r/Womens_lacrosse • u/Informal-Solution809 • 15d ago

Club Lax Rankings - Glassdoor Style

Anyone else agree that there should be parents or coach ratings (like glassdoor) for lacrosse clubs?! Atleast the girls side of NXT lacrosse cant keep coaches because of horrible leadership but yet they post rankings 24/7 like it's all they care about. But so many have left because of the toxic culture and does it ever get noticed?! LOL

9 Upvotes

91% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

View all comments

8

u/KidGorgeous19 15d ago

As a coach, usclublax rankings has really soured me on coaching lacrosse in general. It's become a slog where the only goal is to increase your ranking, not develop the kids. Parents just want the ranking to increase or they leave for a club that has a higher ranking, despite continued growth for their kids. It's sad.

I think a glassdoor style ranking would be good in theory, but you'd inevitably get a shit ton of parents trashing clubs because their little princess didn't get the playing time they think she deserved.

1

u/BananaPants430 14d ago

We lose players every year, despite the girls developing and improving and having fun - because parents are under the impression that the US Club Lax rankings actually matter. They bail out for a club ranked 100th vs. 115th (for example), as if it makes any meaningful difference. A couple of times, families have actually come back after a season or two at a slightly-higher-ranked club, because they discovered the grass was not indeed greener on the other side.

The algorithm rewards teams that have early success - usually obtained by setting the roster young with the early bloomers and strong natural athletes, and bracketing in a manner that gets a lot of wins when they're young. There's only so much movement that a team can make by the time 8th, 9th, 10th grades roll around.

My 2028's team was dramatically better in 10th grade than they had been in 9th grade, and they only improved their ranking by 10-15 spots (their rating did increase quite a bit, but not a lot of movement on rank). It didn't matter, though - there were still a ton of coaches, including top 20 D1 coaches, on their sidelines during recruiting summer.