BOTC wanted to dip into our mailbag (actually, our inbox) this morning and answer two rather important reader issues from this last week. Please read on for some important information as to how BOTC works as an advocate for our parent and player community.

Tryout Quality

The BOTC Tryouts Forum Rules have been an instrumental and fundamental change over the last 15 months on the youth lacrosse scene as we have attempted to raise the bar on program features before parents and players attend even their first tryout. While it might sound like good old common sense, making sure that tournament selections, coaches, sponsors and contacts, and most importantly, costs are disclosed have made comparison shopping between organizations more precise for our BOTC Lacrosse Families.

This has been particularly important in the midtier organizations. While the larger clubs can already have a significant following, your ability to assess a smaller training company which has only a handful of solid teams can be very difficult. When BOTC accepts sponsored tryouts, we very carefully screen the advertising and the product in an effort to guarantee a level of quality for you, the consumer. In some cases, we do find a company which in some way fails to clear the disclosure hurdles here on BOTC.

A small local outfit, the Long Island Wolves, was removed from the Tryouts Forum over the last 24 hours. An astute reader recognized that deletion and contacted us overnight. A Wolves representative was greatly offended when BOTC Staff was asking questions pertaining to the program and as a result, their information was removed from our pages. BOTC is convinced that when thousand-dollar programs are being sold to parents over our airwaves, we want to know that we can stand behind the product for you.

Your Safety

BOTC has been asked by several readers why we do not use a syndicated advertisement service for lacrosse products. For those not familiar with the term "syndicated advertisement", these are best known as the banner ads that appear on many "free sites" which help to pay for their operation.

As you have seen from the previous section on Tryouts, BOTC works on an individual level with each company you see on our site as a sponsor. We validate the products and services being offered.

Syndicated advertisements cannot be controlled in terms of product quality and most importantly cannot be prescreened for virus and adware safety. How many times has your family computer been infected by an accidental download of a banner ad from your local social networking site?

On BOTC, we provide a safe and secure surfing experience. We market our own services, produce our own advertising materials, and deliver that quality content to you on a daily basis. To allow any other organization to control the messaging that you see does not serve you well.