Reply to Trapped/Re-aging Families, How are you having the conversation?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The more this conversation goes on, the more I still feel like just a handful of people even get this.  So here's a few relevant pieces of info:

1. The idea here is for kids to play with their school grade. Every US Club/US Soccer communication says this.  7/31 is the earliest cutoff meaning as long as your kid started school on time, they are allowed to play with their school grade.  This was the goal.

2. The term they use for kids playing a grade below because of school cutoff and birthday after Aug 1 is "force down" not play down, because playing down isn't allowed, but playing up is.  So a "force down" is when a club forces a player to play with a lower grade.  This was not the intent of the change.

3. One of the specified goals was to help facilitate college recruiting because college scouts are usually recruiting a specific graduation year.  They are not often looking at multiple age groups at once and they will be going where the majority of the players they need are playing.  If you aren't playing with your graduation year, you are at a significant disadvantage and this was acknowledged so the change is truly meant to align this. [/quote]

On point 1, for as much as that is true, they also said like 100 times that kids will be misaligned no matter what they do because there's no universal start date for school. There also was an emphasis that the grade focus was to keep classmates together to increase participation.

On point 2,  I've seen more references for "forcing up" and to be very careful about it.

On point 3, yes, they wanted to make it easier for recruiting, but like point 1, explaining it won't be perfect. This is why many clubs are approaching things on a case-by-case basis.

So, across the spectrum, we're going to see a bit of everything, especially at first. As a parent, this means ask a lot of questions, especially of coaches and those who currently are involved in college recruiting (if that's the goal). Be wary of doom and gloom/I've got all the answers people.[/quote]

So which leagues will have Grade instead of Age groups? 
Since you can't have both

Or are we looking forward to going to a tournament in October with brackets that say
U12 6th Grade 
U12 5th Grade

Thought US youth soccer couldn't get any worse [/quote]

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