I hate the BY model. I am the middle school coach for a local team and I have several 06 players who are on a winning BY travel team, a playoff team, a large organization team. They are the best players on their travel team. I watched a few of their AA games and was shocked at the disparity between top player and bottom player, and those in between. It looked no different to me than the disparity that you see on all Tier 3 middle school teams. The top 3-4 players on the team carried the others and that's not good for development of anyone. If these top 06 players had been placed on a team with the better 05 players in the organization it would have been much more beneficial to their development. Likewise, the "lesser" skilled 06 players would have benefited from playing with other "lesser" skilled 05 players. In other words, several of these kids should have been on A Major teams with mixed age rather than BY AA. I realize this is a common theme in all of the posts here, I'm simply agreeing with it wholeheartedly. I think Saucey's response was spot on. FWIW, I do not have a son on my middle school team. For my son, (he's a midget player), I've always wanted him to be on a team where he is in the middle of the pack talentwise... a few players better, and a few who are weaker.