First off, with travel costs, AAA is costing people in CA more than 7-10k. A lot more for a top tier team that is traveling to play in the big showcase tournaments. The families involved have all done this, so they know what they've paid.
None of them are paying full price. They are all receiving some significant level of financial aid.
Now I happen to know how SSM works, and the more they want your kid, the more they are likely to dip into their scholarship pool and offer up. SSM starts to notice and recruit kids who have already shown that they are in the top percent of kids their age nationally. I happen to know of 2 kids who went to SSM, that were recruited from the same Bantam minor team, went to SSM with substantial scholarships, and had multiple elite hockey program D1 scholarship offers. One kid just played in the USHL playoffs, and the other is on the US Development team. They paid less than what their travel hockey costs were, and of course not only played hockey, but got a private education.
The SSM teams play hockey for 7 months of the year and up to 70-ish games, so the Ice time is going to be on a completely different level from playing Tier. We can pretend this approach doesn't work, or might offer a marginal value in comparison to traditional travel hockey, but then you'd have to pretend that the results don't back up the hype, when in fact they do. SSM has won 24 national championships with it's roughly 8 Bantam, Midget and Girls teams. And their alumni list is chock full of current NHL players.
Certainly many of these players are so good they very well might have made it to the same level of success but we'll never know, because they all attended SSM at least for a few years.
