@mylo_cat, I think I know who in particular helped you. Rock solid customer service. Excellent display skills. He used cordage instead of screws to put up display racks. I hope you get to visit the shop and thank the staff in person. ETA: They would love a thank-you with picture. Seriously, they work for bonuses in smiles.

I don't understand the math here. Rosters for most varsity level team sports are 20-25 kids -- baseball, basketball, soccer. If your eligible demographic is 200 kids, that's at least 10% of the grade. But that's also probably 50% of the hopeful demographic that actually wants to play the sport.  Not every kid in the grade wants to play a sport or make the commitment to play it at such a competitive and all consuming level, but scouting seems to like to assume that everyone does.  There are also plenty of nonschool options for kids that don't make Varsity cuts and they are not all high end travel. Like scouting, there are teams and leagues at all levels of play.  Do a certain percentage of kids and parents aspire to be the star starting player in a sport and pursue it that way? Yes, of course, but scouting seems to like to exaggerate that number to blame declining interest in scouting on sports.

On the same day you shared this link, I received an email from my local council advertising a spot on its 2026 Philmont contingent for $2,400. 😛 I wonder how much the decline in high school football participation (where roster size is unlimited) has led to parents funneling their kids to other team sports (where roster sizes are limited)? If you Google this, I think you'll find participation hasn't dropped but rather remained stagnant even as the US population has increased. I still think the biggest issue is scarcity, which drives an "arm's race" for parents to get their kid on a high school team. Take a large suburban high school with 1,600 kids - that's 400 kids per class (or roughly 200 of each gender). When they become upperclassmen, how many kids in each class can actually play varsity soccer, basketball, or baseball/softball? 10? That might even be generous, depending on the number of underclassmen pushing for a roster spot. Even an inclusive sport like cross country caps varsity rosters at 7 or 8. You can have 50 boys or girls go out for cross country every year, but most of them will just be participating in a glorified workout club (not that there's anything wrong with kids getting exercise after school).

You guys have to be careful here. A "day camp" is also an event that 1 day but "recurring". So say you have a 1 day skills tournament district event. If you repeat that within the same calendar year months apart and with a different name but exactly the same "whatever" it is now a "day camp" and must follow NCAP.  Like I said, there is a lot of gray area out there and there are too many 22 year olds that can pivot to a different career and nothing worth a lick out there making decisions and spouting non-sense. 

We have a very good relationship with our CO and as long as we continue to support their service program to the community they not only charter us but cut all of the units a check to cover advancement and administrative costs. This allows us to focus all cost on the average cost of an outing; we do make adults pay their own way on outings which also keeps the costs down for the scouts (part of that is so many of us leaders would be camping regardless so we've created low cost for scouts troop). My troop is also in a state where there are ways to get state campsites for free/super reduced for youth organizations; so when we use state properties for camping we're basically cutting the site cost out. The troop in the past has had campouts as cheap as $4 a head, there is a neighboring troop that does this as well. To be clear we've average the cost of outings to $25 to make everything easier and more consistent for parents. I personally think we could get the cost down closer to or below $15. We have a very large troop so there is an economy of scale that we have yet to leverage correctly. This methodology becomes a success-begets-success situation. As the average number of scouts and adults per outing goes up, the average cost of site rentals spreads thinner and thinner across more people. We still have some outings where portion sizes are out of control; we need to get better at teaching the scouts to read portion sizes (especially on dehydrated foods) more accurately; we could shave some cost off of food as well.  Circling back to adults paying their own way; I know that there are units that can't do this. We have an economy of scale situation where we just re-registered 34 troop leaders and we're looking to pick up at least 4 more at crossover in March. There is a core of about 10 of us that go on every outing, we have about another 5 that do some outings. The remainder of leaders perform that more administrative purpose. A troop that has 6 leaders period can't do this right? If you have 3 leaders that can't afford pay their own way on every outing the troop is forced to figure something out which is often that the cost is passed on to the scouts. This economy of scale situation also keeps costs down for the scouts as there are so many of us that just order something online and donate it when the troop needs it instead of the troop having to budget a lot for equipment maintenance and replacement.