O'brady,
Here's our experience.
We have five kids. My husband and I both work (self-employed). We take one or two long weekend-style vacations every year. That's it.
When we still had three or four kids living at home, we were not in a position to cover the costs of travel teams or camps for any of our kids sports, even though the youngest three were invited in various sports. That's just the way it was.
I've posted elsewhere that we live about two hours away from Phoenix, so not only was there the cost to play to consider (and the travel and hotels, etc.), but then we were two hours' drive away from where the teams were based.
For the last two years, we only had the last one at home, and he was able to do the following: played on a Junior Olympics team summer after soph year, played on Arizona's Junior Sunbelt team summer after junior year, played in a fall ball team that faced various AZ junior college teams during fall of senior year.
Went to one PG event in SoCal fall of senior year.
He also was playing summer league for his own high school team every summer.
That was it. That was what we felt we could afford. There were a lot of invitations that we just had to decline.
We loved the experience and got so much out of it. There was a little second guessing ("Should we be doing more????") but I think we're all satisfied with the amount of exposure we gave him. His older brothers and sister have cheered him the whole way and never voiced resentment that we didn't do the same for them when they were still in high school.
Now? He was drafted on the second day and is going to a top ranked JUCO next year. The future looks good.
I have to agree that any amount of exposure is better than none, but in our case, our somewhat limited exposure seems to have been enough. If I had a boatload of $$ or maybe one or two kids instead of five, I'm sure we would have spent more on any of the kids who seemed like they were serious about going for it.
ktcosmos