Author: Jared Stohl

Just because you didn’t make the top AAU or select team in the state doesn’t mean you can’t get recruited. Many players that are college level players slip through the cracks every year. Even Stephen Curry almost got passed up. If your not on a national showcase team, here is what you should do to make sure your talents don’t go unnoticed. The Exposure Gap

Need some motivation? What does it take to get your game to the  next level?

Watch this phenomenal piece on Stephen Curry

Every kid dreams of playing Division 1, but what are the actual odds of getting a division 1 full ride scholarship to play basketball? Well according to scholarshipstats.com you have a 1% chance. Your odds go up to 5.7% if you can accept playing at lower college levels.

 

Basketball is just a game. It ends for everyone eventually. You win some and you lose some. I feel the general trend in teaching the new generation of athlete’s is that it is okay to lose, everyone gets a participation trophy and it’s okay that team just beat you by 20 points, “They have been playing together for years”.

I agree there is more to life than basketball, and one should have multiple interests. But why should the score at the end of the game matter? Here is cold hard fact- It matters because eventually this game we love turns into a business and turns into potential money earned or lost. You will either be on the winning side or losing side of it. Getting a scholarship to play a sport in college is like getting paid, after all the average D-1 basketball player spends an average 39.5 hours a week on their craft not including class time. It is a full time job, and what do you receive for that work? A free college education. Mine was worth $120,000, of which I didn’t have to pay 1 cent. Obviously once you get to the next level you either sign a contract or you are cut but that is a minuscule portion of AAU players who actually make it that far.

If you saw my previous post only 1% of kids in the US make it Division 1 and 5.7% get some kind of financial aid at other levels. This is why the score matters. Because there is someone out there that is better than you, and more than likely a kid on the team who beat you will take your scholarship in the future. After all coaches like to recruit people who win or come from winning backgrounds.

Keeping score is one way to always compare yourself to other competition. Yes you will have games you lose and days you play terrible, but how you respond to those losses, and bad performances is what matters especially at a young age. For me, instead of saying it’s okay they are really good, I always asked, “How do I get better, how do I beat that team?”. I believe this correlates to the “The real world”. If businesses fail they either improve or they don’t make it. If your a salesman and you don’t get sales..well you know how it goes.

AAU tournaments and showcase tournaments are essential in measuring what level of basketball you are at. You should always be comparing the score of a team you beat to another team who beat them by more or held them to less points than your team. As a coach and player it lets you know, okay we have to raise our level of defense or we have to improve offensively because that team scored 80 points on the team we just beat and we only scored 50 points.

Now don’t mistake me, I am assuming 90% of kids playing elite AAU tournaments or playing on an elite team have the goal to win tournaments, or play in college, or simply make the varsity team. Otherwise yes please don’t worry about the score, just have fun and be the best you can. For me I always had something on the line, and I knew where my goals lined up.

My college coaches used to use the same method of comparison only to more detailed scoring stats. For instance our goal was to win the WCC conference, so we compared our scoring average and defensive points allowed average to the team who seemed to have the winning formula in our league…Gonzaga! one season we were 5-0 and Gonzaga was 5-0. We had compared our stats to them all year long. Of the 5 teams we already played that they had played, they averaged a few more points than us per game offensively but defensively they held teams to 12 fewer points than us. So we knew if we wanted to beat them we had to get our defense better. For your info we lost that game by 3.

Keeping score is essential to measuring your progress, your teams ability, and if basketball is something you can potentially have a future in. It is okay to fail but don’t accept failure and do nothing about it. In the real world you either rise to the level of the competition or you won’t make it for very long.

 

 

 

 

I have coached both AAU and Highschool basketball and to me there has been issues both ways of kids skipping spring/summer tournaments to go with their AAU teams to and also I’ve lost AAU players to high school teams because their coach pressures them into having to be there, or they are trying to make an impression on their coach.

What it comes down to is players goals. Is there goal to make varsity? Is there next goal then to get to college? I think high school coaches and AAU coaches need to respect those two things. If a player has already been on varsity that last year then there next focus should be to get to college, in which AAU will help them get there 95% more than their high school team will. College recruiters like the AAU circuit because you get the best playing against the best. Not to mention scouting services who see you on the AAU circuit in big national tournaments. On many high school teams you find 1-2 really good college level players and the rest won’t probably make it past their senior years of high school. Sure there are some exceptions like the state tournament, however college coaches are usually busy preparing their own teams to really crunch down and recruit kids in the high school season. Also it is important to take in account the strength of the league you are playing in. What college or pro players have come out of your league and how well do the teams in your league compare to the rest of the state? College coaches have predetermined bias’s about your league and AAU puts everything on a level playing field for them.

For more info on the importance of AAU here is what college coaches say about the issue.