PPA Basketball

[Anonymous]

I asked about Jelleff and someone said try PPA.

What do you think about PPA basketball? Good coaching?

[Anonymous]

Both of my kids have done it the past few years and really liked it. We've had great coaches. Of course, it's possible not to have a great coach! But ours were great.

[Anonymous]

I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

PP, how did you find the right AAU team? Hear about a lot of leagues with bad coaches. How did you find a good league and coach?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

PP, how did you find the right AAU team? Hear about a lot of leagues with bad coaches. How did you find a good league and coach?

We started with team one that my sons peers had joined so kind of followed the lead of those ahead of us. It was expensive (but in line for the area - i find $600 for 8 weeks of basketball expensive), coaching was ok but not a good overall experience and did nothing for my sons confidence. We happened to play another league team close our house. During the game I struck up a conversation with one of the parents from the other team. At the end of the season we switched (team didn’t require tryouts) and never looked back. Finding the right fit worked out well for us. I hope my son sticks with this team through high school (he’s in middle school.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

+1 Very, very expensive rec. We are fortunate to be in MoCo, which has a great county rec league, as we discovered after our stint with PPA. We had liked their soccer program, though it's also expensive for what you get, but thought the basketball program was dreadful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

PP, how did you find the right AAU team? Hear about a lot of leagues with bad coaches. How did you find a good league and coach?

The AAU tryout process is totally not transparent and is really challenging for parents and kids when first joining a team. Some general observations about why this is:

- Teams are terrible at publishing information. Their websites are often non-existent, non-functional or woefully out of date. They tend to do much better at publishing to twitter, instagram and snapchat.

- All AAU teams claim to be highly competitive, yet there is an almost unbelievable range between bad local travel teams and good regional or national level teams, and this goes along with a very wide range of environments where kids can compete in "travel" basketball. Contrary to what many people assume, very, very, very much of the difference between better and worse teams is down to the coaches, not the talent level of the players.

- The fact that you're getting professional coaching sometimes doesn't mean much. We had "professional" coaches who played pro overseas who just didn't care -- one guy came to every game and practice high and was late to every single game or practice my kid ever had with him.

- AAU organizations are often badly run. It's not uncommon for a team to collapse mid-season -- even when the coaches are good at the basketball stuff. A couple of years ago, I was picking up the phone to make hotel reservations for a tournament in Atlantic City when my kid's coach texted me to say that the team was disbanding.

With this in mind, my suggestion would be to go to some youth basketball games (More Than Basketball fall league, Force One Fall league, similar in VA if you're there) and watch coaches. Watch teams warm up before games (are they doing drills with a coach, or jacking up shots with no supervision? For their layup lines, are they running from close to half court and shooting real layups or are they trying to do jellies to look cool?), for younger kids, watch how much coaches substitute key players (are they teaching or just trying to win?), watch the team's hustle on defense (do they immediately run down the floor and set up? do they trap the ball? if the other team beats their trap, do they adjust and play half court?), watch the coach's interaction with officials (officials are being paid a small amount in exchange for making it possible for your kid to compete and they could give a crap who wins a U12 game. Coaches with an ounce of self awareness or discipline treat them respectfully and insist that parents do too).

Note the names of teams that look good and either speak to the coach or look for them on the Web or on Twitter.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

PP, how did you find the right AAU team? Hear about a lot of leagues with bad coaches. How did you find a good league and coach?

The AAU tryout process is totally not transparent and is really challenging for parents and kids when first joining a team. Some general observations about why this is:

- Teams are terrible at publishing information. Their websites are often non-existent, non-functional or woefully out of date. They tend to do much better at publishing to twitter, instagram and snapchat.

- All AAU teams claim to be highly competitive, yet there is an almost unbelievable range between bad local travel teams and good regional or national level teams, and this goes along with a very wide range of environments where kids can compete in "travel" basketball. Contrary to what many people assume, very, very, very much of the difference between better and worse teams is down to the coaches, not the talent level of the players.

- The fact that you're getting professional coaching sometimes doesn't mean much. We had "professional" coaches who played pro overseas who just didn't care -- one guy came to every game and practice high and was late to every single game or practice my kid ever had with him.

- AAU organizations are often badly run. It's not uncommon for a team to collapse mid-season -- even when the coaches are good at the basketball stuff. A couple of years ago, I was picking up the phone to make hotel reservations for a tournament in Atlantic City when my kid's coach texted me to say that the team was disbanding.

