Reply to How hard is it to get into AAU from rec?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I’d recommend spending six months or a year doing individual training with a good coach.  My kid went from being the worst player on a rec team that always lost in 6th grade to being a starter on a very good AAU team and bench player and reliable scorer on a high school team whose starters all played D1 mid major or higher ball.  AAU games did little to help that progression.  What helped was (hard, uncomfortable) skills and conditioning training and playing 3 on 3 with college players.  [/quote]

This.  It amazes me how many parents fall into the travel racket.  [b]People it’s pay to play[/b].   You get to spend a lot of money to have your family calendar tied up by driving a long ways to practices and games that are often scheduled last minute.    Join a rec team for fun play[b] and do skills training[/b] if kid really wants to improve.   Spending lots of time in the car driving to tournaments does not make you a better player.  Playing constant pickup during the time you could have spent driving, combined with skills training will make a better player.  [/quote]

pot, meet kettle. Just wondering, what gyms does a 6th grade girl go to for pick up games?  [/quote]

I’m the poster who suggested skills training.  It’s definitely a cost, but it’s more worthwhile to me than paying for a not great AAU team.  I disagree with the PP about pickup ball — in my experience it’s tough to find good competition, and instead you find chaos, crowds, and bad players with big egos.

A good coach will organize 2 on 2 or 3 on 3 group training and scrimmages, which is huge for learning.  My experience is that this can be a “pay it forward” situation where your kid gets to play with better players mostly at first, but also plays with worse players too as they develop.  They can learn from both. Two different coaches did this for my kid.

Later, as they develop further, a good trainer might get them into private runs with college players or even current or former pros, and they can learn a TON from that.  [/quote]

I've seen a couple of training only girls at tryouts and open gyms. Maybe I've seen more, but these dads both wore the evolution shirts and bragged about how smart they were to wait on a team. Those girls were not prepared for how physical and rough the game is. They kept on expecting the coaches to call fouls and they started arguing that they were being held/pushed/elbowed. That's just how tryouts are. You can be great, but when someone two inches taller and 20 pounds heavier is arm guarding you (girls refs let kids get away with a lot, especially in the half court), you have to know how to deal with it. [/quote]

DP.  I can’t speak to the girls game but this is a good point for boys as well.  I actually think there is value in playing chaotic ball with a bunch of kids who don’t really know what they’re doing wrt fouls.  It makes a player more physically and mentally resilient and also eventually helps kids learn to play physical but avoid making silly fouls.[/quote]

I think you need a bit of both.

There are kids that can do skills and drills but freezes up when they're under pressure.  One of my kids was like this and it helped a lot by trying to find them as many playing opportunities with quality players as possible.

But once you get to a certain age level, everyone can do the same thing.  So you REALLY need to stand out from the rest of them to have a shot to get onto the team.

The issue I've seen is that some people show up to tryouts totally unprepared and unable to do the skills and drills that they have players run through tryouts.  So have seen cases where some of them leave during tryouts or not show up for the next session of it.  Unless they came from a decent rec team with a coach that emphasized some of the things, just having experience with rec ball or playground ball won't help with getting onto a team by itself.

In some of the tryouts I've seen, they don't really run the kids through the skills and drills at the younger ages, like elementary school.  But by middle school a lot of the tryouts pretty much have kids do the same thing with maybe some slight variation in some specific drills different coaches might do.[/quote]

On the girls side, by middle school, the coaches know the players in the area including the ones who don't play for them. Even if they don't know them, they see what backpack they have and the first question is who do you play for. That alone is intimidating for rec players [/quote]

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