Reply to Summer swim kids swimming in “wrong” age group

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s an interesting point. My son is a small 7 and he is racing against kids that turned 9 mid season. There is a huge difference between a 7 year old and a 9 year old in height, weight, strength. [/quote]

Hang on…wait til your swimmer is 11 swimming against that kid when he’s 13. [/quote]

You poor thing. Your 11 year old swimmer must not be very fast. My 11 year old swimmer can hold their own against the 13 year olds. [/quote]
Gosh.  You're an awful person.  Get help.

[b]Parents of kids with summer birthdays are used to always having their kid be the youngest.  It happens over and over.  It seems a bit ridiculous to hear the parents of kids with school year birthdays to suddenly get bent out of shape that their kid no longer has the advantage in just this one thing.[/b]  They'll harp on and on about how redshirting is wrong and age cut offs must be respected.  Or how after 1st grade it doesn't really matter that their kid is 12 months older, that doesn't give an advantage, their kid is just very athletic.  Yet here there is just one June 1st cutoff--the only one I've ever heard of--and those same parents are up in arms.  Well, welcome to how it feels.  It's no different than my 8 yo being in basketball tryouts with almost 11 yos who have already hit puberty and have 40 lbs and 14 inches on her.  (And in this case the disadvantage is only for the fun summer season, your kid can still do winter swim with age cutoffs.  With basketball it's the same cutoff for rec, AAU and travel so she'll never have an opportunity to not be the very youngest.)[/quote]

Yes, its this exactly that is rubbing me the wrong way.  I have 2 summer bday kids (who are not club swimmers).  When I first read this thread, I thought well I was not allowed to make excuses for my kids behavior in school "because they were the youngest" nor do I make excuses in all the other sports they participate in by grade level where redshirted kids are literally 3 years older than my kids.  I just let them play the sport and strive to get better.  I have one kid that is tiny and that kid is often 8-10 inches shorter than the other kids on the soccer field.  They have had to learn over the years not to be afraid to get in there and mix it up with the bigger kids if they want to get the ball.

Let's be real, for most/all of our kids sports is a way to have fun, teach discipline and sportsmanship.  This thread leaves a bad taste in my mouth about swim in general.  I am so happy to watch my kids do the cheers, hang over lanes to encourage their friends and goof around between races (especially after 2 years of covid).  Parents who are complaining about a random date, please don't ruin it for the rest of us.[/quote]
This is a little different though because there are defined age groups in summer swim, but then if your birthday falls in an 8 week period you are allowed to swim in an age group that you have aged out of. It’s also weird to see the listing of the kids’ ages in heat sheets and see Larla Smith age 10 when everyone knows that Larla Smith is actually age 11. [/quote]

This happens in other sports, though.  It happens in baseball, where the age cutoff for the 6+ summer tournaments my kids played in was May 1, so kids (including one of mine) were playing ___U baseball up to 2-3 months after they turned the next age (i.e., playing 9U baseball for the summer after turning 10 in May).  And yeah, everyone knows that a fair number of kids in the tournament playing 9U (or 10U, or whatever) are not actually that age.  The point is that they created a defined, one year age group - which in that case, is May 1 - April 30 - and everyone with a birthday in that one year age band is in that age group.

My kids are relatively young, but I swam growing up, eventually on scholarship at an NCAA division 1 program- genuine question, do these 15-18 kids not do high school swimming?  We did club swimming growing up, but the focus was the HS season, where I was a 14 year old 9th grader swimming against 18-19 year old HS seniors.  I'll be honest, I'm struggling to understand why this is so harmful, particularly on the girls' side.  And if the concern is that kids are returning to summer league after a year in an NCAA program, then prohibit that- a strictly age-based rule won't do it.  I (and plenty of other kids, I'm sure) was 18 until September of my sophomore year of college and could have competed even if you changed the age ranges.
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