Reading your last point re: kids sticking with a program that's bad for them—I agree completely.
Middle school and high school kids are constantly taught to advocate for themselves. So why does CHSAA, the governing federation for CO high school athletes, punish a student-athlete that does just that—advocate for themselves—when their athletic situation has soured.
Some of these coaching-gone-wrong situations are abusive. Some are merely neglectful (another form of abuse, I suppose). Some are what I'd call coaching malpractice.
In such circumstances, what's the appropriate amount of time that a student should stick with it? If a student-athlete is dealing with one of these scenarios, do they work to make it better for a year? Do they get their parents involved? Talk to the AD about the problems they're dealing with? If it's not getting better, then what, try to be grittier and gut it out until they're halfway through high school? All along, CHSAA's bylaws are passively encouraging that student-athlete to stick it out, stay with their abuser (harsh, but sometimes accurate), put up with a coach that isn't actively working to properly develop that athlete.
An unhappy, unfulfilled child makes for an unhappy family. The parents are have tried talking to the coach. They've tried talking to the AD. Sometimes it gets better, but only for a while. So the athlete and parents have had enough. They look at their options and decide moving their son or daughter to a different school is the way to go. In their research, they've learned that CHSAA will punish their athlete with a one-year suspension from varsity sports. But they know if they stick with the status quo, their child will be miserable and they'll be miserable. So, transfer it is.
But where should their child begin their second high school experience? Probably not too far from where they live. Probably a school with similar or better academics. And of course, because this transfer is "athletically motivated," they want a better athletic experience for their student-athlete.
So they look at the relatively nearby schools that have comparable academics. And they look for a team, a coaching staff, an environment that they're confident will be better than their first choice. Because the first choice was a bad one, and they already feel bad about that. And they know they can't afford to make another mistake. They do their homework and choose a school that checks all the boxes. After all, their son/daughter only has one year of varsity eligibility left at this point.
The school they choose offers the consistently best program around in their athlete's sport. Again, they can't afford to be wrong twice. They certainly can't transfer again. But shortly after their athlete starts at the new school, people start talking about how their young athlete was recruited by the new school. How there was something unethical about their move from one school to another. What they don't hear are people asking the original coach what he was doing wrong as a coach or a person, what that program wasn't providing, why they scared off a talented athlete—basically, why a family would uproot their family's day-to-day existence and go through the fairly extreme step of transferring their child away from the program where they started. And that's just it. I hear about athletes transferring and the first thing I think is "what went wrong?"
But many people (including some on this message board) choose to look at the new school and blame them for accepting a student-athlete who joins their program. They blame the new school for doing right by the athlete. Weird.