I have seen this first hand and agree with you 1000%. Parents are delusional as hell and are the ones ruining youth sports with their delusions. It’s sad as hell, man.
That's the real problem, the parents. I see many parents just drop their kids off at training, then go run errands, sit in the car, grandma be taking them, etc. Then wondering why shyt ain't translating in games. YOU still have to work with the kid. Trainers can't control what you do with your kids but if the trainers see that the only time the kids are touching a basketball recreationally is at training, there is only so much they can do. They are starting at a foundational level and only improving at an incremental pace, if they are improving at all. Many kids have sloppy fundamentals and want to fly before they can even walk, forget about crawling. In the case of some of the local kids around here, my son's trainer is relatively popular for people to come see. He has a lot of the top high school talent under his wing, a few college kids and others. As parents start sending their kids to trainers at a younger age, he's becoming sought out more. As I said, he shows my son all the time in his promos for business. My son just has a feel for the game that I sure as shyt never had. I've said it plenty of times, I was an athlete playing basketball, he's a basketball player playing basketball. Vision, dribbling, shooting, defense, situationally, when and how to do certain things at certain times, etc... Like I said, parents see the promos and go, this can be my little Johnny, not truly understanding the work that's put behind the scenes to make it look like this. Only place you will ever find success before work is in a dictionary. I say all that to say, I know that my son won't sniff the NBA as college is the goal. I'm never shy about showing clips because he's that good and validates what I say.
Case in point. My son on July 10th. Both teams they played against were 6-7th graders. My son's team are all kids going into the 6th.
Iso on the right wing, drive right, behind the back pound to the left, quick hesi and gets defender to bite and jump, few dribbles later, finishes on the left side with the left hand.
Starts left, tween hang to the right, couple of dribbles, behind the back pound to the left and hang. A couple dribbles to the left to draw defenders in and then a bounce pass through multiple defenders to a cutting teammate for an And1 opportunity.
Teammate gets the ball on defense, creating fast break opportunity. My kid gets the ball on the left wing, going to the rim. Setting up the defender by slightly going right, sets up the right/left Euro into the left-handed layup. If you listen, the ref did the SportCenter jingle to me after the move because he was impressed by it.
Catches the ball outside the three-point line, rips left, gets past first defender, left/right Euro into the right-handed layup in front of the rim.
Gets the ball after an inbounds pass, comes up on defender who was playing way too far back to truly defend, tween hang to the right, couple of dribbles then tween left and crossover right. Hard behind the back pound to the left, two low left-handed dribbles, left/right Euro to get by defender, right-handed layup in front of the rim.
So, what's going to happen is that he's going to take these clips of my son's, show him in drills similar to these gameplay clips and kinda have them running side by side and parents are going to do the Birdman hand rub. He's played in a lot of places and in person, at his age range, I've never seen a kid handle the ball better than he can. I've never seen vision better than his. On top of that, he's efficient. Because he doesn't settle for 3's all the time and gets to the rim, he's about 50% from the field for this current year. In these two games, He had 18 points out of 70 the first game and 16 points out of 44 the second. His coach doesn't even call plays as we are at the point that my son just figures it out and gets everyone involved. Just cut and run, he'll find you. His future high school coach regularly shows up and watches his games. This shyt is rare at his age brehs. He's 10. It just so happens that this shyt involves my son so that I have to meet these various basketball people from Kentucky or Wisconsin trying to get him on their teams and shyt while we living in Indiana.
All of that to say, outside of just showing off my son, they may make some money off of these gullible parents chasing these dreams for these kids, but this shyt isn't for everyone. There are many kids out there that are playing simply because their parents have money. These are clips from the school team that I've shown and they play year-round. On my son's travel team, you have many kids that are playing because their parents have more money than sense. His travel team isn't good but he always cooks. Parents need to be honest with themselves about the prospects of their kids. Most simply don't keep it real.
