness - product selling at record levels, again what is sell? Best case on a compromise would be to lean on kind hearts to go age-based from 1st to 5th grade, then let the more business-minded approach take over with grade-based in middle school.


All of the tryouts are grade-based again. Youth participation doubled last year, largest single-year spike in history of sport. What is the sell to change? Club is a private business, so has to be more than some complaining from parents that already paid for the year, and continue to do so every year. If a minority number of your customers hate your product, but stop in every day to buy it anyway, is there precedent for change? You may need a competitor to offer a better product, or you need impede the growth of the current product. Buying it and complaining about it, is really just buying it...

I can guarantee that there will need to be only one catastrophic safety incident that occurs between mismatched aged boys in a grade-based situation before the whole sport is forced by the insurance industry to go age-based. The only question is whether to do it proactively before that happens or wait for the incident to occur, which it will.

I can guarantee that there will need to be only one catastrophic safety incident that occurs between mismatched aged boys in a grade-based situation before the whole sport is forced by the insurance industry to go age-based. The only question is whether to do it proactively before that happens or wait for the incident to occur, which it will.[/quote

Crickets. So the last 60 years was this one big huge unnecessary risk? That's what skill brackets are for, not birthday candles.

What your personal line? With the injuries in other sports out there, ha..

That's why they have waivers. Also when is the last time you saw a high speed devastating hit in a 4th, 5th 6th 7th 8th grade game? Varsity, sure, otherwise no.

My son is an on age 2020, born in 2002. He is a big boy 6' and 200 lbs. he has always been big and when he was younger teams would complain that he was a "hold back" which he isn't. My question for "hold back" parents is this. Do you feel good about your kid looking like a stud, when he is beating up on kids who are 1-2 years younger? I don't even like when my on age, big kid plays against boys that are smaller than him. I can't even imagine what he would look like if we held him back, but again, I would be embarrassed because he would be beating up younger kids. Am I missing something? Seriously, that must by like an "A" team playing in a "B" division and feeling good about how awesome they look. What is the point?

The point is a carefully calculated cheating loser move. My son is an on age smaller 2020. Love when he smokes the holdback sand they throw tantrums on the sidelines. Priceless!

No, but to assume every private school 1st grade, 2nd grade, etc parent is going to add plus 1 when they register under the current rules, if they have a prefirst curriculum, because there could be now or in the future a size disparity is ridiculous, and certainly not worthy of being personally criticized. Can 6 and 7, 7 and 8 year olds all of a sudden not play and learn lacrosse together?! If the registration system changes, cool. If your kid develops, grows, whatever, and at 8,9,10 you want to move him up, cool. Your specific example is not typical. Sure, if there are a handful of superior older 6,7th graders running the tables in middle school, play them up if you have any good sense as a parent or coach, but once high school hits, business is business, no such thing as fair, there is legal or not legal. If they can't play, it won't matter how old they are at that point.

You quote recent growth numbers and then subsequently treat the current situation as the 60-year status quo?! You're not really good at this logic and debate thing, are you??

This holdback thing was completely thrown in my face this summer.

explaining how it works went something like this.

Them: which boy is yours?

Me: ###

Them: Wow he is thick

Me: "Johnnie" is a big boy for his age, his birthday is September. By other state schools definition, he could be a year younger in school and play a year lower in sports. On LI it is Dec 1 or Jan 1st or something in between.

Them: Our (Declan) son is born in June, in our district (Cali) he would have been one of the youngest in his grade so we decided to wait and have him be the oldest. Wasnt fair to him to be the youngest. and he has a slight frame.

Me: I guess someone has to be the youngest.

Them: your LI teams are good. are they all aged like your son's team.

ME: many are,

Them: we were at the WSYL the past few years. someone said they werent real teams

Me: "John" was asked to play in the WSYL, but it was for a new team they were making in his organization. they would play 4/5 games then go to Denver.

Them: thats not fair, it isnt his team.

Me: yeah, how about that. If any LI team would go with the summer team they would be younger so they create new teams. Many kids play on 1 or 2 teams anyway. These teams fit the age boundaries. they play 4/5 games and becomes a team..

Them: How is that fair?

Me: I dont mean to be rude but you say fair, to me your boy is playing down?

Them: well he is the youngest on the team

Me: wait he is playing down and the youngest on the team, and you are complaining about what is fair. admittingly I regret it, but I said no to my son playing down. So please I no longer get what is fair or not. the WSYL maybe a farce with the age cutoffs, since it hasnt been consistent since inception. but age is age.

