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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Thanks for the interesting age cutoff history. I enjoy parent rep drama as a parent rep myself!

Our club has a lot of really successful summer birthday swimmers. It definitely helps to turning 9 and competing against a group with a lot of 6-7 year olds, or turning 13 and competing against just-turned 11 year olds. Those are some big jumps physically and developmentally. I have a spring birthday kid so she is young for most activities that she does and the youngest in her grade because of pandemic redshirting. It is what it is so all you can do is observe it and shrug it off. When it gets my kid down, I gently remind her that she is being compared to kids who were in preschool when she was born. That helps give her some perspective.[/quote]
A “turning 9” won’t compete against a 6 year old. They will be competing against 7-8 year olds. The max age difference remains 24 months. 
Example: youngest kid in 7-8 bracket turned 7 on June 1st. Oldest kid was 8 on June 1st, turned 9 on June 2. 24 months.[/quote]

Do these people not realize no matter when the cutoff is, it’s still the same? There will always be one kid who is the youngest and one kid who is the youngest.  It’s like they can’t do math. [/quote]

Right except if you use actual birthdays, you don’t have a situation where a kid doesn’t belong in that age bracket at all, but is swimming it because a bunch of team reps got together and decided to change the rules from the way the rest of competitive swimming works in order to advantage their own kids. [/quote]

So your theory is that all the people whose kids have July birthdays created a conspiracy to game summer swim competitions to benefit for their kids. Ok.

The point is that even if you use actual birthdays, it disadvantages some kids and advantages others, because kids do not suddenly level up in size and maturity on the day of their birthday. It just means kids who have birthdays during the season will start the season as the oldest in their cohort and then have to switch midseason to become the youngest in a new cohort. They are the same child, the same size, the same ability. Can you not see how that creates all kinds of weird issues for these kids, as well as the kids they swim against?

What if, and I know this will sound crazy, but what if we just let kids swim and impressed upon them that the important thing is that they have fun and try their best, and that coming in first or dominating the competition, or coming in last for that matter, is not really the point?[/quote]

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