Why We Wish Youth Lacrosse Would Adopt A Single Age Standard --- And Why It's Harder Than It Seems

It's a summertime tournament. A team from Pennsylvania is playing against a team from New Jersey. The team from New Jersey is more skilled but the team from Pennsylvania is stronger and more athletic. The team from Pennsylvania wins with a relatively comfortable margin. A few years later, when we compare where the players are being recruited, the players from the team from New Jersey have better prospects than the players from the team from Pennsylvania.

So what happened?

This was the result of different states having different systems of age classification. New Jersey teams generally use a grade-based system. Pennsylvania teams generally use an age-based system. So, just to use a simple example, if a team full of sixth graders from New Jersey plays against a U-13 team from Pennsylvania based upon a January 1 cutoff, the U-13 team will be on-average sixth months older than the team from New Jersey. Why? Because New Jersey schools generally use a summer date as their birthday cutoff for school grades. At the middle-school level, as the variable ages of puberty onset wreak havoc in competitive balance and athletic development, an average of sixth months of additional maturity is huge.

So what's the solution? Ideally, the sport would adopt a single standard cutoff date and we could run every competition on an age basis. Unfortunately, picking which date to use is a challenge that surely will upset someone somewhere. Whichever date we choose, it will divide up a grade in some school district because different districts use different cutoff dates. That means that half of kids in one grade will be playing at one level and the rest at another for their entire youth sports career. Youth soccer, for example, generally uses a July 31 cutoff date. A summer cutoff date chops up grades in school districts that use a January 1 cutoff date. Hockey tends to use a January 1 cutoff date which divides up grades in schools that use a summer birthday cutoff. These divisions can be particularly difficult when we get to high school sports. When half a grade has spent their entire athletic career playing against one level of competition and the the rest played against a different level, there can be a significant effect as the athletes adjust.

To the extent that lacrosse uses an age cutoff, it usually is January 1. States like New Jersey of course simply reject the use of January 1 and adopt a grade-based system rather than having a date imposed by "outsiders" goof up the formation of their teams. Of course, if we adopt July 31, one would expect the areas in which January 1 is the typical school cutoff to reject the new age-based system as well.

As expected given what I have discussed here, I do not have a simple solution. If we are going to adopt a single date as a cutoff, I imagine that July 31 will be more appropriate in the short run because most of the lacrosse hotbed states probably use a summer date as their school grade cutoff. In the long run, however, the expansion of lacrosse will hit more states that use a January 1 cutoff and programs in those states might not appreciate the arbitrary decision from whatever handful of states that enacted the decision before lacrosse became a truly national sport.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts and what date your schools systems use wherever you live.