I played baseball about the time it was invented (just joking) when it was cheap. I spent a good deal of my adult life coaching basketball. Some of that was AAU teams with kids who were coming out of high school and really DID have to be seen to go on. We went to tournaments around the country, and the scouts were there (360 at a Houston tournament where my boys finished second). My teams were usually evenly split between white and black kids. None of the black kids could afford the ridiculous cost of these trips. At the time, I had money (don't anymore), so I paid their way. The experience with the parents was not good: I suspect that they resented that "whitey" had to pay for their kids and that they usually could not afford to travel and see their kids play. I don't blame them for feeling that way: I would feel the same. I didn't resent doing what I did because I loved those kids. Some of them went higher and would not have had that opportunity without that team and its travels. But I can't even imagine how much the organizers of those tournaments made off them, and I can't imagine how some of those teams got themselves to the tournaments. The colleges that benefitted from them really should have been paying the tab, but the idiot NCAA rules prohibited that. (How convenient.) Despite all that, I have wonderful memories of that time. But I do have sadness about the thousands of boys who were excluded by money from the system. And although I only coached a couple of girls teams, I have no doubt that all of the above applies to them as well.