BOTC - US Lacrosse Community Forum Forums MID-ATLANTIC LACROSSE MARYLAND FORUM Boys 2024-7th Grade Fall 2018/Summer 2019

From previous poster....

"First, in case you haven't heard MD plays in a grade based system (not Intelligent, I agree but it is what it is). I am not aware of anyone playing on a team below their grade so the continuous calling of teams "cheaters" is wrong. Debate the merits of age vs. grade based all you want, but when someone follows the rules their league/tournament plays under it is not cheating.

Second, the good old "no older team than Madlax". You have no idea the ages of the kids on the Madlax, or any other team. I am very aware that there are a fair number of "on age" kids on Madlax and the vast majority of "holdbacks" are mid/late summer birthdays (in other words 1 to 2 months off age) but keep spouting "fake news" about how the poor little LI kids are all a year+ younger if it makes you feel better, no one in MD cares and you are simply wrong, that is a fact.

Third, "so, sooo bad". Such an unintelligent comment, hard to even respond but the reality is that a good number of these kids will go on to play at some of the top high school programs in the country and then go on to top colleges. If this is your definition of so bad then we will take being bad. Feel free to take a look at the UA Top 25, 7 teams in the top 25 are fed by HoCo elite (4 LI teams in the top 10 vs. 3 HoCo). Then take a look at the top ranked recruits and where they are from.

Fourth, if this is such a major issue for the LI teams then here is an idea, don't play in grade based tournaments. If LI lacrosse is "far suprior" as you say then stay on the island, hit the road for the WSYL, proclaim yourself the masters of the 2024 age group and enjoy yourself. If the best lacrosse is on LI then stay there and compete against the best. The constant complaining and moaning has become pathetic but is actually pretty smart. You have created a win-win for yourself. If you lose to a MD team then it is because every kid on the team is 1+ years older, if you win then you can continue to believe in the superiority of LI lacrosse since you beat a team in your mind that is "playing down".

I will simply end this with a quote from Col. Nathan R. Jessep: "Either way, I don't give a darn, what you think you are entitled to!"

See you at UMASS in July.

UGH.... I thought we were moving past this....

If they move on, they have to stop pounding their little man chests. Just laugh at them, especially the LI ones who only feel like big men when they troll the mid Atlantic forums.

Thank you for the kind note at the end of your post, we will have fun watching our kids and teams play this spring! It is always fun watching kids who in the near future go on to the top high school and then college programs in the nation. I am sure it is the same in LI.

I know my 13yo son is looking forward to the spring and summer season playing a sport he loves, if that is "meaningless" then I am not sure what the term means. Then again he is only 13 so he does not grasp the full impact a 13yo game/tournament can play in your future happiness (for the OP this is sarcasm since I assume you are a kid or an adult with a kid's intellect). For this I am eternally grateful. I truly hope you and/or your kids have a great time at the WSYL, I am sure it will be a great experience.

Also, just as an FYI, no one down here really cares about playing LI teams any more than they do about playing MD, PA, VA, DC, etc. teams. I think you may be living a few years in the past where LI was the single source of dominance in the sport of lacrosse. Any quick read through high school polls, recruiting rankings, etc. show this is fast becoming a nationwide sport with exceptional talent all across the country. This is great for the sport and the kids. LI will always be a hotbed of lacrosse but feel free to join us in the year 2019.

One final note, you sound so angry and pathetic posting on the MD forum. Here is a novel idea, why don't you stay on the LI board. Perhaps you will be a happier person if you focus on what you know in your little region of the world. I know I will be content staying on the MD forum and seeing how the teams do in the HoCo league and the summer tournament season.

To my fellow MD people, hope everyone's son(s) have a great HoCo and summer season!

quote=Anonymous]How many on age players play in the HoCo league of cheaters? Obviously less than 15 total, or one of the cheater clubs would be sending a team to the WORLD SERIES OF YOUTH LACROSSE to compete for the world championship of 13 year old lacrosse (sorry, no 14 and 15 year olds allowed, cheater teams)!

But you guys keep stockpiling your 14 and 15 year olds, just to have a “chance” at beating 13 year olds from LI, in some meaningless 7th grade tournament, that everyone forgets about on the ride home. Sorry. I don’t mean to belittle your games with LI teams because I’m sure it’s like the super bowl to your boys. But to us it’s [ChillLaxin] hum. Nobody cares. Especially when our boys will be playing for a TRUE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP!

I know. Compared to that, your boys have nothing to look forward to this summer, except maybe getting their drivers liscence.

Have fun in your little HoCo play dates.



