It's also too obvious who the redshirted kids are because they have to play league sports (also huge in my area) with their agemates, so other parents clearly see what's going on.
Actually sports more often exacerbates the problem by encouraging parents with "younger" kids to deliberately redshirt. We live in a community where the little league baseball (which is huge here) cutoff is May 1 with the school district cutoff on September 1. So my June birthday son couldn't play baseball with his grademates (no exceptions allowed regardless of athletic ability). Our soccer league is more enlightened and actually forces the older kids to play with their age mates, but lets the younger kids automatically play up (provided they are young for their grade). In our community more than 80% of August birthdays (and practically all of the boys), 70% of July birthdays, and 60% of June birthdays are redshirted. Even in May, the average is like 40%. Since redshirting is done much more often for boys than girls, one can only imagine the percentage of boys that are redshirted when the percentage of boys is broken out.
I actually think that there should be a high school league prohibition on 19 year old high school athletes. This would stop the redshirting problem in its tracks.
Birthdate is the third line down at the top left of the first page.