Them: I guess you are right, how old are the boys on the field now?

ME: 15/16

Them: oh, but what year are they?

ME: 2019

Them: I still dont get why you have them play 2019 they should be 2020? They are playing against older kids.

ME: well that is how we do it? thanks for the conversation have a great day good luck


Qtr changes and gave me an excuse to exit stage right....

My outtake why the [lacrosse] doesnt the government have a set date for school (across the country). People dont get it . When did cheating become the norm. When kids across the country go to college it is a bell curve of ages, why not have a consistent age of when you should go in. Heck, not just in sport but academics also. Hey Im not saying take away a PG or holdback, you want to PG or hold back okay go ahead, but let everyone be on the same page of what is going on. You want to gain an advantage because you/He/She couldnt do it the right way. Now you need to find that back door.

Waivers are a scare tactic - they don't stand up a lot of the time. You must not be watching the 7th and 8th grade divisions much - I've seen some big hits in those games.

We have something in this country (or used to) called "federalism" - education is a state right . . . strangely, it's kind of almost making a comeback now . . .

Just because injuries happen in other sports doesn't mean that you do not do everything possible to prevent them and/or limit/mitigate their severity - you only need one suit brought by one party where they prevail to change the tune, and failure to provide "safe playing conditions", IE, mismatched ages, would be the low hanging fruit for an attorney to go after. ALL other contact sports at the youth level are age-based, and for good reason that fact would be used as evidence in such a suit. Lastly, there is NO legitimate argument that lacrosse should not be age-based.

I don't see anything about growth in the 60 year comment. You realize there are multiple people on here, and it's not just you and some other ding dong arguing, correct?

You should call your script "Fart Noise".

Because this isn't the USSR. Most schools do set a maximum for athletic participation, and it is typically the equivalent of doing one extra year. Makes sense, since almost the entire private school industry has evolved. Did you seriously mean to infer that every American would need to finish HS (as in mandated) at the same birth year age? All of your nonsensical drivel aside, come on, you realize when you start talking to someone on the sideline, they walk away within like 20 seconds, right?

Tell me ONE instance where a waiver did not stand up? Just ONE! And yes I have watched 4-8 lacrosse and what you may think is a "big" hit is not. It's a three step pop. Guessing your kid does not play football or soccer or hockey. See the same hits. The only scare tactic is your statement that someone is going to get severely hurt due to some imaginary massive size difference. Don't see it at the HS level and my guy plays Nassau A. No one cares there. Sorry, you are wrong on this.

OK ding dong . . .

Once the government does that, then they can make the biotech industry create a drug that makes every boy reach puberty at the same time. Then we can have leagues by height and weight, and while we are at it let's time them in the 40yrd dash and make sure there are kids that are not too fast. and maybe we can compensate the dumb ones that don't know what they are doing by only allowing a defender to be so close. Make sure the bell curve is as steep as possible.....

Beat me too it. Even though DC has been trying more and more to control what is done in the states, you want Florida, Mississippi, and the rest of the country having a say in how to run our schools in NY?

To the fool that wrote, “there is no precedent for a safety outcry” and then again wrote, “If a minority number of your customers hate your product, but stop in everyday to buy it anyway, is there precedent for change”… I would suggest you look up the meaning of the word precedent and then go and find me another contact sport (at the youth level) that doesn’t have some limitation or control for size and/or age. Do you think that was always the case?

Here are a few tips for you moving forward - a) don’t use words you don’t really understand the meaning of and b) don’t cite examples of things that actually argue against your point.

Business is business and this whole thing is real $ for the people that run it. So, no - it won’t change overnight. That doesn’t mean that consumers of the product (with as much right to their opinion as you have to yours) shouldn’t make the case for why there is a better path forward. Parents of left-back kids exploit a system that is deliberately set up to be exploited. Sorry, but Jr. is just older than his opponents, he is greatly advantaged by that fact and the left-back parents know this is true. Rationalize away!

If the gubment - listened to folks like you and instituted strict guidelines on what age a kid must be to be in that particular grade in the name of "fairness" for a particular sport, they would get pushback and opposition never before seen. Look beyond your small world of lacrosse and maybe you might understand how people get away with it. Have you ever noticed how old some of those boys are that are being drafted by the NFL? Juniors in some of those major SEC programs who are 22 or 23 at the draft, that's not on age. But, a lot of times, those are not intentional holdbacks. And then you want the gubment to institute something that would run counter to the NCLB's replacement the ESSA. Please pass that on to your local representative or Senator and see how far that gets along.

