Good read!

[thatch62]

https://es.pn/2XBwnah

i have seen many athletes with a lot of potential never make it to college because of burnout and injuries from overuse. It’s in all sports the dream of big money and becoming a super star.

 

[Norcal_Fan]

man, what a great article. It's no wonder seeing that a lot of the kids on upper level teams are playing anywhere from 40-70 games between April and July, not to mention not much of a break after the HS season. AAU coaches and players parents a lot to blame (in my opinion).

AAU coaches want the prestige of communicating with college coaches and getting kids in college and not playing as many games will effect their bottom line. Parents are to blame because they're chasing scholarships for their kids. I think the kids are less to blame because if you put a ball and a court in front of them, they'll want to play. I doubt there'll be any regulations anytime soon, but it is becoming an epidemic. Some kids are starting in 2nd and 3rd grade. Overuse injuries have been well documented in kids in ALL club sports..not just basketball.

 

[personalogic]

man, what a great article. It's no wonder seeing that a lot of the kids on upper level teams are playing anywhere from 40-70 games between April and July, not to mention not much of a break after the HS season. AAU coaches and players parents a lot to blame (in my opinion).

AAU coaches want the prestige of communicating with college coaches and getting kids in college and not playing as many games will effect their bottom line. Parents are to blame because they're chasing scholarships for their kids. I think the kids are less to blame because if you put a ball and a court in front of them, they'll want to play. I doubt there'll be any regulations anytime soon, but it is becoming an epidemic. Some kids are starting in 2nd and 3rd grade. Overuse injuries have been well documented in kids in ALL club sports..not just basketball.

I personally don't think the demands of any one basketball program, at least the ones I know about, are really the problem. A couple of practices and 2-3 games in a weekend is not really that big a deal. Especially when you consider (as most coaches do) how mediocre the attendance records of a lot of players are.

Where it gets problematic is when a player is engaged with multiple teams with overlapping schedules. The sixth grader who belongs to a CYO team, an AAU team, and an Asian league team. Not to mention moonlighting as a "guest player" whenever her own coaches give her a weekend off. The eighth grader who has decided to play high school basketball but hates leaving her friends on her select soccer team, so doubles up, ignoring the knee pain. And dabbles with the Spring track program in her "free" time.

Then in high school the player finds out that open gyms start the end of July, with morning weight training soon thereafter. Six days of practice and games during the season, with a probable session with her trainer on Sundays. In the Spring she joins the club team she thinks will give her the most visibility, but also has to satisfy the demands of her high school coach. He's not just running summer league teams. He's doing "camp" five days a week and running a full scrimmage/tournament schedule throughout the summer.

The bottom line is that no regulation is going to stop this. If you restrict AAU practices and games, the parents, players, and coaches will just find other options to fill the time. As it is, a lot of coaches would like to limit their programs but realize that if they don't fill up the schedule, their players will wander off to other programs that will.

 

[ClayK]

The last point is a great one -- if club or high school coaches don't do enough in the eyes of parents, players leave. And parents, sadly, generally have no clue because they've never gone through the process and as is often the case in complex situations, what seems intuitively the obvious right course is in fact not necessarily the best thing to do. And there's always someone willing to tell the parents what they want to hear ...

 

[Common Sense1]

The last point is a great one -- if club or high school coaches don't do enough in the eyes of parents, players leave. And parents, sadly, generally have no clue because they've never gone through the process and as is often the case in complex situations, what seems intuitively the obvious right course is in fact not necessarily the best thing to do. And there's always someone willing to tell the parents what they want to hear ...

The problem isn't clueless parents. The problem is that the people they should be able to trust the most are the people who are the quickest to fail to give them necessary knowledge or to outright lie to them about their chances.

I've lost count of how many teams I've seen playing at viewing tournaments with zero coaches paying attention, only to have the club coaches telling the kids and parents after the game how many college coaches are talking to them about players on the team. And don't get me started on how many times I've heard club coaches tell players that they will get enough exposure playing for their club and that going to a college elite camp is a complete waste of time.

