LaxPower Back-Up Stick

HooDat wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 4:59 pm No one said there weren't good/great lacrosse players. An "all-star team" from today could probably beat an "all-time All-Star" team with no problem. Today's players are better athletes and have received far more coaching at a much more technical level.

That is different than the growth of the sport. And from my vantage point, rec lacrosse has stopped growing. And rec lacrosse is the early indicator.

I don't have a huge problem with a lack of growth. I just don't like the sacrifice the game of lacrosse has made so a couple dozen of guys can make six-figures off the game at the expense of rec league play.

HooDat wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 4:59 pm No one said there weren't good/great lacrosse players. An "all-star team" from today could probably beat an "all-time All-Star" team with no problem. Today's players are better athletes and have received far more coaching at a much more technical level.

That is different than the growth of the sport. And from my vantage point, rec lacrosse has stopped growing. And rec lacrosse is the early indicator.

I don't have a huge problem with a lack of growth. I just don't like the sacrifice the game of lacrosse has made so a couple dozen of guys can make six-figures off the game at the expense of rec league play.

wgdsr wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 5:40 pm ya, don't have any problem if the sport's not "growing". decades ago, it was pretty cool to be able to see new areas get it. new schools in established areas. more young kids being able to play before high school.
it certainly would be cool if the crawl kept happening to places that have no other option than baseball and t&f in the spring. wyoming, arizona, mississippi, south carolina, north dakota, oklahoma.

now that we are here --- and on many local levels, given what it has turned into, i'm more than ok with it not "growing" in an established area. but it will be contracting, if it's not already, in an area near you.

https://www.uslacrosse.org/about-us-lac ... ion-survey

there are some participation reports up to 2017. sport grew that final year, but only if you count 0.1% as growing.
first overall downtick, maybe ever, from 2016-17, in youth participation. if you separate out the girls, youth boys was down over 3 %, from 292k+ to 283k+. do i expect something similar when we see 2018 and 2019? i do. that's with newer areas growing, adding high schools, new rec youth leagues in non-hotbeds, etc.

at a pretty long-term, successful high school for lacrosse, had 3 freshmen come in for 2018-19 school year.

in the swath of our metro area, i wouldn't be surprised if the 5,000+ # of players is down 50% in the rec league over the last 2-3 years, based on the now number of teams. although there are too many get-your-d1-scholly-here club travel teams in the area, they don't make a dent in that number.

people used to say this was a sport for the rich preppies. we're either coming full-circle or not much has changed. bring your wallet, or find another ball. or maybe the xbox machine is just cheaper than all of them, after all,

ABV 8.3% wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 4:04 pm

pcowlax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 2:49 pm In CT now we dream of Rowland compared to the unfathomable idiocy of the past two. All of the posts about CT other than Primetime, obviously, were sarcastic mocking of his ridiculous description of CT as a blasted wasteland due to a few hedge funds leaving. And no, something I posted which seemed to launched much of this furor was that the CSU coach leaving, or CSU folding lax or CSU lax thriving, none of these have any bearing on the future trajectory of lax as a sport. Cleveland St. for gods sake is not the canary. Declining participation in more recent expansion regions due to the cost and time commitment of clubs certainly could be. I will say however that soccer has survived decades of escalating club costs, weekly summer tournaments and, vastly more threatening than anything in lax, full shifting of top players out of even the clubs and to year round ODP and they are still doing OK. Plenty to criticize about clubs but they need not spell the end of lacrosse.

On the men's side? gotta be kidding me. Has the mens national team ever scored a goal in regulation time? Didn't even make it into the World Cup. pathetic. Guess all those club players are good

pcowlax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 7:42 pm

ABV 8.3% wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 4:04 pm

pcowlax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 2:49 pm In CT now we dream of Rowland compared to the unfathomable idiocy of the past two. All of the posts about CT other than Primetime, obviously, were sarcastic mocking of his ridiculous description of CT as a blasted wasteland due to a few hedge funds leaving. And no, something I posted which seemed to launched much of this furor was that the CSU coach leaving, or CSU folding lax or CSU lax thriving, none of these have any bearing on the future trajectory of lax as a sport. Cleveland St. for gods sake is not the canary. Declining participation in more recent expansion regions due to the cost and time commitment of clubs certainly could be. I will say however that soccer has survived decades of escalating club costs, weekly summer tournaments and, vastly more threatening than anything in lax, full shifting of top players out of even the clubs and to year round ODP and they are still doing OK. Plenty to criticize about clubs but they need not spell the end of lacrosse.

