Even if today's players are íncredibly 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 raely do teams ever hold a practice. Some programs fly in top players from out of state for a single weekend to join the team. Certaín players play or one team ín he morning and another one in the afternoon.
If mom and dad aren't happy with their son's playing time, they swítch 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.
