Rec Sports
Rebels Lacrosse’s collapse leaves youth teams across Long Island struggling to regroup
• Hundreds of youth laxers across Long Island are without a team after the abrupt shutdown of Rebels Lacrosse, one of the region’s largest travel lacrosse organizations.
• The collapse has left families out thousands of dollars and high school juniors scrambling to salvage their college recruitment prospects.
When Craig McElwee’s 15-year-old son Brady worked a 10-hour shift at a Rebels Lacrosse tournament at Stony Brook last year, the teenager earned $150.
When he tried to cash his pay check, it bounced, his dad said.
“A league that collected one and a half million dollars in freaking dues… bounced a $150 check,” said McElwee, a Bethpage attorney whose son plays on the Raiders ’27 team, a squad of high school juniors that was affiliated with Rebels Lacrosse until the organization’s shutdown last week.
That bad check, McElwee said he now realizes, was an early warning sign of what would become a devastating collapse affecting hundreds of Long Island youth lacrosse players and their families.
On Thursday, the owners of Rebels Lacrosse LLC and its parent company Blatant LLC, Mike Brennan and Joe Potenza, announced that the company after 15 years in the travel lacrosse business had filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations, leaving dozens of boys and girls teams — ranging from elementary school through high school — without an organization, and families out of thousands of dollars in paid fees.
The outfit additionally has training programs for kids as young as 3 years old.
“You stole some kid’s dream,” McElwee said, expressing his frustration with Brennan and the organization’s collapse.
Brennan, in a statement to Greater Long Island, said the shutdown was not planned and happened quickly — right after several teams dropped out of the organization.
“We never had any intention of shutting down our business after 15 years, as we were currently in the middle of our 8th season with Rebels Lacrosse,” Brennan wrote. “Once we had a few teams get poached, and all file disputes, we realized we could no longer operate and immediately made the decision to close and consult a bankruptcy attorney.”
He added: “We have received an outpouring of support from former athletes, parents, and those who truly know us best, for the last 15 years of our work.”
The business of youth sports
Travel youth sports has evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry nationwide, with club lacrosse representing one of its most expensive sectors.
On Long Island, where lacrosse is deeply embedded in suburban culture, families routinely invest $3,000 to $6,000 per child annually for the privilege of playing on elite travel teams — and to increase their chances of earning scholarship money to play in college.
The investment extends far beyond tuition. Families pay for specialized equipment, tournament travel, and — for high school-aged players — premium recruiting services designed to attract college coaches.
For many families, particularly those in middle- and lower-income brackets, these expenses represent significant financial sacrifice, justified by the promise of college scholarships and opportunities their children might not otherwise access.
“The unfortunate truth is nowadays, if you don’t play club, you don’t play school ball because everybody is so far ahead of you,” McElwee said.
The stakes are particularly high for high school juniors, who face their most critical recruitment window. This is when college coaches attend tournaments and exposure events — often paid by travel organizations to do so — to evaluate prospects, when highlight videos are assembled, and when recruiting relationships are cultivated.
Losing a season — or even part of one — while in 11th grade can effectively end college athletic aspirations, parents said.
For the Raiders ’27 team, composed entirely of juniors from communities across Nassau and Suffolk counties, the Rebels collapse came at the worst possible moment.
But the team over the weekend received a lifeline of sorts from Team 91 lacrosse. The parents voted to stay together as a team, keep the same coaches and play under the Team 91 banner, albeit with renewed costs for things they had already paid for with Rebels, parents said.
Years of warning signs
The signs of trouble at Rebels Lacrosse had been accumulating for years, parents told Greater Long Island.
Parents said equipment promised never arrived and that tournaments were sometimes canceled at the last minute. Additionally, coaches went unpaid for months, according to multiple families.
But families tolerated the dysfunction, clinging to the relationships their children had built with teammates and coaches, hoping the organization would stabilize — or in the Raiders ’27 case — at least make it through next summer’s key recruitment period.
Kim Libertini, whose son Matthew, a junior at Locust Valley High School, plays defense for the Raiders ’27 team, paid for a Rebels helmet and equipment package when he joined the team as an eighth grader in 2022.
The helmet took a year and a half to arrive, she said. The gloves, bag, and sweats never came, she added.
“That tells you something was wrong,” said Libertini, an assistant superintendent with Cold Spring Harbor Central School District. “So, Matthew ended up playing with his Locust Valley helmet.”
Parents said that this past March — eight months before the shutdown — Brennan began pressing families for early payment for the following season, despite families having already paid in full for the current year.
“He reaches out in March saying, ‘We’re just trying to gather up and solidify next year.’ And I said, ‘You’re looking for payment in March?’” Libertini said. “At that point, I had already paid in full for the whole year.”
Parents said the demand for advance payment signaled cash flow problems.
The pattern extended to tournament operations. Parents said a scheduled tournament at Stony Brook in early November was canceled with Rebels telling parents that teams had dropped out.
Parents said they later learned from people familiar with the situation that unpaid officiating fees were the cause.
When Rebels attempted to place teams in a tournament operated by Team 91, a competing lacrosse organization, the teams weren’t added to the tournament registration app, said John Peragine, a Patchogue restaurateur whose son played on a seventh-grade Rebels team.
When some of the moms with Peragine’s son’s team called to complain, Peragine said, a Team 91 staff member delivered a blunt message: “Instead of you calling me and yelling at me, why don’t you call your directors and tell them to pay the bill?”
“That was the first time somebody actually spoke about what we’re all feeling,” Peragine said.
Not all families waited for the collapse to act.
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