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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NVSL used to require you to age up if you had a summer birthday.  The rule was changed 10 years ago?  Maybe 12.  They made a bunch of changes at the time.  I think it was tough on coaches and would change relay teams mid-summer, etc.  But this was before all the software that teams now use.

It would be easy now to go back to that rule and not have it as disruptive.  I think that there is something to be said for it since at least with summer it is crazy to have a 13 year old swimming as a 11-12 or a 15 year old in 13-14.  Or a 19 year old in the 15-18 group.  [/quote]

This was why I quit swimming. I think the cutoff was 7/1 back in the day. My birthday is in June. So, the summer I turned 13, I was swimming 13-14 with a girl whose birthday was early July and turned 15. I just couldn’t compete. [/quote]

But you get that this might have happened anyway even if kids aged up on their birthday, it just would have been a girl with an August birthday instead of a July birthday. That girl didn't magically become a better, faster swimmer the day she turned 15 -- she was also better and faster than you when you were both 14. And if you'd stuck it out, then the following summer you would have been swimming against kids as old as 18 years old. Do you think you would have gotten so much better in that one year that this would have been easy? Like do you think the day you turned 15, you would also suddenly be a better, faster swimmer? Nope.

There's always someone better and faster. Always. If someone is going to quit for this reason, they were going to quit anyway. Unless you want to do away with age groups altogether, there will always be a youngest and an oldest within any given cohort. My kid is almost always the youngest in her cohort, but in certain summer activities, including swim, she's sometimes the oldest. I'd honestly rather she be right in the middle so this was never an issue because both pose issues. But the idea that it's ONLY unfair to kids with June birthdays in swimming is absurd -- all kids with summer birthdays deal with this and it's just a fact of life.[/quote]

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