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

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

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

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I get the frustration. I have a swimmer whose ability to make A meets is definitely impacted by the two kids in the AG who are 18mos older, and it's hard.  But that's life in almost everything.  As pointed out there are cutoffs for school and other sports, so no matter what date you choose you're going to have kids potentially 2 or more years apart.

[b]I'll also say now that we have middle schoolers it's hard emotionally on those summer birthday kids too as their friends move up an age group and they are stuck with the younger group.  My child has a friend who was a rising 8th grader this summer and was clearly unhappy to be in the age group with rising 6th graders while classmates moved into the teen ranks.  It didn't matter as much to them when they were all elementary schoolers but socially it was an impact.  No, it shouldn't be, but middle schoolers are irrational.[/b]

TLDL, changing the process might benefit my child so selfishly yes I'd say change it.  Reality is the cut-off is somewhere so I don't really stress about it.  It isn't worth a floating date for a 6wk season.    [/quote]

Having a summer birthday is hard and there is honestly no way to do age cutoffs so it is easier unless we moved all the age cutoffs to the middle of winter (Jan 1). And that would cause other problems, I'm sure.

Probably the most "fair" thing to do would be to eliminate age cut-offs altogether and have kids qualify for levels at the beginning of the season. But that would be expensive and time consuming and it also introduces another competitive layer which means more complaining and gaming of the system, not less. The arbitrary age cut off might seem unfair, but with kids activities sometimes it's preferable to have things be unfair in an obvious way that is easy for people to understand. It's easier for kids to grasp and deal with "yeah, I'm the youngest in this group so I don't do as well" than it is to understand "I didn't swim as fast on qualifying day so now I'm not even allowed to compete against the kids I swam with last summer."[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics