Reply to Is age 13 too "old" for DS to try baseball, tennis, or lacrosse?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to a college prep boarding high school.  Freshmen play all three seasons, sophomores and juniors can drop one season, seniors can drop 2 seasons.  It's also no cut.

Most of the PPs don't have experience with no-cut required sport schools.  Usually the school is very small.  By having every kid play sports they don't have to have a gym program and they can field full teams that they might not otherwise be able to fill.

With all that said, here's my experience (and the experience of kids currently attending the same school this year):

Your experience 20 plus years ago is not particularly relevant 
Every year there are new students, sometimes freshmen, sometimes older.  Every kid comes in knowing that they have to play a sport, but many have never played anything, or they want to switch sports.  The coaches are all used to dealing with kids at various levels.  Some sports have varsity and jv levels, some only have varsity level and the kids who are just starting won't play more than 2 minutes per game for at least a month.  Two of our sports only had jv, because we couldn't be competitive on the varsity level.  For any sport that has varsity and jv both, varsity works solely on honing skills, jv works on basics at the beginning of every season, and they progress through honing strengths and shoring up weaknesses.  For the sports that only have one team, whether it's varsity or jv, the team works together to teach the basics as quickly as possible.

Personally, I did field hockey, swimming and soccer.  With the exception of one kid (male manager-exchange from Germany) in four years, every single girl on the field hockey team started having never held a stick before.  Some had played ice hockey, some had played soccer, 2 had played lacrosse, and many had never played anything.  We worked drills every practice, all four years, at least for a few minutes, because every year there was a new batch of girls for whom it was their first season, and we wanted to be competitive.  Swimming isn't really a team sport.  We had kids come in who set records their first couple weeks, but we also had kids who were learning to do all four strokes.  For soccer, we never had enough girls to have a jv team too, so we only had varsity.  Because we had enough girls who had previously played, most of the newest players played 2-5 minutes for the first month.

I like small schools, and the schools that do no-cut every kid plays for sports are great.  I don't know how it works at your kid's school, OP, but from what I've seen?  He should be able to pick anything he wants.  Check with the school, talk with him to the coaches.  And good luck![/quote]

Your experience a decade or two ago isn't particularly relevant in today's world where many kids start in sports league at the age of five.  Dd started field hockey in 4 th grade, most of the other girls had been playing since first grade.  [/quote]

NP here and I agree and disagree :-).  I agree that kids start sports earlier now, and when I played field hockey 30 years ago, none of the girls had ever held a stick before taking it up in 7th grade but that would be very different now.  However, I also agree with the spirit of the first poster in that in a small school with a no cut policy, there are always going to be beginners in most sports so you should just try what you want.  That having been said, I'd probably still encourage my DC to pick running or tennis because those are sports he can continue into adulthood.  [/quote]

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