AAU has become one-stop shop for college coaches

Jul 03, 2010

By: Oakland Press Sports

By MATTHEW B. MOWERY
Of The Oakland Press
When entrepreneur Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly store in Memphis, Tenn., in 1916, his idea for self-service grocery shopping completely revolutionized the way consumers purchased food.
While the ideals and origins behind the formation and subsequent growth of the Amateur Athletic Union’s system of summer basketball aren’t nearly as neatly summarized as that example, the result — at least for college coaches — is almost exactly the same.
AAU basketball, for all its warts, has neatly cut out the middleman in the recruiting wars, effectively providing the consumer (in this case the coaches) a one-stop-shopping atmosphere, where nationally-marketed products (here the players) are on prominent display on the shelves.
That comes with both good and bad — increased exposure and attention have spawned a seamier side to the suddenly burgeoning business of recruiting — but for coaches, you have to take the bad to get the good.
“It is what it is. And you cannot like it and complain, and say bad things about it, but there are good things about it,” said Oakland University men’s basketball coach Greg Kampe, who has watched the AAU phenomenon grow in his 26 years in Rochester. “I can’t change it. I’m not gonna change it. So I accept it for what it is, and try to make the best out of it.”

For time-strapped coaches, making the best out of it means taking full advantage of the fact that they can see far more players at an AAU tournament in the summer than they ever can during the high school seasons.
“The biggest advantage, from a college coach’s perspective, to do AAU recruiting, you go to an event, and I’m there all day long, and get to see seven or eight kids. There’s not too many times where there are seven kids who are our level or above are playing on the same high school team. So we get to go to one site and sit there and see all these different kids from different areas of the state of Michigan, or even the Midwest, for that matter, and we don’t have to leave a gym,” said Jeff Curtis, the head women’s basketball coach at Division II Northwood University.
“From the convenience factor, it’s huge, and not to mention it’s always on the weekends — which does take you away from your family on the weekends, but it also means you’re home on the weekdays, which for some people is really, really important.”
That convenience is even a bigger factor for women’s coaches in our state, who were used to recruiting in their offseason (the fall) before the court-mandated season switch for Michigan high schools. For the last three years, women’s coaches have had to deal with the same headache of in-season recruiting that their counterparts on the men’s side had dealt with all along.
“Before the seasons changed, every Tuesday and Thursday, I was going to be on the road. I was recruiting. That’s the way it was. And now, it becomes more of a challenge to pinpoint when kids are playing — certain conferences play on certain nights, and sometimes they play the early game or the late game,” said Curtis, who estimated his staff — members of which put an average of 35,000 miles on their cars on the recruiting trail last year — logged 22 days in July alone last summer, as compared to two or three in-season recruiting trips.
“It has made a major impact, and we’ve probably stepped up our game a little bit, as far as what we we’re looking to get accomplished, as far as our recruiting, in the spring and in the summer, but we still … like to do our homework and see kids play in high school, as well. … Bottom line is that we still need to be out and see kids play, as much as we can.”
And if having instant access to thousands of players all at once is a huge bonus for coaches, it’s even better when the AAU tournaments divvy the players up into age groups.
That’s a godsend for someone like Oakland Community College women’s coach Marv Allen, who has to reload his team in two-year cycles.
“Say I’m looking for seniors that are coming out, or a junior at a particular position as a potential player down the road, I can see maybe 100 girls in one day. But the nice thing is, they’re all juniors and seniors, versus if you go to a high school game, you may see two seniors on one team and one on the other, and mostly juniors. Or vice versa. So you get a much quicker overview faster, is what you get,” Allen said.
“If there’s a freshman, that’s four years away for me. A four-year college may be able to look at them and think, ‘We’ll put them on our (radar), and follow up next year and the year after,’ where I’ve got that two-year turnover.”

On the radar
One of the main mandates of AAU basketball is to get kids on the radar of college recruiters as early as possible — sometimes to the detriment of the sport, and the kids themselves.
Kids not yet out of middle school and years away from driving privileges are taking cross-country summer trips, and donning expensive uniforms. For cash-strapped parents — many of whom are just starting to deal with pay-for-play systems in high school sports — those additional costs may price kids out of playing multiple sports, just adding to the general move toward specialization.
Three- or four-sport athletes are definitively a thing of the past.
“When I was growing up, I couldn’t wait to be on my high school basketball team, because I got to wear the cool uniform, and warm-ups, and all the neat things that came from playing for your town. … When I was in high school, if you made an hour ride on the bus to play somebody, that was unbelievable. Now, I mean, some of these AAU teams, they’ve got 13 different uniforms, they’ve got kids at 15, 14, 13 years old that have nicer equipment, brand new shoes — the hottest shoes, the coolest stuff — and they’re given all this stuff. … They’re wearing a different uniform for every game, and they’re traveling all over the freakin’ country,” said Kampe, whose own sons play in the AAU system.
“They just get stuff before it’s ever earned — long, long, long before they ever should, in my opinion.”
The AAU system — which as often as not merely breeds the sense of entitlement for athletes — also erodes the attitudes of loyalty and perseverance, almost setting up a system of free agency.
“I see it because I recruit a kid, and things don’t go well for him in his freshman year, instead of sucking it up and saying, ‘This is the school I picked and this is where I want to be.’ … and it’s not so much the kid, it’s the people around the kid, who should be saying to him, ‘You chose this school, it’s not going to be easy. You were just a freshman. You’ve got to improve, you’ve got to get better, and go through the process.’ No, kids want to run and change, because that’s what they’ve done all through (the process). I know of kids that have played on a different AAU team every year. They don’t like the coach, they don’t like this, so they leave,” Kampe said.
“When I was in high school, if something went wrong, my dad would grab me by the jersey and say, ‘You do what that coach says, and you keep your mouth shut.’ Now it’s, ‘You need to get out of there, that coach doesn’t know what he’s doing.’ ”
By and large, those people doing the whispering are there for the money, like it or not.

