"Waiving fees at the city level addresses only one of the barriers that keep poor children from signing up to play soccer or baseball"
Transportation is a crucial issue, with many single parents juggling multiple jobs and multiple children who need to be in multiple places. Also, Gaithersburg is somewhat atypical in organizing leagues. Many cities and counties have exited youth sports, an arena now largely controlled by independent leagues that charge hundreds of dollars in fees, either for recreational programs or more expensive travel teams"
"Last year, nearly 70 percent of children from families making more than $100,000 played team sports, according to Project Play, an initiative on youth sports from the nonprofit Aspen Institute. That figure is nearly cut in half for families making less than $25,000.
And the greatest irony, experts say, is this: A youth sports culture that places an immense emphasis on winning — mostly cultivated by parents — is leaving some of the best athletes and potential teammates behind.
They can’t afford to swing $300 bats or lace up $250 hockey skates, and fewer are able to compete for college scholarships. In 1993, 12.6 percent of scholarship athletes came from families making $100,000 or more, according to an analysis of NCAA statistics. By 2008, that number doubled.
“It’s extremely frustrating, and it’s also extremely unfair,” said Diego Uriburu, executive director of Identity Inc., a Gaithersburg nonprofit group that helps Latino youth and their families in high-poverty areas. “These young people have natural athletic talent, and they are not getting to work on it. They don’t have the best coaches. They are excluded because they can’t afford it.”
Corporate sponsors are good at some niche funding or getting fields built, equipment donated but they have to have a profit motivation to do more. The illusion of running young sports clubs as non-profit's gives a false sense that fees are being used to better the community when they only serve a small fraction of people who can afford to pay anyway.
Some will say the cost of the infrastructure (fields, transportation, parking, etc) is so great that we just can't have affordable youth sports for the masses. But the truth is we have a lot of infrastructure that is owned and locked up by the (govt, schools, parks, etc) and they don't share, cooperate or even make the facilities accessible or affordable to anything but a local league if at all if you have connections,