Grassroots Basketball: The System We Support

This week featured another article about Sonny Vaccaro trying to change his legacy, as well as a Dan Wetzel piece about AAU “coach” Pat Barrett, a story which illustrates everything wrong with the system that Vaccaro created (Wetzel’s piece drew a response from agent Marc Isenberg too).

The Vaccaro article talks about the changes that he plans to make to save his legacy:

Vaccaro is here to tell the mothers and fathers in the room that he hopes to build a national basketball academy, one that will develop elite players to be role models and bring home gold medals. It’s the centerpiece of his plan to transform the image of youth basketball—his legacy, which is now under fire from every angle.

This “academy” has been in the works since at least 2006 (publicly). The NBA and NCAA are supposedly involved, but nothing seems to happen. I have outlined ideas and plans, which are available for free and am willing to work with any of the powers that be, but Stern, Brand and Vaccaro are better at rhetoric and eliciting support than actually making something happen. It’s much easier to pass blame back and forth than to do something.

But, this is the new Sonny: the crusader:

“Sonny always fights for the kids,” Annette [Legion] says. “I don’t know why he has a negative reputation. All I can think of is some white people don’t like it that he has helped so many black kids and coaches.”

I agree with Vaccaro on many points, including the NBA age limit. I also think that he is a great businessman, filling a void in leadership due to USA Basketball, the NCAA and NBA abdicating its responsibility to oversee the growth of the game at the grassroots level. My problem is not so much with the man, but the system that he created and supported for so long. I do not see a crusader fighting for kids, but someone who created a marketplace that takes advantage of the dreams of kids and their overzealous parents.

Kevin Love said he would’ve preferred hitting In-N-Out Burger with his family after another UCLA victory last winter. Yet, there was Pat Barrett, head of one of the top AAU basketball programs in the country, waiting outside the Pauley Pavilion locker room and pleading for Love to come with him instead.

Love had known Barrett since he was in fifth grade, played two years for Barrett’s traveling team and, as a result, said he felt obligated to go. What Love apparently didn’t know was a New York sports agency had donated $250,000 to Barrett’s team under the premise Barrett could deliver players such as Kevin Love – to dinner first, then as a client.

When Love arrived at Mr. Chow, the famed Chinese restaurant in Beverly Hills, the waiting group included Jay Williams, former national player of the year at Duke and 2002 NBA lottery pick.

Williams was there on business, as the chief recruiter for Ceruzzi Sports and Entertainment, the very agency that staked Barrett with a quarter-million dollars.

This is Sonny’s system: he is the godfather of grassroots basketball and delights in being the person who gave college coaches endorsement deals and was the first to pay AAU coaches with shoe company money. He swore that he would be the first one to pay O.J. Mayo before leaving Reebok before Mayo turned pro. Now, he wants to save the players from his inventions.

While Sonny, and others, exploited the rules, they play by those set forth by the NCAA and NBA. The NCAA created the summer meat market because it is easier for its coaches to recruit at a couple tournaments in the summer than during their basketball season. The NBA created an age rule because its General Managers could not stop themselves from drafting unprepared players whose potential was never realized as they sat on the bench, unable to secure playing time at the professional level because of their rudimentary skills left undeveloped by an entire system that focuses more on recruiting than development.

NCAA rules prohibit college players from accepting anything of value from sports agents, and NBA players association rules prohibit sports agents from giving college stars anything of value. But no rule explicitly prohibits AAU basketball coaches such as Barrett from accepting a $250,000 donation from an agency such as Ceruzzi Sports, and then playing semantics by paying for dinner when the agency’s front man is there to recruit a player such as Love.

So, while Love cannot make money as a college freshman, his former AAU coach is able to use his influence to secure funding for his “non-profit” organization. While Vaccaro argues against the NCAA’s non-profit status, an argument with which I agree, I never hear him arguing about these pseudo-nonprofits set up by AAU coaches to solicit donations so they can buy players (with gear, free travel, expensive hotels, etc) and pay their own salary. And, of course, this is legal. The system is set up to enable these grassroots “coaches” (and I use that term in the loosest possible sense of the word) to profit, while also increasing the profits of the NCAA and NBA at the expense of the players who have no other recourse but to join Brandon Jennings in Italy.

Not all coaches operate like Barrett and it is a guy like Barrett and a story like this that ruins it for all the club coaches who work hard and do it for the right reasons. Unfortunately, those coaches get lost in the system as the coaches who recruit the top players continue to have the most influence, and its the money from the agents and the shoe companies which finance their recruiting efforts to land the top players.

Make no mistake: clubs like Barrett’s are not in the business of developing players. That is my argument. He finds talented players, gives them free gear and travel in exchange for the exposure to college coaches, and then makes money off the back end getting financial support from agents and shoe companies who foot the bill and then some. Meanwhile, the rare coach trying to develop players struggles to raise enough money to pay for gym time.

The priorities are backward. The entire system rewards the wrong things. We reward the marketers and the businessmen and the recruiters, not the players and the true coaches developing their talent. We reward players with potential, not those with productivity.

Our entire system of talent identification and development is backward and based almost entirely on an economic system, not a skill assessment and development system. Ultimately, parents control their choices and are responsible for the well-being of their children, but many are naive and do not understand the process. When a slick-talking runner or AAU coach offers advice, they are quick to trust someone who appears to offer advice, even when that advice is layered with a marketing pitch.

We definitey need to change our approach and our emphasis, but is the guy who takes credit for creating the mess the guy to orchestrate change? Sure, he is a great speaker at college business schools, and he can teach many lessons on exploiting an untapped market and building a business empire. But, how does that improve the basketball side? How do we move basketball instruction forward? How di we improve coaching? How do we improve skill assessment? How do we create better metrics for talent identification?

We should answer these questions in an attempt to improve the youth basketball development system rather than relying on profit analyses or marketing. As long as financial statements and profit dominate the system, it will run as a business, and what is best for business is not always what is best for the athletes or the game.

~ by Brian McCormick on March 12, 2009.