Coach P: I don't have the data -- and I could be wrong -- and finally, even if I did have the data, I'd have to get permission because at the time I was collecting and analyzing it on behalf of a club doing affiliation planning.
However, here's what I vaguely remember. AYSO was less attractive than USCS because AYSO cost more and had a 50% playing rule. AYSO was closer to USYSA/SCYSA on registration fees but the supporting fees brought it in lower. USCS was the lowest priced option. Also, both AYSO and USCS tended not to nickel and dime clubs to death with all sorts of fees for coach passes, DOC passes, inter-state travel (not a big deal on recreation, of course), and the like. Tournament costs were tremendously different between SCYSA and USCS with USCS being much lower. The registration costs associated with USCS were ***much*** lower -- the need for a paid registrar with USCS was virtually non-existent while it's a really tough job with SCYSA/UYSA because of the requirements for registration. As I remember, the insurance options were about the same -- but I'm not an insurance expert and their were others that looked at that.
In recreation, a $10 registration fee is big because it represents such a relatively high proportion of the overall fees paid to the club. And of course, recreation tends to be resource intensive because of the number of players -- in other words, you take in more than 10X less than select but your field space requirements aren't 10X lower.
I personally think that all of recreation needs to move away from the SCYSA -- not because those folks are bad, but because we need an absolute rock-bottom lower priced option that we can pass along to the clubs that they can pass along to kids and lower the barrier to entry for recreation as much as possible. Then again, the truth is that I don't think registration fees for recreation are the limiting factors here -- I think what is needed is for some affiliating organization to take those fees and invest them back into growing the sport.
