In professional sports the BEST players - Free Agent get the BIGGEST contracts. In our situation, the BEST most desired player is getting the BIGGEST discount. It is basically the same difference. Being the best at your craft has benefits, whether a hugh contract or a perk to play.
Huge difference - in professional sports, fans, networks, and merchandising across a huge number of market segments allow for the best professional athletes to be paid at the highest rates.
Here in youth sports and particularly lacrosse, if your "B" and "C" players disappear from an organization following a discounting practice exclusively targeting the "A" players, explain how the ARITHMETIC (to quote Bill Clinton) actually works.
Problem with your model is that it simply does not work across an entire club when you only award top players. The model just has to be need based (as with many colleges now) when awarding financial aid.
Now, having run many teams in youth sports, my methodology was always to take the total needed to operate the team and divide that among X-2 players (assuming that there were X players on the team). Our experience was that there were always two (on average) parents in this economy who might have been short and we would be able to carry the cost without embarrassing the parent or player. In fact, this information was carefully guarded even when we disclosed the annual budget to parents.
What does this mean in real cash? An annual fee per player of $2000.00 with 20 players would have an annual budget for the team at $40,000.00. Here, we would charge each parent $2200.00 ($40,000.00 divided by 18 payers) in order to make up for any team shortfall. If we were fully funded by all parents, we would take the excess ($200.00 x 20 payments) and use the money for an extra team tournament, meal expenses at the extra event, and additional training.