On the men's side? gotta be kidding me. Has the mens national team ever scored a goal in regulation time? Didn't even make it into the World Cup. pathetic. Guess all those club players are good

Uh, guess we are talking about two different things. Youth men’s soccer in US doing great, as is women’s. Men’s adult has to play the 190 countries in the world where men’s soccer is their sports life. Outside of 5-10 countries, 0 nations give a dump about women’s soccers. FYI there is no high school or youth club women’s soccer in Chile. To put things in perspective, and yes, I will send you the links, in preparation for this World Cup cycle the US women’s national team lost to a 15 year old boys academy team. This was as good a 15 year old team as there is in the US but, yeah. Australia, who has a very solid women’s team lost 7-0 to a 15 year old boys team before the last World Cup. Any decent college team beats them 6-0, the men’s teams beats them 35-0. So, yeah, you know nothing about soccer or the idea of there being a world sport, because there is. US lax has to beat Canada and...........

pcowlax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:44 pm Friendly, hostile, call it what you will. When the US national men’s team loses to 15 year old girls, come back about the sexist disparity in how these teams are treated. Not sure how we got here on the lax page but on any sport, your salary is predicated on your revenue generation. That’s that. You make money, you earn money. The last men’s World Cup took in 6 billion, this women’s took in 130 million, by percentage of revenue, the women earned about 20% to the men’s 6%, please pay some attention to reality.

pcowlax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:44 pm Friendly, hostile, call it what you will. When the US national men’s team loses to 15 year old girls, come back about the sexist disparity in how these teams are treated. Not sure how we got here on the lax page but on any sport, your salary is predicated on your revenue generation. That’s that. You make money, you earn money. The last men’s World Cup took in 6 billion, this women’s took in 130 million, by percentage of revenue, the women earned about 20% to the men’s 6%, please pay some attention to reality.

Homer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:40 pm Vote on what you'd like this thread to have more of!

-- Hilarious inside jokes about Fairfield County.

Wheels wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:52 pm

Homer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:40 pm Vote on what you'd like this thread to have more of!

-- Hilarious inside jokes about Fairfield County.

There is only one choice here.

Fight me if you think otherwise. I'll be at the Sea Grape on Reef Rd.

Wheels wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:52 pm

Homer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:40 pm Vote on what you'd like this thread to have more of!

-- Hilarious inside jokes about Fairfield County.

There is only one choice here.

Fight me if you think otherwise. I'll be at the Sea Grape on Reef Rd.

Homer wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 10:15 pm

pcowlax wrote: ↑Fri Jul 12, 2019 8:44 pm Friendly, hostile, call it what you will. When the US national men’s team loses to 15 year old girls, come back about the sexist disparity in how these teams are treated. Not sure how we got here on the lax page but on any sport, your salary is predicated on your revenue generation. That’s that. You make money, you earn money. The last men’s World Cup took in 6 billion, this women’s took in 130 million, by percentage of revenue, the women earned about 20% to the men’s 6%, please pay some attention to reality.

I don't read the water cooler/politics stuff, but at least in terms of the actual lacrosse boards, this is easily the weirdest thread in the thus far short history of Fan Lax.

I might be missing some of the layers of double-secret ironic innuendo, but the way I read ABV's original post was that whatever's going on with soccer in this country at youth level, it hasn't produced a demonstrably better men's national team than what we had in 2002 -- quite the contrary. Of course the men have a wholly different competitive situation to deal with as opposed to the women's team, but I didn't take the post to be about that. I thought it was about whether the shift to club & academy vs. rec & HS play had positively or negatively affected talent identification and development. The claim was that it certainly hasn't helped, which seems right to me.

pcowlax wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 9:48 am As for me, I never intended to say, and didn’t say, that the club model had greatly improved our national men’s team, relative to the top ~35 teams they still suck (though they would pound the team from 20 years ago). In the context of talking about a lax bubble bursting I was just saying that while there are many things to lament about the way club is run, soccer moves from rec teams to travel teams to club teams to ODP and it has not ruined their participation level. It can be done. Having a large club scene need not destroy youth lacrosse. Sea Grape is great for a drink, if I’m eating outside on the water I’ll take The Whelk

pcowlax wrote: ↑Sun Jul 14, 2019 10:18 am What in the hell are you talking about? Maybe dial down the ABV.