INTEGRITY NOW OR LATER?

Prep Schools, Reclassification, Hold Backs... What the...? These are common terms now considered part and parcel when it comes to maximizing your son or daughter's recruiting potential out of high school. There are Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) tourneys every weekend in converted warehouses turned multiplex facilities. You pay to park and to get in just to watch kids, who aren't old enough to drive yet, play basketball. There's a lot to say about all of this craziness but I'm especially intrigued with the extended prep educational experiences prescribed to many parents.

The fifth year is common now for the serious top recruits, the ones with NBA on their minds. It's hard to look at the phenomenon and not think, "Man, maybe I just didn't want basketball bad enough back in the early 90s when I was in high school. Kids now are down to stay a year longer in school and be held back..." then I come to my senses. There used to be a stigma about staying in school too long, looking older than everyone else and graduating from high school at 19 or 20. And I realize that now you can actually graduate and go to basketball academies where you won't be judged as if you failed senior year. But still...it's weird to me.

In the last 10 years in our culture the ethos of amateur basketball has morphed into, for elite players, a systemic on-ramp to professional basketball. There's a concocted cocktail almost scientific in its exactness that is supposed to at minimum land a prep a scholarship. Back in the day, and I know how this sounds, but back in the day your high school team was the primary vehicle for exposure. My college coach came to Diamond Bar high school and saw me play. He didn't come to some basketball factory with short courts and running time games. And this isn't to say that my day was better. I'm just saying I struggle to understand the obsession. There's opportunism in the eyes of people who have made lucrative business out of the basketball stage that used to be more formative and recreational. And there's the same opportunism in the hearts of parents who desperately want their athletes to excel.

I guess it worked for Shabazz Muhammad the Minnesota Timberwolves rookie recently sent home from the NBA rookie transition program. In fact, it works for enough guys, just enough guys to keep the amateur compulsion alive and well. And I get that. I get that keeping kids busy keeps them out of trouble and that skill mastery is likely when you repeat-rinse-and-repeat. But dude, you ain't got to lie to get your kid good. You ain't got to hold your kid back and reclassify him so that he's class of 2014 instead of 2013. Commit to the core virtues that make people great and the young bull will still develop. Trust me. Some things never stop working. Patience is a virtue and a developer of virtue.