Reply to PPA Basketball

Forum Index » Sports General Discussion

Reply to "PPA Basketball "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=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.[/quote]

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?[/quote]

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  Their websites are often non-existent, non-functional or woefully out of date.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.
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics