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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Find a private coach.  Have him start at the outset learning to catch, throw and cradle with the off-hand.  Tell him to hit the wall.  If he’s athletic enough and works hard enough, he should be able to play and contribute.  It also depends on the program he’s playing for in high school.  Top private school programs (Prep, GZ, Landon) have players who have been playing since kindergarten and developed a fair amount of lacrosse IQ.  The public schools tend to have less developed players so entry bar is lower.  Remember that Paul Rabil never touched a stick until 7th grade.[/quote]

[b]Mine never touched a stick til right before 9th grade. Divison 1 college. HS varsity all four years. Fun stuff. [/b]

Ignore the whole must play for ever crowd. [/quote]

Your kid might be the next Paul Rabil. But probably not.

I'd be inclined to ignore anons on DCUM who have unverifiable stories about how their kid never touched a stick until high school and then went on to play D1.  :roll: [/quote]

Lacrosse parents are, next to tennis and swimming parents, the snobbiest in thinking that you have to start early to play well. The fact is in any sport, inborn athletic talent and a strong desire to get better can mean that some athletes surpass those who have played since pre-K.  For lacrosse, the agility, speed, and lacrosse IQ necessary to excel cross over with some of the skills used in soccer, football, and basketball.  Size, strength, and reaction time matter, too. [/quote]

Theoretically, your kid can pick up a sport in 8th grade, pass up other kids in that sport, and become an olympic-level athlete in that sport. Theoretically. You can maybe even cite a single example of some kid somewhere who has done that. But you are deluding yourself if you think [i]your kid[/i] is likely to be one of those remarkable, astronomical odds-defying prodigies. Sorry, he's just not. Maybe he can pick up a stick and get on some (lackluster) high school team, and that will be fun for him, but that's probably as far as it's going to go. That's just reality.

There are 121,000 male high school lacrosse players in the US. There are ~17,000 college lacrosse players of which ~3,600 play D1.

Odds of any HS kid playing lacrosse in college, 7:1, odds of playing D1, 33:1.

[i]Even [/i]if your kid starting playing in kindergarten, he is probably not going to play lacrosse in college.

If your kid first picked up a stick in 8th grade, he is competing for against all those kids who started uch earlier for that college lacrosse slot. It should be obvious that his chances of playing college lacrosse are thus [i]less [/i]than 7:1 and his chances of playing D1 are [i]less [/i]than 33:1. That's not "snobbery" that is math and common sense.

So yeah, go ahead, live in this dream world where experience basically doesn't matter so long as you have "inborn athletic talent and a strong desire to get better". Good luck with that, you'll need it.[/quote]

I didn’t read that OP said her kid wanted to play D1, just that he wants to try a camp or clinic. Most of us want our kids to play sports for the experience, not to make it to a D1 college team.  Would you really tell any kid, “you have no chance of making it onto a college team, so don’t bother with sports!”[/quote]

True but there was another PP who chimed in with the D1 fairy story.

And I didn't say if you can't make a college team don't bother with sports. By all means play sports in high school. Just don't expect this will translate into cash and prizes in college, because most likely it won't.[/quote]

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