The AAU, which stands for the Amateur Athletic Union, a US nonprofit organization that hosts a variety of different sports for youth athletes, has drawn attention largely for its influence over youth basketball. Many high-profile basketball players, including LeBron James and Luka Dončić, have taken issue with what they see as its harmful effect on the modern game.
The draw of the AAU is that it provides a venue for the best players in the country to compete during the summer in front of a slew of college recruiters; any player angling for a D1 (the top division of college sports) scholarship must work through the AAU basketball system.
The culture of AAU is hypercompetitive: athletes from the age of seven travel the country and play in shoe brand–sponsored tournaments — a far remove from the (more affordable) culture of pickup basketball long associated with the sport.
Year-round participation in nationwide competition, brand-sponsored tournaments, invite-only camps, and professionalized personal training has replaced an earlier model of youth sport in which athletes played during the school seasons but enjoyed a long offseason during which they often played another sport for fun.
For the players, the AAU offers exposure, putting not-yet-teenaged kids in front of college coaches, agents, trainers, handlers, and shoe executives. These individuals make up the informal rent-seeking class, which makes money by restricting kid’s access to big-time amateur basketball.
Their primary objective is “relationship building” with future stars, or what sports documentarian Mike Nicoll has referred to as ”juice proximity.” The aim of these individuals is to identify young talent, build up that talent’s brand, and funnel them to a set of specific college programs associated with their particular brand sponsor.
It is perhaps unsurprising that American sports are dominated by the same brand of gatekeeping and rent-seeking capitalism common across the rest of American society. But the AAU exists in what is functionally a sports version of international waters, a decentralized space not run by the government but subject to the whims of major multibillion-dollar shoe corporations like Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour. Within this world, children are viewed as commodities, an asset that could one day be worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
And of course, while there are many well-meaning people in these spaces looking out for the kids and their future earning potentials, the system itself creates perverse incentives that inevitably attract bad actors.
Unsurprisingly, this money-driven, individualized approach to youth basketball is at odds not only with the health of the game but the health of the athletes themselves. Overuse injuries, burnout, and financial stress are all commonplace for both athletes and their families. These realities can be especially painful when the likelihood of getting a D1 scholarship for high school basketball players is less than 1 percent.
On a recent episode of his podcast, The Post Game, former NBA player and seven-time champion Robert Horry put things bluntly:
I hate AAU basketball . . . I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. There’s a lot of coaches that are exploiting these kids to try and get a payoff one day . . . I wish they would do something [else], so their bodies won’t get worn down, that’s why you see so many of these kids get hurt so easily now, because they’re overworked.
The justification for this demanding sports environment should be that it produces good results. But in this year’s NBA playoffs and even finals, star players Jayson Tatum and Tyrese Haliburton suffered Achilles ruptures. This is an injury often associated with overuse and previously thought to signal the natural end of a professional athletic career, but it is now being experienced by athletes in their physical prime.
The reality of the AAU experience stands in direct contrast with what experts have come to understand about juvenile athlete development. Findings from Norway’s Children Rights in Sport, as well as the Aspen Institute here in the United States, show that earlier and earlier specialization in sports for children results in increased likelihood of injury and mental health issues.
These stresses often harm promising young careers instead of promoting them. Norway has made efforts to reduce early specialization and has introduced age limits for travel, rejecting the path embraced by America. These commonsense approaches ensure that children are exposed to a sports culture that prioritizes experience and skill development, while protecting the well-being of young athletes.
Even in the European club system of basketball, where a level of professionalization and specialization is embraced, kids are brought up through a balanced approach of skill-building, intellectual development, and team-centered training. The US model, in contrast, obsesses over skills, individual exposure, and brand-building. This has proved a recipe for disaster, but things don’t have to be this way.
In Europe, China, and Australia, club systems bear the financial burden for the child’s participation in sports, providing a more affordable option to parents who in the American system are tasked with paying for some combination of travel, event access, and trainer sessions. This allows players from all backgrounds to enter the sport, an injection of meritocracy desperately needed in an NBA in which, just last season, LeBron James suited up alongside his rookie teammate LeBron James Jr. Some have gone so far as to call basketball the “new golf” because of the cost-prohibitive nature of a sport that has its roots in working and middle-class America.
The good news is that the rest of the world’s approach has shown results: the last seven NBA MVPs have all been foreign-born — a fact that might put pressure on the United States. Media pundits, reflecting on the toxic culture of American professional sports, often express shock at the balanced lifestyle of stars like the Serbian Nikola Jokić and the Slovenian Dončić, who have garnered attention for their behavior during the offseason, which they usually spend visiting family, drinking beer, and racing horses.
This alone should be a damning indictment of the utility of the AAU’s grindset culture. As homegrown athletes continue to fall behind their international peers, it’s clear that the highest levels of the sport can be more reliably reached with a tempered approach that allows young athletes to both professionally excel and enjoy themselves.
AAU basketball is an exceptionally American institution. Some of our largest corporations are bankrolling competitive environments that fetishize the individual at the expense of the team, providing young athletes with a crash course in brand optimization where development is sacrificed in favor of exposure.
This variety of neoliberalism has created a new kind of athlete — one that prioritizes notions of self-entrepreneurship that have done harm to what makes team sports so compelling.
If we want to live in a society in which sports can function as a positive expression of competition, leisure, and meritocracy, it would be in our best interest to learn from our neighbors, adopt a children’s sports bill of rights, and nationalize the AAU system. This would bring long-overdue regulation to an industry that has shown an inability to effectively develop young athletes with their best interests in mind.
Apologists for the system often argue that this harsh environment is responsible for producing some of the NBA’s best American players. But these figures often flourished despite, rather than because of, this grueling system. The late Kobe Bryant, when asked his thoughts about the AAU, had the following response:
I hate it. It doesn’t teach our players how to play the right way . . . it’s just a showcase. It’s absolutely horrible for the game. My generation was when AAU basketball really started becoming shit.
I got lucky because I grew up in Europe, and, you know, everything there was still fundamental, so I learned all the basics, and I think we’re doing a tremendous disservice to our young basketball players right now. That’s something that definitely needs to be fixed.
Great Job Jack Bedrosian & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