Money, money, money
Coaches who’ve been around the game for decades, like Kampe and Tennessee women’s assistant Dean Lockwood, it’s been an annoyance they’ve had to deal with increasingly, as the interest in their sport has grown.
Handlers.
Entourages.
Representatives who turn kids into miniature free-agents.
“There’s a lot of different motivations. In the men’s game, because all of it trickles down from NBA money, it’s like all these people, so many of them have got their hooks into this kid because they see a payoff at the end of the line, more often than not. Not all of them — there are some really good ones out there,” Lockwood said. “But the people who get in the way of the recruiting process, and want you to deal with them, and want to be so overly involved in the whole thing for somebody, or have their hand out — in the end, it’s money.
“In our world, there’s not the NBA, there’s the WNBA, and the money’s not the same. But because women can go overseas (to play professionally), and do very well, and there is a WNBA, we’re seeing more and more of that.”
For Lockwood, who spent the first 22 years of his coaching career on the men’s side — with stops as an assistant at Army, Tennessee and CMU, and as the head coach at Northwood and Saginaw Valley — the switch to the women’s game six years ago has merely allowed him a front-row seat to watch his newly-adopted sport go down the same road.
He even warned legendary UT women’s coach Pat Summitt that it was coming, back in his first go-round in Knoxville, Tenn., in the late 1980s.

“I told her this: Our game (at the time the men’s game), we’re about 15 years ahead of your game, in terms of — not how it’s coached, or anything — but in terms of the elements that go into recruiting. I said, ‘You watch and see. As your game grows in popularity, there’s going to be elements involved in recruiting,’ ” Lockwood recalled.
“And now, being on this side of the fence, I said something to her the other day, I said ‘You know what? It’s getting closer and closer to the men’s game, in terms of all the people you have to deal with, in terms of the AAU stuff, the entourage of people.’
“If you talk to men’s coaches … you’re going to hear some absolute horror stories about people they have to deal with, and instead of being one, two or three people, it’s five, six, seven people in a kid’s camp, that you have to try to get in your corner. But I’ll tell you what, you’re seeing more and more of that (in women’s basketball).
“Now, is it as widespread? No. Is the volume of it as big as it is in the men’s game? No. But do we see it? Yes we do,” admitted Lockwood, who has seen it all before. “If you’ve cleared the land, and you’ve had to hunt bears and wolves, you know what they look like. And if, all of a sudden, my livestock is disappearing, and I see big paw prints — I know a bear or a wolf when I see it.”
More often than not, those wolves in sheep’s clothing attach themselves to a kid during the AAU process, reinserting the middlemen back into a process that was originally intended to keep them out.

Separate, yet equal
So how does a college coach get through all the noise of recruiting to find the right players? By using all the tools available to them, and understanding how different they are.
Like the venues themselves, both high school ball and AAU hoops have positives and negatives for recruiters.
“There are lots of good things (with AAU basketball) … but I also think it’s tough to watch,” Kampe admitted. “AAU teams, they practice once a week, maybe twice a week, they’re up and down, kids change, they may have four different players this week than they did last week, the style of ball, the coaching — there’s a big difference in coaching between lots of the teams — so there’s a lot you don’t know.
“A lot of it is just watching kids just run up and down and make athletic plays. The intelligence factors and things like that, you don’t see a lot of in the summer.”
By and large, though, AAU ball allows recruiters to pin down a kid’s tangibles — can he/she dribble, run, jump and shoot? — while watching them in high school ball may provide a better measure of intangibles — how do they take coaching, and winning and losing?
“I think some people base their recruiting solely off AAU, which I think that’s a little bit of a mistake, in my personal opinion. We want to see kids playing AAU, and I want to go and turn around and I want to watch them play in high school, because I want to see them play in different situations and in different environments,” Curtis said. “And that’s our part, as college coaches, of doing our homework.
“Give the kid a chance to show what they can do on a team full of all-stars, and I want to see you can do when you might be on a team that’s not quite as good as your AAU team. How are you going to react when things get a little tough? I think that shows the true character of the kid that you’re recruiting. And that’s one of our things: ‘OK, have you seen them play?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where did you see them? Did you see them AAU, did you see them high school ball? Did you see them in an open gym, or a showcase?’
“And we try to cover all of those areas, to get a true understanding of what a kid’s all about, and how they react to certain situations, and honestly, more times than not, it’s the same all the way across the board. There’s been very few times where we see a kid who shines in AAU, but emerges as kind of a bad attitude when it comes to high school ball. It does not happen too often that I’ve seen, but I have heard of cases where that’s what’s going on.”
While AAU ball may lack some of the permanence of high school — wins and losses mean far less when they pile up like cordwood — competing is still competing.
“In an AAU setting, you still get to see a kid compete. I don’t care who you are, if you’re playing, if there’s a game, and that clock is running, and there’s officials, a true competitor … they don’t want to lose, ever,” Lockwood said. “If it’s a high school drill, or an AAU game, or a high school tournament game — those kids do not want to lose. And they will give everything they’ve got.”
In the end, that’s all recruiters want to see, no matter where a kid is playing.

Matthew B. Mowery covers colleges for The Oakland Press. Read his blog at TheOaklandPress.com, and follow him on Twitter @matthewbmowery.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 at 3:28 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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