With this in mind, my suggestion would be to go to some youth basketball games (More Than Basketball fall league, Force One Fall league, similar in VA if you're there) and watch coaches. Watch teams warm up before games (are they doing drills with a coach, or jacking up shots with no supervision? For their layup lines, are they running from close to half court and shooting real layups or are they trying to do jellies to look cool?), for younger kids, watch how much coaches substitute key players (are they teaching or just trying to win?), watch the team's hustle on defense (do they immediately run down the floor and set up? do they trap the ball? if the other team beats their trap, do they adjust and play half court?), watch the coach's interaction with officials (officials are being paid a small amount in exchange for making it possible for your kid to compete and they could give a crap who wins a U12 game. Coaches with an ounce of self awareness or discipline treat them respectfully and insist that parents do too).

Note the names of teams that look good and either speak to the coach or look for them on the Web or on Twitter.

13:02 here ~

The above is really good insight and advice. Having some of that knowledge would have saved us a lot of money, driving time and headaches.

Coaching - so very true. One our teams had a good coach but not only did the team have no chemistry or demonstrate teamwork, the coach's son was on the team and he clearly favored him. This was a $600+ program. Having a child of a coach on a team is an absolute non starter for us, unless of course we go back to rec.

Figure out what is most important to your son and your expectations of the team/coach. PPs suggestion of going to some games is spot on - Force One (https://www.forceonebasketball.org/results-other) starts its fall tournament this weekend so would be a good opportunity to see some of the teams in action.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

13:02 here ~

The above is really good insight and advice. Having some of that knowledge would have saved us a lot of money, driving time and headaches.

Coaching - so very true. One our teams had a good coach but not only did the team have no chemistry or demonstrate teamwork, the coach's son was on the team and he clearly favored him. This was a $600+ program. Having a child of a coach on a team is an absolute non starter for us, unless of course we go back to rec.

Figure out what is most important to your son and your expectations of the team/coach. PPs suggestion of going to some games is spot on - Force One (https://www.forceonebasketball.org/results-other) starts its fall tournament this weekend so would be a good opportunity to see some of the teams in action.

Great advice PPs. The link for force one doesn’t have the tournament schedule. Anyone know what it is?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

13:02 here ~

The above is really good insight and advice. Having some of that knowledge would have saved us a lot of money, driving time and headaches.

Coaching - so very true. One our teams had a good coach but not only did the team have no chemistry or demonstrate teamwork, the coach's son was on the team and he clearly favored him. This was a $600+ program. Having a child of a coach on a team is an absolute non starter for us, unless of course we go back to rec.

Figure out what is most important to your son and your expectations of the team/coach. PPs suggestion of going to some games is spot on - Force One (https://www.forceonebasketball.org/results-other) starts its fall tournament this weekend so would be a good opportunity to see some of the teams in action.

Great advice PPs. The link for force one doesn’t have the tournament schedule. Anyone know what it is?

It’s likely to be posted today on that link. If you look back at previous seasons you can see past tournament brackets.

[Anonymous]

I thought OP was looking for developmental basketball? If so, PPA is exactly that.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I thought OP was looking for developmental basketball? If so, PPA is exactly that.

OP never really specified beyond good coaching for an 11 year old. It’s ok PPA, those of us that have been through your system understand your business model and how you are selling yourself to parents. Fortunately for you there is no shortage of kids and parents that will give you money.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I posted one of the responses about jellef. My son did about a year and a half of PPA, it’s basically rec with a paid coach. Do not go into it expecting a good coach, we had one great one and the rest were duds. They knew something about b-ball but lacked crowd control skills. One practice per week and one on the weekend made it very expensive rec. iIf you want your son to play and have fun either rec or PPA. To actually learn something, maybe look into hooped or other clinics to supplement after several seasons of PPA my son hadn’t learned much but thought he was all an all star.
Since he has chosen b-ball we signed him up for a lot of summer camps and eventually got him involved in an AAU team.

+1 Very, very expensive rec. We are fortunate to be in MoCo, which has a great county rec league, as we discovered after our stint with PPA. We had liked their soccer program, though it's also expensive for what you get, but thought the basketball program was dreadful.

I'm in MoCo too and my 5th grader has been playing with PPA for 3 seasons now. I'd love for our team to shift to MoCo Rec for the winter season to save $$, but we have been unable to find a parent willing and experienced enough to coach the team. Was it easy for you to find a parent coach for Rec?