Then the high school coaches. It's amazing how many kids transfer with the thought that by playing at a high profile school, they will increase their profile, which will increase their opportunity for D1 scholarship offers. Down here in SoCal, the poster child for this is Etiwanda. Every year, they raid all of the nearby schools (and some that are pretty far away) for as much talent as they can . And every year, they underachieve in CIF and don't get all of their players to the promised land of scholarships, mainly because a lot of that transferred in talent never plays once they transfer.

I had never been through the process prior to my daughter. But my wife and I were aware enough to notice that some clubs had college coaches watching no matter how good the team was, just because of the reputation of the club, and that our original club wasn't one of them. So we had a family discussion and decided to leave and wound up on an EYBL club that did get that kind of respect. We figured out quickly that our daughter's high school coach didn't have all of the contacts she claimed to have, and was lying to us about schools contacting her about our daughter. We were also aware that all of the other schools making overtures about transferring offered no better opportunity to gain a scholarship. Again, a family discussion resulted in staying at the high school despite the coach.

There is no one clear cut path to a scholarship, but all of the misinformation isn't helping the parents make informed decisions that will help their kid get to the point where one or more colleges want them. And the misinformation is what is leading to kids playing too much and incurring all of these injuries.

 

[ClayK]

Excellent points ... there are many coaches who either don't understand the system or will say anything to get talent.

There are also many parents who do not want to believe their daughter is actually a D2 player, and as many who feel that if the club team doesn't win a seventh grade tournament in Modesto then the coach is terrible and it's time to change teams.

The issue from a coaching standpoint is often that developing players (improving their three-point shooting, say) means losing some games, and too many parents measure a club's success by games won rather than player development.

And of course the player wants to a) play with her friends or b) play on a team with good players or c) play on a team with a good social media presence, or all three -- and none of those will necessarily help her reach her potential.

 

[Common Sense1]

Excellent points ... there are many coaches who either don't understand the system or will say anything to get talent.

There are also many parents who do not want to believe their daughter is actually a D2 player, and as many who feel that if the club team doesn't win a seventh grade tournament in Modesto then the coach is terrible and it's time to change teams.

The issue from a coaching standpoint is often that developing players (improving their three-point shooting, say) means losing some games, and too many parents measure a club's success by games won rather than player development.

And of course the player wants to a) play with her friends or b) play on a team with good players or c) play on a team with a good social media presence, or all three -- and none of those will necessarily help her reach her potential.

I don't think parents would have an issue with being told that their daughter is a D2 player if they were given better information. It's pushed too hard that if you're not a D1 player, you're a lesser player. Even your statement could be read that way. In actuality, according to a recent NCAA study, it's just as hard to become a D2 player as it is to become a D1 player, and D3 isn't much easier. But because of the "D1 or bust" mentality that is pushed by a decent amount of club coaches and recruiting gurus, parents turn up their nose at the thought of anything other than D1 offers.

Parents measure a club's success based on what they are told by the director upon joining, especially at the youth level. The first club my daughter was a part of preached development and getting her ready for high school and beyond. In actuality, there was no development (I don't count warm-up drills as development), so all there was to judge the club on was performance in games and the skill of the coaches in those games. That tended to be the theme for every club that tried to get us to switch to them: the director and coaches preached development, but the parents said otherwise.

As far as your example of the parent who is pissed that you lost a 7th grade tournament in Modesto, there are a myriad of reasons why losing what a coach considers a minor tournament that may push a parent into wanting to leave. Did a player get to start after missing practice all week, even though there's a "no practice, no starting" rule for the club? Has the parent been with the club for a long time and seen no growth in their child, and a loss while seeing their kid barely play again is the last straw? I agree that there are situations where parents overreact, but there are some where the reaction is justifiable.

Even if a player ignores all of those reasons you mentioned, they may still never reach their potential. It just happens.

 

[ClayK]

Of course there are times it makes sense to switch clubs, and of course promises are broken ...

And coaching is hard, and unrelated to playing skill.

I agree that if parents were better informed about the way the system works and how their daughter fits into that system, better decisions would be made. But parents almost always think their daughter is better than she is -- which is a good thing, because if they don't believe in her, who will? -- and that makes it difficult, more often than not, to be realistic about the player's ceiling and what she needs to work on.

Add that to those coaches who will say whatever the parents want to hear, and the development train can go off the track pretty quickly.