squeeze every last dollar they can out of people. I'm in my 30s and when I was a kid pretty much everyone played basketball for at least a rec team. It created a larger pool of players and some kids who were late bloomers could still get decent coaching/development and they didn't give up completely on the sport. Rec programs now are a joke and basically the only option for development now are AAU/travel teams which are expensive. So a lot of kids give up on the sport early and those that continue with basketball have to fork over ridiculous amounts of money to do so.