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[quote=Anonymous]With youth basketball, terminology gets kinda tricky because different people use the same words to mean different things.  When people say AAU they might mean:

- any kind of non-rec and non Catholic league basketball (i.e. select, travel)

- teams that play in AAU sanctioned tournaments where all the kids are members of AAU and they check birth certificates.

- teams that play in shoe company sponsored leagues.  The 3 shoe company leagues have about 20-25 teams per age group starting at 15-U, and that's where the best talent in the country is (i.e. McDonald's all-Americans play for those teams).

- teams that aspire to shoe company sponsorship and play in large tournaments put on by HoopGroup or similar that are either open to any team that pays or fairly easy to wrangle an invitation to.

To give you a sense of the landscape, in the past 5 years DS has played for:

- A bad select team that played in a local travel league (where they lost a lot) and also played AAU tournaments (where they got crushed every time).  Fees were about $400 per season (fall, winter and spring, so $1200 a year).  They were definitely pay to play, because the organization had tons of teams and would find a team for any kid.

- A good select team that played in a local travel league (where they always won the championship) and AAU tournaments (where they occasionally won but also got crushed fairly often).  Fees were similar but they were a small club and only took kids who could play.

- A fairly good AAU team (the "b" team at a sponsored club) that plays in the top division of big tournaments plus the occasional invitation-only showcase event made up entirely of sponsored teams (typically when they are standing in for the "a" team due to a conflict).

I say all of this to clarify that there is definitely pay-to-play among so-called AAU teams, and about the only teams where you don't really see it are the top level circuit teams (i.e. fully sponsored shoe company teams where the kids get hundreds of dollars worth of gear, travel, and coaching paid for and there are no fees at all).  Even at the "b" team of a sponsored club, there is some pay-to play (e.g. the dad of a player on DS's team works for the club, so his kid gets more playing time than he would strictly based on merit).

In terms of whether your kid would be challenged, it's tough to know.  A kid who plays JV at DS's school and hardly ever scores also plays on a low-level travel team where he gets like 20 points a game, so the same kid will look really different based on the competition.  I get what you're saying about wanting a team that will develop your kid but also wanting him to be challenged,  but recognize that those are to some extent competing goals, and it's going to be tough to find an exact fit.  I would definitely advise going to a lot of tryouts and, if at all possible, talking to parents.  All teams say that they focus on development over winning, but few really do.  For example, DS's AAU coaches say they want to develop kids, but parents were actively trying to poach players from other teams all season last year, and a loyal, hardworking kid got cut from the team halfway through the season in order to make space for a poached player.  As you might expect, the focus on winning (over player development and over teaching fundamental basketball) generally increases as you move up the scale toward fully sponsored teams.
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