I feel like there is two things that separate the die-hard sports fans from the “Sportscenter” sports fans. This is a common theme of mine, because one of my all time pet peeves is what I like to call “fake fans”. These are the guys who don’t really watch games. They watch Sportscenter and PTI, and their “favorite” teams when they are good, but would rather be out drinking or watching movies when their team is not a title contender. They don’t really watch the games. Don’t know what the team is doing unless it is national news. That leads me to my point, which is that there are two things that real, die-hard sports guys do: they watch the games no matter who is playing, or how good or bad their team is and develop an opinion on those games, and they read books. They actually read The Yankee Years by Joe Torre to develop their own opinion on the book. Or they read Juiced to see what Conseco had to say. Reading books isn’t just for college classes. It helps us understand sports and our favorite players like nothing else does. This is why I read books. That, and girls like a guy who reads books.
The reason I am so worked up about reading (I apoligize for the previous rant, fakers) is that I just read one of the best books I have ever read. I didn’t say “sports books”, I just said books. Play Their Hearts Out by George Dohrmann is an absolutely fantastic book. Dohrmann exposes a firsthand account of the AAU system that up and coming basketball players participate in. To describe it in one word, I would say “haunting”.
The story follows a coach named Joe Keller and his star players he has assembled on his AAU team, including child phenom Demetrius Walker. Keller was known in AAU circles as the guy who had Tyson Chandler, only to lose him to a more high profile AAU coach. He retired for a few years, and then decided the way to get back into the AAU game would be to get the prospects at a young age. He went for kids as young as 11 or 12, which is how he came across Walker. Keller quickly put together a great team that he referred to as a “family” led by Walker. The players develop over the years, some stayed on the team and others werepushed out by Keller, who shows no loyalty to anybody except Walker, who he treats as a son. Walker became a national story. He was rated as the #1 prospect in his age range, which was 6th graders. This all put enormous pressure on the kids, especially Walker, who was under a spotlight from age 12 and on.
To make a long story short, the team led by Keller, Team Cal, went through many changes, won a national title at one point, and began to break up by high school. Keller found he could make money by marketing his players and getting deals and swag from shoe companies, and eventually signed with Adidas. He then went on to create the “Junior Phenom Camp” which was for kids that were not yet in high school. Keller could make enough to live comfortably off one of these camps. He was always driven by personal glory and the quest for money, but this camp only reinforced it. By high school, Demetrius Walker and some of the other star players from Team Cal (Aaron More, Roberto Nelson, Justin Hawkins) had all gone their separate ways, and while some succeeded (Nelson and Hawkins), others (Walker and Moore) fell into problems both on and off the court. By the end of high school, Keller had abandoned Walker, who went to four different high schools. Moore was in trouble off the court, and quit all together after being ranked as one of the top prospects in his class at one point. Hawkins committed to UNLV and Nelson to Oregon State. Keller was painted as a villain, as was other AAU coaches and the shoe companies, while the players were all looked at as victims.
There is much more to this book than I have said in the last two paragraphs, but I don’t want to give an entire book report. The point of it, is how these kids are handled in the AAU circuit. They are looked at as investments. They can make an AAU coach a lot of money, and gain him notoriety if they move on to success. If they fail to perform, the coaches will drop them like a bad habit. The coaches are vultures. They hype these kids up at such young ages, that the kids are under more pressure than most child stars. We, as a society, always worry about child stars. “Will Miley Cyrus adjust to life as a grown up celebrity?” Who gives a shit. Most of these child stars get enough money as a kid to live comfortably for life. These young phenom basketball players are carrying the weight of their team, their family, their coach, and sometimes their community on their shoulders from grade school. It takes a rare kid to handle these expectations, and most of the coaches and recruiters on the AAU circuit don’t do them any favors.
A theme of the book is “how young is too young?”. This includes the ranking of players, the hyping of player, the exposure of nationwide travel for basketball, the abundance of goods given to these kids by shoe companies. The coaches profit on these players by cutting endorsement deals. The kids get free gear, but don’t really make any money. Then, as they get older and begin to attend the high profile camps, they are forced to play 5-on-5 games with the other top prospects in the nation, all vying for the same scholarships, so each kid is essentially playing with the competition. Nobody looks for someone who plays team basketball, because all the kids are looking out for #1. And why wouldn’t they? It is an incredibly flawed system.
The kids on Team Cal were once rated extremely high. Four of them were ranked as top 10 players in their class. Now, of the four I named, Aaron Moore is nowhere to be found, Justin Hawkins is playing sparingly for UNLV, Roberto Nelson is a role player for Oregon State, and Demetrius Walker, former number one player in his class, is sitting out a year after transferring from Arizona State to New Mexico. What he does next year is anybody’s guess. The AAU circuit took a toll on this kids like nothing else could have. It drained them of an innocent childhood and a chance to realize their potential on their own without recruiters, coaches and agents breathing down their necks 24/7 when they were just trying to pass Algebra.
The sad part (among the many other sad parts of this book), is that Joe Keller is far from an outlier. This system of AAU basketball and rankings beginning at an incredible young age is continuing all over the country. These kids are facing pressure like nobody their age should ever face. The youth basketball system in this country is extremely harmful to more players than it benefits. There is a right way to have AAU basketball be successful in recruiting and developing basketball players, but many programs don’t do it the right way. They do it the way that benefits the coaches and backers, but not the kids. I feel like I could rant about different aspects of this book for pages and pages, but I’d rather you read the book. Read the book, then wait a week like I did. It will sit with you, tugging at your heartstrings and nagging at your thoughts. You will love the kids, and hate the kids sometimes. You will almost always hate the coaches. But read the book. It may be the catalyst that starts a change in the way we treat our young athletes. Probably not, but we can hope.
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