[papagrit]

I'm not sure that restricting kids over a certain weight from being able to run the football makes that much sense. Is a kid who weighs 80 lbs. more likely to get hurt by tackling a 150 lb. kid or by getting tackled by that same 150 lb. kid?

I'm sure that if the larger kid is a ball carrier, that causes contact between the smaller kid and the larger ball carrying kid to occur more often which increases the chance for a smaller kid to get hurt. That is pretty much the idea I suppose. I certainly am not saying that I want ANY child hurt during any sort of football game. I just said that it stunk that my older son who has good athletic ability was slotted in to be a lineman and never got a chance to see how much "skill" player potential that he might have attained. By the way, both of my boys were NEVER held back for athletics so their age was appropriate for class. They both graduated at age eighteen and were just larger than their classmates. Perhaps instead of age splitting the youth group football into classes, it should be size. I don't know, there really isn't a good all around answer because then you have really young big kids playing against much older big kids.
Anyone can say what they want to about the youth league football ONLY being about teaching kids and not about being competitive. I agree, it SHOULD be like that, but, it isn't. My boys played youth league basketball and there wasn't even a score kept on the scoreboard, but, the parents in the stands were either writing down on a note each time a team scored or were holding their fingers out counting baskets on their hands during games. In football, the team that won the most usually had the most obnoxious parents with the Mama's being worse than the Dad's on crowing about who won. Competitive nature just leaks out and the ugliness some people can show usually comes to the surface. I know everyone on here who has a kid playing youth ball can remember some obnoxious A-hole that lorded over everyone about how well his team was doing and how great his kid was going to be and the kids ages are all like 5 to 8 years old. The superstar kid of the A-hole that I remember didn't even play football in high school and the boy has made the paper a few times........in the court section. Just a shame really.