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Actually, the high school football team at my kids' school was "no-cut" at least when they were there. Now lest you think it was a small school that needed all the players it could get, not so. When DD #2 graduated it was about 1400 kids. There was even an article in the paper about this policy once, how they just get more coaches if the team gets bigger and bigger. Now obviously, only 11 players can be on the field at once, and only the best get to play esp. in the big games. But there is also JV.
When my daughters did gymnastics, the coach had a policy of no-cuts. Anyone who went out could be on the team. She didn't get the extra coaching help; she recruited volunteers to help her. And of course, not all the kids competed varsity, but there was a JV, and at some meets, like "senior night", she'd let all the seniors compete regardless of their ability. Just one example. BTW, they went to state a number of times with this coach.
Some teams did have to cut, because the coach couldn't/wouldn't get additional help.
In the early 70s I had three or four boys come to me telling me they were going to come out for basketball and I couldn't hold them off. All of them had longer hair than I allowed and I told them to come on out but that they would have to do everything that the others did in practice like running laps and other work activity but that they wouldn't be allowed to sit on the bench at games unless they cut their hair. I always thought someone talked to a liberal lawyer and found out that since they had to attend school, by law, but it was up to me who sat on my bench or played in games. Long story short, not one of them attempted to play the games they thought they wanted to do till the next year and two of them got their hair short enough to qualify and became a respected part of the teams. They didn't play much till all the others had been in at mop up time but did get into some games.
Now these were good kids who just wanted to fight me about hair. One of them retired from the Air Force as a Colonel and his brother ran some of those huge cranes like keep falling in NYC these days. He worked all over the world doing that.
Ya know we've had Title IX for more than 40 years and the "reasonable": accommodation statutes that it requires hasn't stop Alabama from winning the BCS title, nor Kentucky from winning a national title.
It's caused plenty of men's non-revenue sports to be cut.
I think this is going to be looked back at in a future school shooting. Some child that just couldn't compete like the others but had to be put on the team anyway only to see each and every day how they are not the same is going to snap. This mainstreaming and everyone's a winner policy is creating our problems.
It's not broke. Don't fix it.
Mainlining, as I called mainstreaming when teaching did cause plenty of trouble even for the kids the laws applied to. For instance, one girl was always being cheered by boys for doing handsprings in the hallways and she never wore anything but long dresses. At the same time one boy was called the "mad climber" because he loved to climb. At one point a group of boys talked him into hanging from the ceiling girders in the gym. Now what would have happened if he slipped? I could go on and on about those kids being taken advantage of by the "normal" kids.
What do you want from these kids. They do their best. Yeah, they may be special ed but they just want to fit in and be like every other kid. They deserve that respect yet you ridicule them and their teachers.
In 1983 I had four junior boys take some tests and they actually "tested" their way into special ed. One of them came and told me that he was getting high Bs in American History and I knew what he could do and that he didn't belong there but couldn't do anything about it. I disliked that bunch more than any group of kids I ever had to deal with. They were very lucky in that their teacher was the best Special Ed teacher I ever worked with but they had no right to the kind of specialized care she gave them.
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