Difference between travel and AAU basketball

[Anonymous]

I am a new basketball parent so please forgive my ignorance.

What is travel basketball exactly? How far and often do players travel? I would suppose it’s not necessary to travel much since this area has plenty of basketball talent.. Then is AAU different from travel basketball? I have read on this forum about Force One league in MD. Does that fit into one of those categories?

Thank you!

[Anonymous]

Travel basketball is just a term for teams that travel and that includes AAU teams who can travel far. Some AAU teams don't travel except for around the DMV. Some local county leagues have a more selective, top team that travels outside of their zip code. I think travel is just a loose term for a higher level team.

[Anonymous]

As PP said, travel is a pretty generic term. One thing to know about AAU is that people use the term for:

- Amateur Athletic Union events (where the kids and coaches have AAU affiliation and they check kids’ ages),

- “Travel” or “select” teams that play primarily in leagues like Force 1 or Flames and play an occasional tournament. These are generally lower level than the teams below — my kid played on a team that won all their Force 1 games including the championship by big margins, and they played in the lowest division of most tournaments (and often lost).

- Travel teams focused on tournaments run by companies like HoopGroup and Elevate Hoops. These are generally at a higher level than a league like force one, but there is a HUGE range (often 4 divisions with 30 teams in each). Blowouts are really common at these tournaments.

- Grassroots leagues sponsored by shoe companies (EYBL, UAA, and whatever the Adidas league is). These will be the highest level of competition with most kids in those leagues playing D1 college ball. Note that the shoe companies buy all the gear for these kids and there are typically no costs to kids to play. Also worth noting that Adidas has open tournaments (called “Silver” something). Those are not the same as the grassroots league, although some local teams seem to try to imply that they play for the grassroots league when they really just play in these open tournaments.

For the second two varieties above, nobody checks ages, and “reclassing” to play with younger teams is really common, so if your kid plays 15U, they will play lots of 16 year olds.

[Anonymous]

Thank for the detailed answer!! Very helpful.