I find this interesting. What youth teams are having great success right now?
I’m most familiar with bgyfl. Park ridge falcons are bgyfl but they aren’t dominant. From what I understand the other Park Ridge team that was also named the Falcons but now is something else, is likely taking a lot of the top bgyfl park ridge program’s talent. Weird story there.
I would say the top bgyfl programs: Palatine, Downers, Wheaton. Tri-city usually has a TON of kids at each level but not the most dominant. Elmhurst Eagles are down. I think they lose kids to Bears each year. Bears has a decent amount of Elmhurst kids. It’s a feeder team for IC. Arlington Cowboys is not good, they’ve gotten decimated by the Arlington Dawgs, feeder for Hersey in Pop Warner. Glen Ellyn has some talent but you don’t see them at the highest level very often. They tend to be in d2(between lowest and highest levels of bgyfl).
Your old school bgyfl programs like Bartlett, Carol Stream, Lombard Falcons and Bloomingdale tend to dominate the D2 level. The talent isn’t great. Rarely do they get bumped up to the gold d1 (highest) level. When I was a kid Bloomingdale was unreal. Now? Not so much. Still some talented kids but not enough to dominate.
Sad to see the Hanover Park Hurricanes, a once dominant bgyfl program is no longer in bgyfl. Man when I was a kid they were an awesome program. As others have said demographic changes have shifted that area.
Another once proud program was Bensenville Bandits. They used to be great in the 80s and 90s. Went to KC a few times in pop warner. Bensenville was a blue collar town. Now it has also shifted with less kids coming out and when a kid is really good they end up at IC. Bandits are gone and been replaced by Bensenville Raiders. They were asked to leave by bgyfl after not winning more than a game or two in the entire organization.
Now that I think about it, all of those programs that are down tend to follow the trend where their high schools are these days.
Carol Stream down- GBN down
Bloomingdale down- lake park down
Hanover park gone- lake park down
Bartlett down- Bartlett HS down
Palatine, Wheaton and Downers all very good if you look at the standings of the top teams in each division. Biggest issue is that they all feed into different high schools so the talent doesn’t always get to the same high schools.
