Box Score Beat

Demanding Our Attention

Posted on 23. Mar, 2009 by Collin Orcutt in Grass Roots Basketball, Sports Journalism

If you weren’t paying attention, you may have missed two articles that, while not ground breaking in their own rights, examined on a topic worthy of the level of scrutiny we put our politicians under: what is known as grassroots basketball.

On Thursday, the Village Voice published Graham Rayman’s piece, “The Raw Intensity of New York’s Elite Youth Basketball.” Just two days later, the New York Times Magazine ran an article by Michael Sokolove titled “Allonzo Trier Is in the Game.”

Both articles offer slices of the elite youth basketball world, that of A.A.U (Amateur Athletic Union) tournaments, billion dollar sneaker companies, websites dedicated to player rankings that can determine fates, over zealous parents, millionaire backers — and all for kids, many of whom are not even teenagers.

Rayman’s piece uses the Riverside Hawks, a storied New York City youth program, as a way into the grass roots scene and then broadens the focus. Sokolove follows the sixth-grade talent Allonzo Trier, using him in a fashion similar to the character Dante in “Dante’s Inferno,” a guide that leads the reader by the hand through the fantastic and usually unbelievable world around him.

The ugliness of youth basketball isn’t new, nor is writing about it. If you know the name Sonny Vaccaro then you know a little about the wild west that is pre-college hoops and the tactics that accompany them (if you don’t, just wait until the HBO movie ABCD Camp, starring James Gandolfini as Vaccaro). Darcy Frey wrote about the scene in “The Last Shot: City Streets, Basketball Dreams.” Mitch Albom touched on it in “The Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, the American Dream.”

In Rayman’s piece, there’s an anecdote about Antoine Lewis Sr.’s experiences as a Riverside Hawk when he was a high school senior back in the 80’s:

There was a shady side to that world, too. Teams, Lewis says, thought nothing of offering cash and other incentives to players for their participation in tournaments. He recalls refusing to play in one tourney because he surmised that the organizers were drug dealers.

It was also not uncommon for most of the kids on Riverside’s senior team to earn full scholarships, which is staggering when you realize that most high-school teams never send anyone to Division One.

Lewis is now 40. In his youth, he played in a tournament with Kenny Anderson, Moses Scurry, J.R. Reid, and Alonzo Mourning. So we see it’s not a new problem. But if this is not new, then why is it still being written about? Simply, the problem persists.

And not only does it persist, it has worsened.

I was at an AAU Tournament in New Jersey a couple weekends ago. There were more than 100 teams there. Over the course of the weekend I was told about and then watched the next can’t-miss-kid (a sixth grade lefty from Brooklyn who, at his age, supposedly has more skill than Kenny Anderson did), saw a Villanova recruiter decked out in full Wildcat gear (keep in mind this was a U-14 tournament), and learned second-hand about a Nike sponsored D.C. team that had flown all of its players and their families to the tournament, along with their full home and away uniforms with matching sneakers.

And this was a relatively small tournament compared to the heavy weights.

In Sokolove’s article, he writes about an A.A.U. team coached and sponsored by Steve Trauber, a UBS big wig:

Trauber’s sixth-grade team traveled to tournaments two weekends a month and played 118 games in 2008 — 36 more than an N.B.A. team does in the regular season. He estimated that he spent more than $200,000 on travel and other expenses. The star among his sixth graders was Jesse Pistokache (White Chocolate), a six-footer who lives all the way down in the Rio Grande Valley and travels most weekends to Houston to practice with his teammates — or join them on another flight to a tournament. “This is our life,” his mother, Teri Mata-Pistokache, a college professor, told me. “You’ve just got to give in to it. If he wants to meet his goals in basketball, this is what we’ve come to understand is necessary.”

This passage was the point in the article when I went from mildly interested to fully invested. If this isn’t telling that A.A.U. basketball and the pressure put on the kids that play is more epidemic than enrichment, I don’t know what is.

You see, while the country is caught up in office pools, Cinderellas, and (this year) Baracketology, in gyms across the U.S. America’s basketball youth are taking part in an unholy game of “how much will you be worth” and to whom. And it never stops. No matter the season, the vicious cycle continues.

Rayman writes:

“While no one is going to admit that kids can be commodities in this world, sometimes it can seem like that.”

That’s just the problem. There isn’t a “sometimes it can seem like that.” They are being treated as commodities. They’re investment options for the higher-ups at sneaker companies. Throw shoes at them now, hope they make it big later. Sokolove picks this up perfectly:

The shoe companies, Nike and Adidas most prominently, along with apparel makers like Under Armour, pour money into the system, hoping to win the loyalty of kids who might become the next LeBron James. They finance the best A.A.U. teams and find ways to funnel gear to the most promising players. It’s a relatively small investment for these companies, even if they make bets on hundreds of kids, but to the families it can seem like a lot – not just the material goods but also what the attention and gifts seem to foreshadow. Think of it this way: Youth soccer may seem out of control, and here in the U.S. there’s no big pot of money at the end of the rainbow, and few suburban families believe their kid’s talent is going to get them to a better class of subdivision.

The crux of the issue is that, somewhere along the way, a kid’s game became a man’s business. These articles were a good first step. But showing that there is a problem isn’t enough — many of us knew about the problem well before the pieces were published.

What we need are articles on where the connections are: which college coaches have relationships with which A.A.U. teams, what sneaker companies are feeding kids to what programs, where is the money coming from and whose hands is it passing between. Certainly this isn’t of the caliber of our country’s economic problems or our troops overseas, but in the world of sports, there are few things that should be deemed more important than exposing the underworld of our youth basketball culture.

Tags: A.A.U., Allonzo Trier, Graham Rayman, grassroots basketball, Michael Sokolove, New York Times Magazine, Riverside Hawks, the Village Voice, youth basketball