@Dude - the old man does double duty as the current president of Baseball BC... most of what you posted sounds about right to me, though I'll have to ask about someone on the Blaze being on the Brewers payroll... that's interesting... Brett Lawrie did get drafted out of the Blaze by the Brewers... Morneau was the North Delta Blue Jays and Loewen was Whalley Chiefs... that league certainly produces talent, and they play a LOT of baseball...
anyway, the BCSPL clubs do have robust hardship programs, but this misses the point. people vote with their feet and we've no chance of 100% retention or attraction rates for low income families.
when I was chair of the Burnaby Selects, back in the maximum 3 OOD rule days, we had the smallest catchment of players (Guidford alone was bigger), were geographically vulnerable to Burnaby kids bailing (hello CMF), had no paid coaches, no academy, and our kids paid like $600 a year - all in.
our teams were routinely at or near the top of the tables. why? because our attraction and retention rates were relatively high. there are certain pockets of Burnaby with a ton of low income immigrants. Hockey? Not so much. Baseball? Pass. But soccer? That they know AND.. as it happens... are pretty damn good at.
I lost the fight over fees at the inception of the BCSPL. Sometimes you have to realize you're severely outnumbered both internally and externally and live to fight another day.
Yes Burnaby was very impressive from the mid-90's until, what, the early teen years when BCSPL began, and still produced some very strong metro teams after that? Like you said, when I played too, the coaches weren't paid and yet teams played superb football, all the top coaches were in the league as were all the top players. Cost was a fraction of today. Teams utilized the 3 OOD rule, by providing good coaching which attracted players. Todays insistence we need "a license pro coaches" is nice in theory, but folly in practice. TD's should be supervising training, demanding certain standards, and if coaches don't satisfy that be moved on regardless of license.