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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Can someone explain to me what exactly the issue is? Like what are people upset about? I’ve read all the discussion and I don’t get it.

The age group spans 24 months right? The youngest and the oldest in the group will always be the same distance apart. The older one turning 11 in July doesn’t suddenly widen the gap.

Am I missing something? Do the people upset about it want narrower age groups so kids two years apart can’t compete together? [/quote]

I’ll preface this by saying I don’t have a dog in the fight. I have club swimmers with fall and spring bdays who don’t want to do summer swim.

People get incensed about “unfairness” in kids’ sports, except of course, if said “unfairness” favors your own kid. The idea that a kid who has orbited the earth eleven times can win a trophy or ribbon or whatever kids get that is emblazoned with the title “9/10 year old champion” is impossible for some people to get over. You can show them a calendar, explain the 24 month duration, explain that someone will always be the oldest or the youngest, but none of that will enable them to reconcile “11 years old” and “9/10 year old”.

Club swim solves this by taking every kid’s age the first day of the meet, but even there, people focus on “oh that kid is turning 13 tomorrow, while my kid just turned 11”. I admit, I do it sometimes. But at least every kid is actually the age on the ribbon or medal, so it shuts people up. It is totally impractical to have this policy for a short summer swim season. So either they should do it by grade (3rd/4th, 5th/6th etc) or call the groups something not age related (minnows, piranhas etc), or just draw the line somewhere and let people kvetch. If they didn’t have a bellyache about the age cutoff, they would grumble about something else. [/quote]

Do it by grade? Someone is always going to be the oldest and others the youngest. For my late August birthday kid, there are kids who are 18 months older than him in his grade due to red shirting. For a two grade level spread, that could mean a 30 month gap. How is that fairer?[/quote]

Organizing sports by grade is precisely what leads to sports-motivated redshirting, specifically in boys. Some people are blatant about and will just tell you they redshirted so their kid would have a better shot at playing at a high level. If you really want your kid to play varsity sports in high school, redshirting is actually pretty easy way to accomplish that, assuming they have any proclivity for the sport at all. A 19 yr old senior is going to make the team most of the time, especially in boys sports.

I'm for whatever rules prevent psychotic sports parents from trying to game the system to get their kid an advantage, because those people need to be controlled. For this reason, I support the age cut offs for summer swim, even though they don't benefit my kids, because if the rules make the obsessive, hyper-competitive parents mad, that means they are probably a good idea.[/quote]

Goodness, yes. Organizing by grade would be absurd - you now have March boys being redshirted to avoid being “too young.” You’ll have kids hitting puberty in the third grade by the time the idiot parents in the DMV stop redshirting to gain advantage. Travel and club sports are 1000 better because they use birth years, so your 7th grade 15 year old isn’t competing against kids who actually belong in the 7th grade. Grade based swim would be the dumbest idea ever for actual competition. [/quote]

Grade level swim happens at the high school level.[/quote]

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