Depending on your age, LeBron James is either the greatest basketball player of all time or the second greatest. Thus, he might know a thing or two about basketball. And he might know a thing or two about AAU basketball culture given that his two sons, Bronny and Bryce, have been mired in it, and he himself was a product of it.
This week, I stumbled upon some quotes from James railing on the overload of AAU, shared by Aspen Sports and Society. At first, I thought this was a new story but turns out it was from an interview with Yahoo Sports in 2019. James was asked about the ‘load management’ debate in the NBA, the idea of limiting a player’s regular season time to keep them fresh and less injury prone for the playoffs…and their careers. The Raptors famously used this tactic in Kawhi’s Leonard’s only season with the Toronto Raptors. The result was an NBA Championship.
Former Suns coach Earl Watson tweeted about the bottom-up impetus for load management in the NBA.
James piggybacked on AAU’s culpability, citing the inexcusable work rate expectations, as experienced by his own family.
“I think [AAU] has something to do with it, for sure,” James, the most famous of basketball dads, told Yahoo Sports. “It was a few tournaments where my kids — Bronny and Bryce — had five games in one day and that’s just f- - -ing out of control. That’s just too much. And there was a case study where I read a report. I don’t know who wrote it not too long ago, and it was talking about the causes and [kid’s] bodies already being broken down and they [attributed] it to AAU basketball and how many games that these tournaments are having for the [financial benefit]. So, I’m very conscious for my own son because that’s all I can control, and if my son says he’s sore or he’s tired, he’s not playing.
“Because a lot of these tournaments don’t have the best interest of these kids, man. I see it. It’s like one time, they had to play a quarterfinal game, a semifinal game and a championship game starting at 9 a.m., and the championship game was at 12:30 p.m. Three games. I was like, ‘Oh, hell no.’ And my kids were dead tired. My kids were dead tired. This isn’t right. This is an issue.”
Lonzo Ball was an absolute stud AAU prospect, drafted no. 2 overall by the Los Angeles Lakers in 2017 after just one season at UCLA. Sadly, his career has been defined by a robust injury history; Ball is about to undergo his third knee surgery and miss all of next season.
Ball is just one example, but injury rates continue to climb, especially among star players. (You know, the ones that every AAU team was begging to have guest play.) And because AAU is so all-encompassing, kids are pressured into specializing way too early, making it a year-round situation. A 2017 American Journal of Sports Medicine study showed that NBA players who were able to play multiple sports in high school had significantly lower rate of injury and longevity of career than those playing full-time AAU basketball.
The late Kobe Bryant decided to focus on fundamentals instead of tourney honors and didn’t participate in his first AAU tournament until he was 15. And he passed that same ideology down to his daughter, Gianna. He spoke on his reluctance in 2019.
“She’s looking around at different stuff and you see there’s a lot. They could literally play every single weekend in club-organized basketball at 10 years old. It’s like, why? I had to be like, ‘No.'”
Of course, most people, actually no people, have the clout of a LeBron or Kobe. It’s easy to get sucked in and sold on how this showcase and how playing for this team will catapult you to the NBA or WNBA. But also, how you’ll lose playing time if you don’t show up for x, y, and z.
Who’s looking out for the kids? Certainly not the tourney directors who will pack in teams of all ages like sardines if it means upping the revenue. It’s not just basketball. My kid is playing a baseball tourney this weekend and his second game tomorrow starts at 8:30PM. The venue is 90 minutes away and it’s quite possible his team could play at 8AM in the bracket round on Sunday. If tomorrow night’s game ends at 10:30PM and we get home at midnight and then must leave at 5:30AM to make it for 7AM warmups, that’s 5.5 hours of sleep max. They’re 12. How is this ok?
Then you have the coaches who might be well-meaning, but they are usually pressured to win. By winning, maybe their program can earn whatever bullshit status comes with win-loss success. Maybe they even land the next Lonzo Ball!
It’s a depressing reality without an obvious solution. If the youth sports rainmakers aren’t not going to listen to LeBron, then all the kids are screwed.
Yes, it's as if kids are sucked into an exhausting rat race indeed. We totally agree with having athletes try different sports rather than be burnt out by one. Just ask Wayne Gretzky and Paolo Banchero.