Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:AAU teams can also form from county team to let them play together when county is not in season. DD's team does this.

Nova94 Feet teams play year-round so that is not what happened here.

if the other coach thinks something's up, they can ask for proof of residency. Every player is supposed to have provided it to their club

Anonymous wrote:The politics of basketball are evident. I don’t know how they work but you see with girl teams too. Sham tryouts at this age is unfair for new players. This is county. People should relax and give everyone a chance. AAU players are simply more experienced by

Most zip codes have multiple teams. You can try out broadly. I'd expect different tryouts to be 'shams' for different reasons. A team that has been together and is also playing AAU year round isn't going to replace half its players based on a couple of open gyms. On the other extreme a parent coached team is going to carry the coach's and assistant coach's kid. If the team is just an extension of rec, they may carry age group commissioners kids as well. At the ridiculous extreme those kids' friends are also in.

The main difference between local travel basketball and soccer is anyone who wants to play travel soccer and compete locally can find a team. The main local league for travel basketball is FCYBL and it is much, much harder to make a team. Each area gets one or two teams, and there are only ten or so spots per team. You can easily have 100 boys trying out for 10-20 spots. And they don't just make more teams to accommodate everyone who wants to play the way soccer leagues do. Also, FCYBL is only for four years whereas you can play in local travel soccer leagues for ten years. So of course Mclean parents are irate by the situation-I would be too. Usually these leagues are a little more protective of their program and the players who came up through their rec league.

Anonymous wrote:AAU teams can also form from county team to let them play together when county is not in season. DD's team does this.

Nova94 Feet teams play year-round so that is not what happened here.

AAU teams can also form from county team to let them play together when county is not in season. DD's team does this.

Oh my gosh, this thread explains so much. This McLean team played my son's FCYBL team in the BRYC Thanksgiving tournament and it was a SLAUGHTER. Like along the lines of 70-5. I forget exactly. Our kids had never played together before in a game as a team, they just started in season practices. This team was so good (and had so many TALL athletic kids). Usually at this age you get tall, or athletic. They had many players with both. This is my third kid to go through FCYBL and I have never seen a team with so many extraordinarily tall, athletic kids. We were joking about the water in McLean.

They seemed like they had played together forever, running plays (we were like, how did they learn all these plays when we just got 2-practices-a-week gym space the week before Thanksgiving?

I was a little irritated that the coach didn't put in his bench players once the score was like oh 40-2 but that may have been sour grapes. Some of their kids got very little play time.

(Our games were very competitive against all the other teams, and this team blew out every other team.)

Stop whining just because travel basketball is actually more selective and difficult to make.

Anonymous wrote:I’m not surprised. My son's AAU teammate (from a well known NoVA team) did not make McLean A or B team even though he’s a great shooter and ball handler, and solid player.

Well, we know he doesn’t play for Nova94Feet!

There is a kid who lives in Centreville playing for Mclean A team.
Can you imagine driving from Centreville to McLean twice a week for practices? Nuts.

The politics of basketball are evident. I don’t know how they work but you see with girl teams too. Sham tryouts at this age is unfair for new players. This is county. People should relax and give everyone a chance. AAU players are simply more experienced by

I’m not surprised. My son's AAU teammate (from a well known NoVA team) did not make McLean A or B team even though he’s a great shooter and ball handler, and solid player.

7th grade fcybl d1 boys

Is it 6th grade?

Why aren't they checking addresses this year? That just rewards cheaters. They have way fewer teams than a normal year b/c they banned so many leagues from participating---the least they could do is make sure everyone left is following the rules.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:From the photos the coach posted online, it looks like 7 or 8 overlapping players between the AAU team and the McLean Select first team. And that's if no kids were missing from either photo. So best case scenario for the Mclean kids was that 7-8 spots out of 10 on this team were "taken" before the tryouts began. That does suck and really doesn't speak well to the McLean basketball org that they would allow their team to be taken over like this.

And hard for the real FCYBL teams to compete against 8 kids who have been playing together year round for years while many of the FCYBL member orgs had zero basketball programming for their players since Covid.

Its kind of gross of this guy to shop his team around trying to line up a stacked team to compete in a community basketball league. Even if it technically follows the rules. I have no idea if any of these kids do or don't live in McLean.

LOLz at McLean parents crying and whining about some kids taking their spots especially if it's within the rules. McLean soccer does this all the time--recruiting players away from other clubs... recruiting over their existing player pool. Why would you expect anything different for basketball?

OP you never commented on whether or not the new players actually ARE BETTER than the A and B team players. I guess money can't buy you everything, McWhiney.

One of the many differences between travel soccer and FCYBL travel basketball is you really can't just go try out for any team you want. Your zip code is assigned an organization, and that's the team or teams (some zip codes overlap) you play for. You can't go shopping around. So the McLean kids are stuck with McLean for the most part, and if there are no spots on their team b/c they have all been coopted by a shady AAU guy, well, they are just SOL.