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LI dad with nothing better to do than troll a mid Atlantic forum at 10pm at night to pound his overly hairy chest about 7th grade lacrosse. lost. Go make love to your wife at night instead of high-fiving yourself over a post that my guess is got you overly excited.

MD v LI is Apple's and oranges. Don't feed the troll.

You’re right. MD are all 2023 cheaters trying desperatelty to compete with true 2024 age kids from LI, by all means necessary. Apples and oranges. Bad apples from MD.

Must be really embarrassing when your boys still lose, which is most of the time. Cheat and still lose. What's next? You already have a few 2022 age kids. 2021's next???

I am not sure what is worse. Hearing LI parents' commentary during games or the whining about hold backs.

Don’t they have their own board to whine on???

They do, which makes it even funnier.

Thank you for the stimulating commentary, holdback parent. No one will ever "get past" the corrupt culture in MD youth lacrosse, until people like you are eradicated from the landscape.

And the only one that would ever disagree with that statement, are the cheating holdback parents.

~ Parent of a MD On-age Player

Wow, such righteous indignation. You respond to a comment with a statement that has little to do with what the poster wrote while making an unknowing assumption, well done. In addition you wrap it up with the now fairly common and weak minded, "if you don't agree with me you are wrong and a bad person statement". Very compelling stuff. It is actually pretty funny to read all the hate and hating thrown around an anonymous forum. All you have to do is take a stroll through the LI forums to see that it is even worse on those forums. You would think there were national security implications to the sport of lacrosse.

I too am the parent of an on age MD parent. I too agree that at the youth level kids should be playing in age based systems. The purpose of these forums is to either b**** and moan which is funny since the comments are so silly, outrageous and full of "fake news", or to provide some level of information helpful to others. To that end my question to all the MD and LI posters who b**** and moan about the holdback situation is - what is your recommendation to solve the problem, to get us back to an age based system? No one ever seems to offer a solution so yes we will continue to find these posts of indignation funny and more than a little pathetic. I will readily admit I have no idea how to make this change happen.

End of the day this is a youth sport. We are lucky that we have a league with numerous divisions at each grade where pretty much any kid who wants to play competitive lacrosse can do so. We are fortunate that our son, and many of his teammates, are able to play at the elite level, on age. I am guessing they would be even better served under an age based system but being a year or two away from high school where at the elite level holdbacks across all sports and all regions (yes, even you LI) are not uncommon I am not 100% sure about that. So once again I would ask all the people who complain on this forum: what do we do to change back to an age based system knowing the potentially high rewards (good high school, good college) enabled by a grade based system that includes holdbacks? It is hard to get the genie back in the bottle and none of the parents released this genie.

~ Also a Parent of a MD On-age Player Who Understands This is Only One of Many Youth Sports Available to Our Kids and That 7th Grade Lacrosse is not Going to Make or Break Our Kid's Life

One issue is the LI trollers continue to try and compare the age based system to the class based system and they aren't the same.
I do think the class based system is out of whack when you have rosters comprised of more than 50% of the players born prior to the 9/1 date and some born as much as 11 months before. I have spoken to HoCo and they continue to say the competition committee decides the rules and those clubs have no interest in changing the rules. They divide the divisions based on skill and age comes into play. The elite division rosters are all older than those of the lower tiers. The teams whose records are at the bottom are given more favor if their rosters are older so they don't physically dominate the younger rosters even if they are of equal or maybe even lesser skill.
The best solution is by exact birth date where the kid wlll be the youngest and eventually the oldest on a roster but people always say "oh this ruins team chemistry" and that is BS at this age.
The above will never happen so I think the best is to have a class based solution with no more than 25% of the roster being born prior to 9/1. That's 4-5 kids per team. If HoCo did that, the MadLax's, BLC's and Team 91's would adjust their team tryouts and rosters accordingly. They'd shuffle some of the older kids to their B team rosters and it would balance things out for them. And if you are the 5th or 6th best oldest child on the roster, you should be playing rec or on a B until or if you get better.

Youth soccer operates on a strictly age-based system. When I last checked, there were still kids being recruited to college with this system. It really shouldn't be all that hard - set the age cut-off date (soccer uses Jan 1) and play U12, U13, U14, etc.

PP here. I think there are a lot of age based systems that work, the issue here is not that there are not good age based systems we could play under, it is that the leagues, clubs and tournament sponsors (and assume high schools) push/allow a grade based system. How do we change that? I assume it would start with getting HoCo to change its' policies but it appears the league is effectively run by the clubs so back to square one.

