I think rec teams should be for everyone, but they aren’t. In our area sports start at 5 or 6. They’re the training ground for travel teams and travel teams are the pathway to the high school teams. It took me a while, and involvement in other youth activities, to understand that a lot of the parents knew each other and teams were handpicked from the beginning. It wasn’t an accident that a majority of the kids my children knew from another youth activity ended up on the same teams. They all moved up to travel teams together then onto the high school teams. It wasn’t skill that got them on their teams at 5, it was who they knew. They developed skills because they had the coaches who knew what they were doing.
By middle school our area doesn’t have enough kids left to hold a rec league. The majority are doing travel and if you can’t pay you can’t compete. If your kid was on the regular rec team and not groomed for the travel teams they aren’t going to make the cut either. The parents who can afford it pay for less expensive activities, but the only sports you can get are usually individual sports. Unless your kid is a natural you can pretty much tell who’s destined for the high school team and who’s not based on which rec team they end up on.