High school vs. club team

No offense, but that is complete bullshit.

 

Especially in soccer and volleyball, it is quite common for the AAU coaches to give specific orders to the HS coaches on how players are to be used.

 

Yeah, I've got to say I'm with Devil there. Local fans DO care about their schools, and I'm not yet ready to throw gamers out the window.

 

Come down to Warner Robins, Ga., if you don't think people care about local teams. WR vs. Northside draws 20,000+

 

Agree. Everybody knows the Long Beach Poly Jackrabbits ... but very few know the Mizuno Beach LightningBatz.

 

Yeah, that was Festival. FSN has televised the 18 Open finals for several years. Kane County, Utah, beat Santa Monica Beach Club, which is actually a San Fernando Valley-based team.
At the Junior Olympics, another Westside team, Sports Shack, beat a team called Synergy, from Philadelphia. Sports Shack has a Beverly Hills address, but the girls came from Los Alamitos (south) to Oaks Christian of Westlake Village (north). It also had girls from Redondo, L.A. and North Hollywood high schools.

The big question, from a sports journalists perspective, is, how do you cover this stuff? The first time I went to Reno for Festival, I decided there was no way to cover it. The Reno paper did about as well as you could hope for. They had a preview feature basically saying this event was in town and there will be 10,000 teenage girls here playing volleyball all over town. The next day they had a feature about the economic impact of Reno holding this event. And, I think a schedule of when all of the age-group finals would be played at Lawlor Center on the Nevada campus.

 

That's about all you can do, short of keeping tabs on the local teams and staffing the championship game.

 

I'm seeing a ton of Twitter postings on local AAU tournaments. Could care less whether the NBA Superstar 16Us beat Team Indiana Lavender, but they have a big following from the recruiting peeps. I feel for the writers who have to cover them. I'd have to take a shower first before dealing with the slime and street agents who are involved in it.

AAU basketball still has some perspective -- only the elite players play. High school teams are often filled out with pretty good multi-sport athletes who are the backbone of a good team. The other sports -- soccer, softball and volleyball are the worst offenders -- have an attitude that you have to sell your soul to club just to be a role player on a high school team.

What happens is people see that Brittni is an elite soccer player and Brittni plays club, so in an effort to turn Tiffany into an elite soccer player, they make Tiffany drop everything and cart her all over the country to play in club soccer tournaments all spring, then wonder why she's not anything better than a role player coming off the bench. Brittni isn't elite because she plays club, she's elite because she has better skill, and club allows her to play against that level of competition for a couple of months.

The high school coaches should be sitting the parents down and telling them "she'll never be anything more than a role player, so why not let her play basketball or tennis or something else." But what happens is, the high school coach sees the state champion team down the road has 10 kids playing club, so he feels like he *has* to have all of his kids playing club or he can't be competitive. Never mind that the state champion team has a whole helluva lot more talent than he does. So, he begins shunting all of his kids into club programs (and telling them they have no choice -- no club, no play in high school) and now you have end-of-the-benchers and JV players who are selling themselves out for one sport. If a program in a community wins, it feeds the beast, and all of the other programs in that gender suffer (the I have to play club to play varsity infection is much worse on the girls side than the boys). That's where things have gotten completely off their rocker -- not with elite players, but with third-tier role players and JV players selling themselves out and their high school coaches using club to monopolize them (and high school ADs who are too spineless to stand up to that practice).

 

There's a simple answer to this whole mess.

State association says an athlete who plays more than X games for a non-school-sponsored team during the school year is ineligible for the number of games they play that is over the cutoff. That would allow kids to play in one or two weekends of club ball, but not be dominated/monopolized by them.

What would happen? A school might lose its elite, college-bound athletes, but those aren't very common at most schools and as noted, that's happening anyway. It already happens in hockey -- most of the top players never play for their high school teams and instead matriculate through elite bantam/midget teams into the EJHL, NAHL and USHL.

But you also would end this practice of the unethical soccer coach and the volleyball coach using in-season club teams to monopolize JV-level players, which would serve the dual purpose of adding some depth to high school teams by encouraging multi-sport athletes, and also protect kids from throwing away their high school experience chasing a lie that they can become an elite player without elite skills if they just sell out one more season to club ball.

 

I would pay good money to see the state association with the balls to lay that down in this era.

 

Problem is, while only a tiny percentage of HS players (even elite club players) actually do have any potential to play any scholarship sport in college, a huge percentage of the parents THINK they do.

Therefore they'll follow any club coach who claims to have the secret of how little Jimmy or Kimmy is going to get their full ride to Humungous State U., follow orders, and specialize in one sport only.

Most club teams around here utterly forbid kids from playing any other sport.