It wasn't that long ago that we were playing in an age based system, seemed to work fine. As the other poster said as well there are lots (if not the vast majority) of club youth sports that play under age based systems and they seem to be doing fine.

I really like the idea of grade with a max number of pre 9/1 birthdays, that would seem to be a decent compromise.

Hockey is strictly age-baed as well. Jan 1. Works great.

The age based systems don't work well. Ask the parents whose kids are at the bottom of the age range and are always playing against older kids. Study after study shows they are at a physical and coaching disadvantage.

The last I checked we are a nation of 340 million who can't produce enough top flight players to either form a competitive pro soccer league or a team to qualify for the most recent World Cup. The age based and current organization of soccer stinks in this country. We can debate at what level things contribute to this but it still stinks. Also, there were only 3 soccer high school all americans out of 68 on the roster and there were 9 out of 44 for lacrosse in the Baltimore/DC area.

And you are wrong about hockey. First of all, their ages runs from September 1 through August 31 and they have 2 year segments which is totally different from the MD area where there are enough lacrosse players to run yearly teams. Also, they allow over age exceptions to team rosters of up to 4 regular players and the goalie. https://www.ushl.com/news_article/show/749141

I proposed the idea of roster exceptions to HoCo and my kid's club and they said the Madlax's, BLC's and Team 91's would never go for it. The established clubs love it and the smaller clubs think they are going to become Madlax someday and take solace in competing against teams more like them. The really funny thing is none of these teams are a "class" at a school. What's outrageous is when a team has kids born prior to March 1 and then those kids are repeated prior to 8th grade. These kids/young men are now driving to their HoCo spring games. There are at least 6 playing this year.

Oh and by the way. US youth soccer uses 8/1 as their start date so this allows for very late summer delayed entry kids. They also have a moving eligibility date based on the length of the season and the birth year. It was a major change in 2017 but has already been absorbed. Let's see if they have success.

Not to split hairs, but I'm pretty sure it's calendar year. My daughter is 13U in soccer, born in 2006. Her team is referred to as ________ '06 Girls

https://www.usyouthsoccer.org/file.aspx?DocumentId=591

Jesus you all take 7/8 grade lacrosse way to serious.
A) My kid plays one of the elite LI Team’s
B) Who really gives a Laxx if a kid is a year older.
C) Besides LI, DMV and Philly no one really gives a dam about lacrosse.
D) Very very few of the boys will garner any type of scholarship to justify the god awful amount of money we spend on this sport.
E) I can’t tell you how many hours and dollars that I’ve spent to make these club owners rich.
F) Hate baseball but wished he didn’t

Yeah. That’s a great idea! Only cheat a little. Just let a select few, cheat. Kinda like being sorta pregnant. Thats a solution?? Why are you looking for a compromise to a corrupt system? It’s a cancer. The entire cancer needs to be removed with an age based system. It couldn’t be any simpler or easier.

Complete straw man arguments. Soccer does great with a strict age based system . Colleges recruit just fine without the grade based system, All competition in US is just like it is all over the world.. Jan 1 to Dec 31. Age based ,, USA soccer world cup woes have nothing to do with you straw man argument.. Tiny Spain goes by age based too and they do just fine in world cup. I actually tried to explain to a Spanish soccer rep about grade based lacrosse and youth..He said I was nuts! LOL

And to top it off you make the argument against holdbacks ! " kids are at the bottom of the age range and are always playing against older kids" So you think it is ok for select holdback kids to be the oldest but only them, not on age based kids??? LOL

Hockey AAA at top level is strictly year born based like Soccer..Might want to look up AAA Hockey in Michigan or anywhere ( State that has produced most NHL players) . Many youth rec/club hockey are Sept 1-Aug 31 like Lacrosse used to be for over 50 years until recently.

Lacrosse has only been grade based in last 5 years..Somehow it survived for many years..Even Crabs top Youth teams were U13 and U15 plus they had High School teams which were based on grade ( rightly so) .

I am glad you are doing something with HOCO..But you will never get anywhere with this Top Hall of Shame league. I wrote to them several times at beginning. Got NO WHERE ! Not sure now..But a few years ago, HOCO personal had children and ties to Private school with holdbacks.. Go figure

That is to simple and how it was for decades without issue. But what would happen to all the holdbacks/prefirst at the MIAA privates or wanta be reclass who want to go there ??

Should just go with 2005 birth year, etc.

