Yesterday's Wall Street Journal finally called out the AAU for what it really is...
At Thursday’s NBA draft, some of America’s budding basketball superstars will learn where they will launch their careers. Four months later, when the season begins, many will learn something else: They don’t know how to play basketball.
One system that prepares young American players for the pros, the Amateur Athletic Union, is, by most accounts, broken. Without a rigid minor-league system like baseball’s or the extra seasoning football players get in college, America’s basketball gems increasingly get their training from teams affiliated with the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), a vast national youth-basketball circuit that has groomed many of the sport’s top stars.
For some time, coaches have grumbled that the AAU’s emphasis on building stars and playing games over practicing produces a lot of talented prospects who have great physical skills but limited knowledge of the fundamentals. Now some players are speaking out.
By the middle of the last NBA season, as concerns build about his dwindling playing time and rough transition to the NBA, last year’s No. 2 overall pick, Michael Beasley of the Miami Heat, finally conceded a fundamental flaw: No one, at any level in his basketball career, had asked him to play defense. And especially not in AAU. “If you’re playing defense in AAU, you don’t need to be playing,” he says. “I’ve honestly never seen anyone play defense in AAU.”
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