Bottom line Holdback parents and non holdback parents will never agree on this so why continue arguing. My son is a 2023 born in April plays on a top program and is very athletic but he is small I would love to have held him back seeing what goes on but when he was 5 I wasn't thinking about any of this, such is life. Good luck arguing back and fourth at least you give people some laughs.

Dude - I played college football and all my sons play football - I know better than you will ever know what a big hit is like. Plus, you are missing the point on this altogether: the case where this problem will likely come to a tipping point will be the vast difference in size between two players, where the hit on otherwise similar sized players might not have been as dangerous, but because of the laws of physics and with respect to mass, along with other 'perfect storm' conditions, the results will be catastrophic. The bigger the sport gets, the more participants that play, the more likely an unfortunate and catastrophic incident will occur between mismatched aged players in a grade-based system. You mention three other sports (one not even a contact sport!) - funny how all three of those sports all moved to aged-based governance. And, yes I've seen big hits in lax games, although most result in man down situations these days, but they happen nonetheless.

Lastly, there are states where a parent signing of a waiver on behalf of their children and the courts generally hold that such a waiver DOES NOT preclude the injured child from bringing suit against a party for negligence - two of those states are New Jersey and Pennsylvania!

Agreed. Moreover, many businesses, and even entire industries, have rested on their laurels and said "why make changes, we are successful", only to see the world change and leave them behind. As said above, this thing is real $ for those that run it, and if they are not concerned with growth, they should be. Moving to an aged based system, in conjunction with a more delineated and uniform skill level division (AAA, AA, A & B), will, in my opinion, engender more growth than they are already experienced, and more importantly, more sustained growth. For those who site numbers showing that lacrosse is growing at a substantial rate as it, keep in mind that this growth is mostly due to the fact that lacrosse is only starting to move away from its very small niche areas of LI and MD. Its a great sport and its being established in many areas of the country where it was never played before. This type of "0-60" growth for any industry is very easy. But there is still room for tons of growth, especially with the summer/fall teams, and in order to maximize this growth, it needs to move to age-based, and it needs to move to a more stratified skill/athletism structure, which will be easier to do the more it grows. This will ensure that kids play against kids who are similar in both age and skill. When this happens, kids and parents will be happier, more likely to keep coming back, and most importantly, more families will want to participate in travel lacrosse. I have seen many kids put on teams where they don't belong, than play against kids who are much older and much more skilled. These kids don't come back. Their money is just a green as everyone else's. If these clubs fostered a true B division (not the so-called one where if the team is not one of the top 10 in the country it is B) where kids played on age, these kids would thrive. My kids would likely be AA on age and the experience would be much better.

Sorry, in your over-thinking and under-explaining, you forgot to cite the precedent. Oh, and it would be, "for which you don't understand the meaning", or some other correctly-written variation. You wouldn't finish that thought with a preposition.
You would make a better case if you would just concede that the grade-based system has certain flaws, rather than essentially accusing the majority of private school parents with some type of mass exploitation. Seriously, most elementary school parents, whether new to the game or not, are not putting much thought into the system at time of registration; if their kid is in 3rd grade, they are probably compelled to check off 3rd grade! Sure, there are those parents of older middle school kids that are smart enough to realize they could play their kid up, probably to his benefit developmentally, but those folks aren't the baseline for all kids that are in a different school curriculum. Just comes off as complaining when you start criticizing a large share of the market base, rather than the leagues that control the rules. At the end of the day, the people that you criticize would sign up legally under any rule without much fanfare, but folks like you would just find another reason to whine and complain, so who gives a crap anyway. Keep crying, but don't forget to send that check in, please.

Please keep talking, please. Tell us one of your college football stories, but tie in some stuff from one of your science classes. Please don't stop responding on here, seriously, we need you.

Way to argue your position - pat yourself on the back for that great retort . . . and then make an ortho appointment for your resulting torn rotator cuff.

The injury thing seems like a stretch in that you are relating it to size and there are many kids the same age that are vastly different in size. I do think that lax teams and tournaments should be age based but purely based on fairness. It is clearly an advantage to hold your kid back from an athletic perspective so essentially you are putting those who do not at a disadvantage .That disadvantage can ultimately impact where your child goes to school etc. Some of you will disagree but not much different from taking steroids out of sports as best as possible.