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Trying to solve hoop's problems
EDITOR'S NOTE: This is the first of a two-part column on the state of basketball today. The conclusion will be in Monday's Banner Graphic.
Basketball is considered an American game in general, and an Indiana sport in particular.
Dr. James A. Naismith (actually born in Canada) invented the game, and it is often said that Indiana perfected it.
Well, those two things may have once been true, but as time passes neither former hotbed of the sport is thriving as much as it did previously.
Exhibit A for the United States no longer being the dominant basketball country could easily be the recent NBA draft, in which 14 of the 30 first-round selections were born outside of the U.S.
That's a staggering number. One of the ESPN commentators pointed out on Friday that the last time only 16 U.S. players were chosen in the first round of the draft was 1978 -- when the league had just 18 teams.
The potential reasons for this are numerous, though it's hard to pin down one of them as the primary cause.
Many foreign countries who produce numerous NBA players -- such as Germany, France and Croatia -- have sports academies for their young standouts and they train as much on sports as they do some of the seemingly worthless topics American kids are forced to learn (such as multiplying and dividing fractions). Not that we should adopt such a system, but it can help explain the shift in talent level.
The blame game
"AAU" teams get a lot of blame as well, although the number of teams who play in actual tournaments sponsored by the Amateur Athletic Union is minuscule compared to the shoe company-sponsored invitationals that have become the dominant forum for displaying the top talent in meat market-style.
I coached travel teams for many years, ranging from elementary ages to seniors-to-be in high school. I have witnessed all the things that such teams are accused of doing, from players jumping from team to team to find a better situation, to overbearing parents who far overestimate the ability of their children all the way through shady teams who were undoubtedly paying high schoolers to be on their teams.
I never got the value of that practice, unless these coaches were attempting to create a better market for their services as a high school or college coach. We can all name numerous instances in which a coach/parent (or both) was hired by a school to also coincidentally acquire the services of a talented child. (See Danny Manning/Ed Manning/Larry Brown at the University of Kansas for an example.)
The primary criticism of these travel teams is that fundamentals are ignored and the games are simply street ball, and there is some merit to that.
The last time I coached "serious" high school travel basketball was in the late 1990s, when teams were just starting to expand their rosters to include promising players from bordering states.
Now, there are literally no borders. Teams having players from multiple states is commonplace.
For example, Deyonta Davis of Michigan State is a Michigan native and was the first pick of the second round of this year's NBA draft. He played for an Indianapolis team in the summers.
Do these multi-state travel teams hurt anything? Not really, except it does make meeting practice more difficult and therefore limits the amount of time these teams could spend on fundamentals. If they actually wanted to work on them.
Doing it the right way
The most successful team I ever saw was from the Bloomington Red program, an early forerunner of the current and expanded Indiana Elite operation. The coach in charge of this team was a guy named Bob Pryor, who coached some freshman and JV school teams in Bloomington but was never a head coach. That fact is a loss for basketball.
During the time this team thrived, Indiana's high school talent was also outstanding. The Spiece sporting goods company, based in Fort Wayne, was considered to be more aligned with Purdue. Bloomington Red was inaccurately labeled as being an "IU" program, and the specific team that was the subject of this conversation had exactly zero players who ever donned the Cream and Crimson.
Spiece's team collected all of the big names from up north, and a few from Indianapolis, and had put together what many people considered an unbeatable team. The team included Jamaal Davis of Merrillville, Cameron Stephens of Fort Wayne South, Luke Recker of DeKalb, Chad Hunter of New Albany and Cedric Moodie of South Bend Washington. All Division I players, all extremely talented.
I coached the second team in the Red program, called Bloomington Black, but we both went to all the same tournaments. My team was obviously eliminated much earlier than the Red team, so we obviously got to see a lot of their games.
The Red team had a few players who played in Division I (Michael Menser of Batesville and Djibril Kante of Bloomington North at Indiana State, Travis Best of Frankfort at Louisville/Purdue, Joda Burgess of Kenova, W.Va., played at Marshall, Nick Wise of Plymouth at IPFW and Kueth Duany of Bloomington North at Syracuse), but primarily consisted of NAIA and Division III players who just filled their roles incredibly well. Tim Majors of Martinsville played at Transylvania, Todd Borgman of Greensburg played at Elmhurst, Caleb Springer of Logansport played at Rollins, Matt Carter of Perry Central played at Southern Indiana and a few others whose names escape me.
The Spiece team predictably imploded about six weeks into the spring/summer travel season due to the inability to have more than one basketball on the court at a time, while Bloomington Red used impenetrable defensive philosophies and precise cutting and screening action to be the nation's dominant team that year.
They didn't lose a game after Memorial Day, taking on all callers at locales ranging from Chicago to Louisville, from Columbus (Ohio) to Evansville, from Indianapolis to Bloomington and eventually to the Nike Invitational in Las Vegas in late July.
Didn't lose a game. Dozens of wins in a row, against teams featuring future NBA players such as Shane Battier, Ron Artest, Elton Brand, Khalid El-Amin, Brendan Haywood, Baron Davis and Larry Hughes. Using D-I role players and lower division overachievers.
The solution?
What's the moral to this story, besides a personal trip down memory lane?
American basketball needs to develop more fundamentally-based teams and players like Bloomington Red did, and none like the Spiece crew.
Is it possible? Sure it is. Will it be easy? Probably not.
Most travel teams I have observed lately seem much more focused on how many games they are playing, and hardly practice at all.
They seem to want to depend on the school team programs to instill fundamentals.
I don't know about the rest of the country, but in our state that's not as easy as it sounds.
You can ask any Indiana high school coach about the recent restriction of not being allowed to start fall practice until two weeks before the first legal game date, and you would probably get a 100 percent negative reaction.
The IHSAA gives high school coaches the month of June to work with their players, and some of them do a good of getting some work and games in without dominating the lives of their athletes. Others, unfortunately, go overboard to the extremes for which travel programs have been criticized and are just as guilty as causing burnout among players as travel coaches.
In my experience, the liberalized summer basketball contact rules have done nothing more than reduce the number of multi-sport athletes, cause burnout among too many athletes and eventually lead some students to specialize in one sport due to overlapping schedules.
All of those things are bad.