New division age cutoff

[Sybrandt01]

I’ve been doing this for a long time and divisions were always based on age on 12/31 with the option to play up especially in the fall when the girl would move up for spring and summer ball. The directors of the two leagues I coach for both said that USSSA had changed the division age cutoff to 8/31 rather than 12/31 so all of our summer 8s had to move up to 10s for fall which wasn’t ideal since even our 2nd year 8s only had one year of travel ball experience due to COVID; they would have really benefited from of few more months of comp 8 before spring rec. we also had to move our 3 true 8s (including my daughter) up because we were only able to field one team. Luckily two of those 8s are among the striver players in the team… Anyway, I was told that the USA Softball tournaments were abiding by the new age cutoff but AST tournaments were not going to until next season. For this reason, given my young team, I registered only for USSSA tourneys. There were a couple of teams there that straight up told me that they kept their summer 10s teams from the summer in tact even with the girls that should have been playing 12s with the 8/31 cutoff… There is a huge difference between an 8 and an 11 year old girl so said games were an eye opening learning experience for my girls-lol When I search for details on this age change, I find very little concrete information and really just worked off of what our league director said (not too involved so I pretty much ran the show…) Anybody able to shed some more light on this please? Thank you