Austin - I completely agree with you – the hand-picking, the skill sets learned, the destination of the teams; we saw so much of that with club soccer and competition dance with our younger two. We learned that it was necessary if they wanted to play in HS; our older two didn’t do much club sports and we changed our tune with the younger two.
So at our lowish SES school, we do have kids (new to the country) who come in and can play and are amazing athletes. I rarely see that upset in neighboring districts which aren’t considered low SES; I think there the sports pipeline is more prevalent. I appreciate how our athletic director at HS says The Best Kids Will Play. It’s not too political.
One cool thing that’s happened lately in our largish city – high school Y sports have become a “thing” – for fun; mainly basketball. The kids who don’t make their HS teams have been playing Y Ball; there were over 40 11th/12th grd. teams playing through just one Y last year. Boys loved it. It reminded me of intramural sports in college.