Let me try to explain the fees this way. There is currently a structure in place where a child can play soccer and not pay a tryout fee. This structure is built to provide soccer to the largest audience possible while trying to keep costs low for the players. It is called recreational soccer.
Club soccer on the other hand is meant for the select few players that want to enjoy a more demanding soccer environment and are willing to pay the high costs involved in bringing it to them. They want to have qualified coaches, more practices, and greater competition to name a few. All these things take a very heavy financial commitment from the club and the player. The club is a lot of times forking over loads of money before they collect a cent from the players. There are many logistical reasons for this; such as ordering uniforms, t-shirts, locking in coaches, land fees, soccer equipment and on and on. If the club waited for the money to be collect by all the parents then the season would be over before they could afford anything. Now that you realize a club has to prepay all these items then you can make the leap that they would like to know in advance how many players they will be fielding. Locking in the coaches is one of the biggest expenses for a club and also one of the hardest things to do. To top it off parents and players are asking clubs to tell them who the coaches are 3 months before tryouts even start for every team. So how does a club know how many players are actually looking to play and provide the financial commitment and not just signed up for the heck of it because it was free? How does a club know how many coaches to lock up? Is it fair to ask a coach just to wait to see if there is work, or does the coach have a reasonable expectation that the club will do its best to make sure they have a team to coach? So the fee is earnest money for the club. It is really a very small fee, when you consider the cost of club soccer, to keep people from presigning up to 10 different clubs with the intention of only showing up for one or none at all, which happened a lot when we had free try-outs. The other clubs being a backup just in case little Salley or Johnny doesn't make the "A" team. This helps the club to better organize the distribution of players, coaches, and field usage.
kdlsc: I am curious to what volunteering at the club level you have done.