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Complete straw man arguments. Soccer does great with a strict age based system . Colleges recruit just fine without the grade based system, All competition in US is just like it is all over the world.. Jan 1 to Dec 31. Age based ,, USA soccer world cup woes have nothing to do with you straw man argument.. Tiny Spain goes by age based too and they do just fine in world cup. I actually tried to explain to a Spanish soccer rep about grade based lacrosse and youth..He said I was nuts! LOL

And to top it off you make the argument against holdbacks ! " kids are at the bottom of the age range and are always playing against older kids" So you think it is ok for select holdback kids to be the oldest but only them, not on age based kids??? LOL

Hockey AAA at top level is strictly year born based like Soccer..Might want to look up AAA Hockey in Michigan or anywhere ( State that has produced most NHL players) . Many youth rec/club hockey are Sept 1-Aug 31 like Lacrosse used to be for over 50 years until recently.

Lacrosse has only been grade based in last 5 years..Somehow it survived for many years..Even Crabs top Youth teams were U13 and U15 plus they had High School teams which were based on grade ( rightly so) .

I am glad you are doing something with HOCO..But you will never get anywhere with this Top Hall of Shame league. I wrote to them several times at beginning. Got NO WHERE ! Not sure now..But a few years ago, HOCO personal had children and ties to Private school with holdbacks.. Go figure


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Uhh. Soccer stinks and doesn't do well with an age based system. You are also ignoring the 8/1 start date.
I didn't say it was ok. I said the fairest system is to base it on exact birth date. That gets rid of any age bias.
Hockey is not strictly age based and I posted the link.
Lacrosse recruits just fine with class based. No one is complaining about recruiting except for LI moaners. BTW, only 5 states in the US use a 1/1 start date for class year.
So you think you are going to shame the lacrosse world by posting on this forum. It's time to move on little man. This subject has worn you out.

As I’ll say again.... and you should be able to see cause I’m a big enough girl to log in and post my comments under my name.

My son is a 2024 ON AGE player..... just turned 13 yesterday thank you very much.

I feel like the constant complaining about a “problem” doesn’t change anything and just gives people something to B**** about.

Personally if I’m holding back my kid in school it would be for an academic issue and then his butt wouldn’t be playing ANYWHERE or ANYTHING because his job is school not sports

Well said.

That’s very nice. There is one on age kid in MD, apparently. Hurrah!

Total joke that Team 91MD is allowed to play elite agaon.

Total joke that Team 91MD is allowed to play elite agaon.

Hey buddy, this isn't the 2023 page, it's the 2024.

The 2023 kids that play on the 2024 team belong in Elite they won Elite last year. I think you are referring to the 2022’s that play 2023. They are not at the elite level.

There aren't any 23s on the 24 team.

Did I read these scores from yesterday correctly? Madlax beat Crabs 18-1 and Bethesda lost to Next Level?

You are correct.

Madlax is a very good team and they played pretty much flawlessly yesterday, will not happen every week but when a good team executes at all levels you can have games like this.

NL is much improved over last year, picked up some solid kids and pretty well coached. Have seen them play, definitely added some good lacrosse players and some good athletes who have the potential to be good lacrosse players with time playing the game.

My son has played for Next Level, and I can tell you from first hand experience that DM is one of the best coaches out there. My kid doesn't currently play for DM, but he wishes he still did. DM is a class act and a wonderful role model. The NL 2024 team doesn't have an army of older kids like some of the other teams do. But DM does more with less, and he actually cares about making the kids better, even if it means a loss on the field. I have watched other teams practice, where it is all about team offense and defense and how to get a win on Sunday. I have watched practices where 90% of the team is standing around so that a handful of role players can practice creating screens for the bigger, older kids. It is all about creating isolation. No off ball movement or fundamentals. DM is the complete opposite. He works on things that matter, and makes all the kids better, not just a handful of ringers. As word gets out, that NL 2024 team will get better and better players.

The following scores tell you all you need to know.

Madlax 18, Crabs 1
T91 10, Crabs 5
Bethesda 8, Crabs 6

It is going to be Madlax, T91, and Hawks at the top, in that order. Looneys, Bethesda, and Next Level will be in a race to lose first round to Madlax. Crabs or FCA will have 1 win, and the other will have none.

Hi guys. Looking forward to playing the cheater teams. The boys have been playing top 2023 teams up here on LI, to get ready for your older boys. You know, 2023 age kids on LI are 2024 age kids in MD. I think that’s a pretty good plan. What do you guys think? Not sure though. Maybe we should be playing older boys in 2022. I know you guys say that double holdbacks are rare, but I’m not sure what that means. Maybe you can help me. Does “rare” mean one double holdback per team? Or two, or three? I really don’t know. Appreciate your help from ya all. See you soon!

Great story line for little Vinny. Keep it alive buddy.