Steve Kerr's comments about AAU Basketball. “Even if today’s players are incredibly gifted, they grow up in a basketball environment that can only be called counterproductive. AAU basketball has replaced high school ball as the dominant form of development in the teen years. I coached my son’s AAU team for three years; it’s a genuinely weird subculture. Like everywhere else, you have good coaches and bad coaches, or strong programs and weak ones, but what troubled me was how much winning is devalued in the AAU structure. Teams play game after game after game, sometimes winning or losing four times in one day. Very rarely do teams ever hold a practice. Some programs fly in top players from out of state for a single weekend to join their team. Certain players play for one team in the morning and another one in the afternoon. If mom and dad aren’t happy with their son’s playing time, they switch club teams and stick him on a different one the following week. The process of growing as a team basketball player — learning how to become part of a whole, how to fit into something bigger than oneself — becomes completely lost within the AAU fabric.”
@maliikawalker 1. How did you fit so many characters in one tweet?😂 2. Kerr is spot on with his assessment of AAU
@maliikawalker have you read this? i remember being floored by the stuff that he documented here about AAU. bookshop.org/p/books/play-t…
@maliikawalker I can’t speak to the boys side of AAU, I have two girls who ball. Our experience w/ AAU level is far superior in coaching & teaching the game vs. HS ball which is garbage. The AAU teams in Nor Cal practice and there is a lot of teaching on the teams we’ve played on over the yrs.
@maliikawalker @NovaDynasty04 That’s very sad. I disagree with the whole sports industry and how it affects the health and well-being of our children.
@maliikawalker Reading Playing Their Hearts Out was very illuminating for this former basketball mom.
@maliikawalker Yup. And you are basically forced to do the same for your kid even if you disagree with the structure to compete/develop