High school vs. club team

It's only a matter of time before club teams become the rule rather than the exception. School districts in LA are cutting stipends to coaches and one private school cut all its sports programs. It was a pretty successful sports program at that, sending a couple kids to the NBA. Money is tight and sports will be a casualty.

 

Yeah, something's going to end up going if money continues to be an issue, and given how parents have shown no hesitation to spend on camps and travel teams, it isn't a big surprise that some sports will be axed.

 

Not for long. The summer 7-on-7 passing leagues are the first step to AAU football, which will wipe out HS football as we have known it.

 

This is the key. All of the parents are buying a line of bull from the coaches about how great their kids are, when really there's maybe one kid who has any future beyond the high school level and that future is just American colleges, which are nothing on the international scale. The comments on that article suggested that parents are paying $500 a month to be part of this program -- the only purpose of it is to let the coaches make a living, it doesn't have anything to do with the development and growth of the kids.

 

The way the NCAA recruiting calendar is set up, an AAU-style system would have a hard time gaining any traction. coaches can't have face-to-face contact or do evaluations at summer events.

 

I think what some people are missing is that travel/AAU is not keeping most kids from playing high school ball. They're doing both. It's not like the numbers in basketball, or football, or baseball have dropped off the map with kids choosing not to play prep sports.

If anything, it's killing off Legion baseball or school-related summer basketball. That's where the kids are picking and choosing, and they're picking and choosing travel/AAU.

Some of this, too, is people so determined not to "have their head in the sand" that they're having an extreme reaction.

 

I think the most disappointing thing about the emphasis on club and travel sports is the specialization that it requires. It has made three-sports athletes scarce, and even two-sport athletes are rare.

I coach girl's high school softball in a competitive league (2nd largest class in state) in the suburbs of one of the nationa's largest cities. The difference in the quality of play between travel and in-house park district leagues is staggering. We'll have girls step on campus who say they've played softball for eight years and my first thought is, "How in the world could you have played softball for eight year and be that bad?" I have a shortstop who was all-state as a freshman this past spring who plays elite travel softball. She does play basketball as well but softball is her thing. This week she's playing in a tournament in Huntington Beach that will be attended by hundreds of college coaches.

The most disappointing thing is that parents whose kids attend schools that have large enrollments are almost required for their kids to play travel if they want their kids to compete at the varsity level. I have an entering freshman this year who is a Division I caliber athlete but she's never played travel softball. She has little to no chance of playing college softball because she just isn't playing elite level competition, even if she would stack up extremely favorably athletically.

High school athletics as we know them today are in HUGE trouble. With that said, a lot of associations have hamstrung themselves by placing so many restrictions on high school coaches that kids have to look at the travel route just to be able to play their sports. If you don't have the time, or the financial resources, to play travel you are out of luck at many American high schools.

 

If high school athletics are in trouble, it's because of budgetary crunch more than competition from travel/AAU. If you're in a situation where you have to be a 12-month player in a single sport, chances are you're at a big high school where there's going to be more specialization. We still see plenty of multi-sport kids in the medium- to small-sized schools.

 

High school teams are definitely becoming subordinate to AAU teams, with AAU coaches ordering HS coaches to run certain offenses, switch positions, give certain players specific amounts of PT, etc etc.

HS coaches are also ordered to arrange their schedules around the AAU teams. When there's a conflict, the AAU team wins, end of discussion. There have been some mutterings that AAU coaches basically fix games between HS games with their AAU players on the rosters, because for various reasons (motivation, recrutiing hype, etc etc.), they want one particular team to win.

We know for a fact this happens in girls soccer -- club coaches have flat-out ordered HS coaches to play gump goaltenders to ensure the club team's "main affiliate" will win key games.

 

Parents don't have enough money to set up a football program that has contact.

 

In hockey, there's juniors and if a kid wants to play in college, he usually has to do a year or two of juniors after he graduates from high school.
That's even true if the kid wants to play Division III hockey.
While I can understand the upside of the year or two of postgrad juniors if a kid gets a scholarship to play for a Division I school, I'm not sure I see it if a kid ends up playing Division III and his family has to play full sticker price. I guess the upside is that the hockey player may get into a school he otherwise may not get into, such as a NESCAC school, but still the family is out thousands of dollars for the year or two of juniors, paying full price at a Division III school and the kid is going to graduate and enter the workforce a year or two latter than his high school classmates.
I'm not sure it's worth it in that case.

 

Verducci explained this very well last year in his Jason Heyward story -- Heyward spent his entire youth playing out of the East Cobb facility in Atlanta, well over 100 games a year in travel ball, and people who only saw him play high school barely even knew who he was because he was gone so often and wasn't really into playing even when he was there.