AAU Press Accommodations

I'm brand-spanking new to the AAU boys basketball national tournament, but it's certainly a big deal with all of the top prep talent being scrutinized by a few hundred college coaches.

What perplexed me today at the Milkhouse on the Disney Wide World of Sports property was just how poorly the tournament is being operated. It's by far the most media-unfriendly monster I've ever had to tame. There's no media room. Or at least, that's the word I've been given. The scoreboard is reset about five seconds after the final buzzer, which means that you might miss the final score if you cough or blink. The scorebooks are snatched up and carried away before you can get to the scorer's table.

They have a single guy typing in the game scores, and he was two hours behind when I went to see him. If you want stats, you have to shuffle through manila folders and copy down all of the pertinent information. They had no food for the media, so I just ducked into the NCAA coaches lounge, where they had a spread about one-third as impressive as what I had at a small Class 1A christian school tournament a few months ago.

Surely I'm not the only guy covering the AAU national championship. Or maybe I am? Has it always been like this?

 

These tournaments aren't set up to watch games. Who wins or loses is irrelevant, as is the team. I wouldn't even write up a gamer on anything in this tournament. These are just glorifed scrimmages. Find the hot recruits in the lobby and write features and updates. If you are covering a game, don't even bother with the team. You are there to look at players. Breakdown their game and how they played. Ignore the result. It isn't newsworthy.

I think them resetting the score is doing you a favor.

 

We get AAU tournaments all summer long at my shop. And they're mostly piddly ones, at that. With little kids.

 

You're correct. If I were writing for a newspaper, I'd be looking at features on individual players. But I'm writing for a new preps Web site with a slightly different purpose.

 

I've covered events at WWOS before. When I was filing something live there, they gave me a back office in the gymnasium to file from. The whole place has wireless.

I've always found the people there to be very nice, and they've always tried to accomodate me, but since most of the events there aren't covered by the media, they don't usually have to make accomodations.