AAU Basketball is indeed the devil

It's a different game today.

Defense, driving and ball handling are much, much better today. Players are much more athletic today that they were in the past (HGH? shhhhhhh.)

But they are not better shooters. The 2010 Bulls shot 45% from the floor and the 2010 Lakers have shot 45% from the floor. In 1980, the Bulls shot 50% and the Lakers 51% from the floor. Sure, a lot of that can be the defensive pressure, but I think it stems from two important areas that have regressed in the past 10-15 years.

Passing and shot selection seem to go down every year - especially passing.

If you watch the old games, you will see 2-3-4 quick passes setting up shots. You just do not see that anymore. Now players, for better or for worse, are happier breaking their man down with the dribble. Old school thinking was you never try to dribble through two or more defenders. Now, it is almost encouraged.

 

Did that last year. College coaches are not allowed to attend AAU events during April (already had outlawed May). They can go on high school campuses and watch "open gym workouts." No one outside of the high school coaches like it. The college coaches would prefer to do one-stop shopping, especially the low-majors who can't afford to traverse the country to watch maybe two players in a day. And the high school kids, especially the rising seniors, want the exposure the AAU tournaments offered.
You have to laugh at AAU, especially at the age level you describe. A few weeks ago I saw a coach sip coffee throughout the first half of a game. This was a 16U game, and his team lost by 40. Another game was reserves from a bunch of catholic high schools against one of the better 17U teams in the country (six top-100 players). It went about as well as you would think it would.

 

Agree about the complaints. AAU is a clique and outsiders need not apply. It's a nightmare where I live trying to get good kids involved if they don't have one-and-done written all over them. And kids can play for out of state teams, switch teams every year and teams break all the "rules" you can read on the AAU web site, but none are enforced.

If anything needs to be cleaned up, overhauled or outlawed, it's AAU summer basketball.

 

Many of you know I do a blog about youth sports, but instead of shamelessly plugging that (too late!), anyone wanting a great history of how the current youth sports-industrial complex came to be should read Tom Farrey's book, "Game On."

Perhaps it's confirmation bias, but Farrey writes the book not as a hand-wringing screed about how things have changed since the good-ol'-days, but as how everything you see is a conservative (his word) response to the way the athletic talent development system has evolved. Farrey knows of what he speaks, because at the time he wrote the book at least one of his kids was in travel soccer.

A lot more athletic scholarship money has become available over the years, in theory making scholarships more attainable for more kids. As a result, however, parents have been willing to spend more and more money on sports to get the exposure necessary to get their kids on the scholarship radar. There is a chapter devoted to how AAU as we now know it came to be.

I talked with Farrey once, and we agreed one of the biggest changes in sports parenting since our childhoods (I'm 40, Farrey is a couple years older) is that upper middle-class and wealthy parents care a LOT more about sports scholarships and careers than parents did when we were young. At that time, sports was considered a career for kids who didn't have the means to accomplish anything academically or otherwise came from the poor side of town. Your kid might have played sports, but you didn't sink money into that like you did a more academic pursuit.

Now poor kids are squeezed out early (unless they happen to be athletically blessed) because the travel leagues and youth sports-industrial complex starts so early. Heck, the kind of school sports cuts that suburban districts are wringing their hands over now happened in a lot of urban areas years ago.

 

While some of it is roids and HGH, a much larger part is simple weight training.

When I was in HS in the early-mid 1970s, the football team (a perennial state power) had only a token weight-training program, and there was little or any coercion by the coaching staff for players to take part. NO other sport had any weight training, at all, period. In fact, baseball and basketball players, in particular, were told NOT to weightlift because it supposedly would make them "musclebound" and ruin their flexibility.

I had four younger siblings that went through school over the next 16 years, and there was a huge change in emphasis in strength training. By the time my youngest sister graduated in 1992, the school's "weight facility," which had been contained in a 20 x 20 room while I was in school, occupied a veritable airplane hangar, and every athlete in every sport was expected to be in there almost every day.

In basketball, the physicality of defense is the reason for the apparent drop in shooting skills. The spread in clutch-and-grab sludgeball across the entire sport is the reason for the drop in shooting accuracy. You can't make 2-3-4 crisp passes to set up shots because players get hip-checked, hand-checked, jersey-grabbed and arm-hacked on each pass.

Plus, Bobby Knight with his clipboard and whistle on the sideline will go apeshit if a player takes any shot other than a dunk/layup, a wide-open 3-pointer, or a desperation chuck as the shot clock runs out.

Teams don't make 2-3-4 crisp passes to get a shot because if they did they would be taking shots with 11 seconds left on the shot clock and there goes Bobby Knight going apeshit again.

 

Good point. And another reason, when you look at the newer parks that are being built, what don't you see there? That's right, lots of them don't have basketball courts any more because snooty "NIMBYs" don't want the "wrong kids" hanging out at the park. What a crock.

 

There are basketball courts everywhere where I live, but they are not used.

There are probably a 100 reasons why, and they all add up to no one playing pickup basketball anymore outside of urban settings.

 

Plenty of this applies to hockey up here in Canuckistan. I have no idea how we produced hockey players when kids weren't forced to play year-round, and go to camps for weeks on end or skate on treadmills or play in summer leagues. And there are plenty of parents who will line up and pay big bucks for their nine or 10-year-old to do this.

Heaven forbid the kid wants to play soccer or lacrosse or baseball or maybe hang out with his buddies and ride their bikes. Oh no, junior is going to the NHL and this is the best way for him to do that.

 

Zag, is this "Upward" crap any different than what you have been recently subjected?

Isn't that God's AAU?

 

There's something profoundly wrong with the world when the youth hockey season begins earlier than the NHL season.

 

JR has seen it from the inside - my kid is a baseball player - but rep hockey in the Toronto area is a cesspool. And there are plenty of sketchy types running hockey schools - and "elite level camps" - that charge big bucks to gullible parents who just want someone - even if they have no credentials - to say that junior is a good player.

 

93D around here, I believe the Upward program ends at 13 but I live in a small town so that may just be because there isn't enough interest. They do have God on their side though.