I will be back to the CHS games. I have been dealing with other family issues and my boy's karate is taking up most of my time. If you think soccer can suck only try being on the traveling karate team. The US Open will cost me $200 just my child to enter.
I only asked because in Recreation you can have 5-10 teams in a league playing eachother in a given terriroty where you will probably have one maybe two traveling teams. So if you have a terrible coach in Recreation you move to another team in that grouping the following year, where club you could get screwed if you did teritory based teams and I think the competition between the clubs is a good thing, a free market is always better in the long run. HS sports is just like what you are saying and my daughter got stuck with an abusive coach for 4 years before he was fired. If it wasn't for some great club coaches she would have quit by her Junior year.
I don't think the system is perfect but I can't think of a better way to do it and if a club does think of a better way I am sure they will use it to their advantage.
One last note, I have sat on three different boards involving soccer and money has never been a driving factor for recruiting and retaining players. It has always been about increasing the club size so that economics of scale could allow the affordibity of better training. Such as being able to hire a full time DOC that has the sole intention of training the club players, or building lights for fields so players can train in the dark, or aquire more fields so that players are not training on top of eachother, the list goes on. I do not know a single board member that makes money from being on the board. Most boards members donate a lot of time and then turn around and pay the club to train their children the same fees as everyone else. Saying that clubs only do it for the money is just pure lazy and requires no thinking.