AAU Basketball
The days are quickly coming to an end where it is enough just to play high school basketball. Those days are quickly quickly going to be behind us.
We’ve had the privilege of working with several great coaches with incredible experience and they all say the same thing. They want to see players play on the big stage and against the best players in the country. They want to be able to watch as many players as possible in that setting and see how they do against them because that’s the competition they’ll face every day in practice and in the games in college. If they rely strictly on high school competition they won’t get a very good idea of where a player truly is at.
I have a relative of mine who plays at a very small school and puts up 35-40 points a night. He even has a chance to be the all time leading scorer in the history of his state. However, he is limited right now in his offers because of his size and the competition he plays against night after night in his typical league. He has only started to play AAU ball but with kids getting offers earlier and earlier it may have been too late to get the D1 offer he deserves. This is a very common tale.
In Illinois this year there is a player named Anthony Davis. Anthony plays high school ball at a very small private school and he dominated there. He received very little attention from colleges across the country until this spring/summer where he jumped in and started playing AAU ball. He went from unknown to a top 10 player in the country and a lock for the McDonald’s game next year. He is going to pick from Kentucky, Syracuse and Ohio St. I’m not saying he wouldn’t have received a scholarship because he would’ve easily but the attention that he received was as a direct result of his spring/summer play because he dominated the guys he went up against. These stories happen all the time also.
It boils down to a couple things. 1. Give yourself every chance to be seen by college coaches. 2. It’s never too late. If you want to play division 1 then don’t just hope it, but do something about it. AAU basketball is a great first step to making that happen.
