After segregation ended, many jurisdictions defunded public pools rather than fund desegregated pools. Instead, wealthier whites used private ones. For a brief history:
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/u-t-expert-troubled-history-bla...
When it comes to who gets these coveted "easy" seats for college admissions, it's not enough to say that the sport is hypothetically inexpensive to participate in. You have to look at all the resources that make it possible to become an elite athlete in that sport. Most public schools--especially poor ones--don't have those resources.
One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melissa_Seidemann
Their demographics are white, but not majority, with ~30% hispanic. I don't know the demo in 2006 though:
https://www.greatschools.org/california/pleasant-hill/466-Co...
Natural talent is still a thing. Though I do agree that more $$$ = better training.
David Epstein's Range talks a lot about training in your younger years. He has a much better argument than me, but the gist is that you have to have a 'trial' period before you commit (depending on sport conditions). In 'unkind' (his term) sports, if you overtrain early, you'll burn out. I'd say Water Polo and Volleyball are those kids of sports. Swimming, on the other hand, is a 'kind' sport where early identification and rigorsous training are beneficial.
It's a really good book: https://davidepstein.com/the-range/
> One of the girls at one of the schools near us didn't have any of that (most likely). I think they shared their pool with a few teams though. I know they didn't have their own coach, and I know that she was the stand-out star of the team.
Of course it's not always true. However your rebuttal actually proves the point of this discussion. You can name one outlier, who is exactly that, an outlier. The issue isn't "athletic scholarships are 100% inaccessible to people outside of the top 10% wealth bracket", it's more along the lines of "the overwhelming majority of athletic scholarships for sports are provided to people who are already benefitting from systemic privelege, and the remaining slots will be filled by outliers"
Consider two equally skilled waterpolo players, one who has a shared pool and the facilities to go with it, and one who has a private pool, coaching staff, etc. Now consider who is more likely to be in that position in the first place. That's not to say that there are no minorities in the second group, but they are overwhelmingly more likely to not end up in that scenario in the first place.