Ha! When I see parents facebooking about their tourney, I like to find out who they played, and I usually find myself laughing. I liked playing smaller tourneys because they were more intimate, but once we started playing tourneys with 50 or more teams, I liked it better! Especially Boulder IDT and TCS Nat's with all the big time programs from around the country. I got tired of playing the same teams from our area.
Learning quickly that classifications are all nonsense – or at least hard to get right. DD’s 14U team was a first year team this summer. Last fall and through the beginning of spring they placed themselves as C. The local tourney’s we played in were mostly C, and they were competitive at the start of summer, and pretty dominant by the end. Went to C nationals and steamrolled it – which was weird because locally the C teams we played we were back and forth with. Thought “nationals” would be competitive. Obviously locally we were all “misclassified”, but it worked when we played each other.
So starting this fall, coach is entering B tournaments. We went to one out of state this weekend and steamrolled it…got “accused” (or there were parent rumblings) that we were trophy chasing. Of course, we were like the 2nd team that signed up, and the tourney said “B”, so coach figured it would be more challenging.
They are in a fall league that has some “known” A teams, that starting this weekend should put us in our place. I think it's time for them to take your suggestion and slow down with the smaller 10-12 team tourneys and play some big ones.