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If you want to know about the state of basketball today a good place to start is the following email sent to Yahoo Answers by a thirteen-year-old would-be NBA star:
I am a 6th grader playing for a 8th grade team i am 5’6 asian i can touch backboard but not rim 12 years in a half i avrage 15 points 8 assists and 7 rebounds in 11 games so far i am a im a point guard standout in games and i plan to make it to college team on a athletics scholar ship and try to see what happens there balls been my life sence 2 grade.
There are in this email the hopes young players have expressed since not long after James Naismith punched a hole in a peach basket to give his athletes something to do during the winter, hopes that keep all our heads in the game, for basketball is perhaps the one sport anyone can play as millions of lunch league gamers who never lettered in anything testify. You can’t play football H-O-R-S-E, you can’t practice skating rushes our tee shots in a school parking lot and stickball seems as quaint as the rules to Red Rover.
But if the hopes expressed in that email spring eternally every March from everyone with some kid left in them, there are also in that letter signs about how the game has changed. The kid knows what’s going down even at his level–in fact as we shall see his chances are already pretty much over unless something changes dramatically in his life.
The NBA knows it as it illustrated when it instituted a dress code for its players. Even on the most obscure playground anyone on the court know the score–basketball has gone corporate only this is corporate second millennium style with a little Enron, Madoff, ABN AMRO and the foreclosure down the block mixed in, only there is no bailout or stimulus bill in sight because for basketball the shit has yet to hit the fan.
The reason that thirteen-year-old is probably not going to the NBA lies in what he did not mention, for in all his props he says nothing about AAU ball. If he had any NBA or even D1 possibilities by now he would be playing on one of his state or region’s major AAU teams, but the fact he does not mention this indicates either he has no access to one or has no been recruited to play on one. Either way, he is probably already in trouble in terms of making it to the NBA.
The Growth of Summer Ball
Half a century ago the AAU (Amateur Athletic Union) was largely an adult affair where corporations like Phillips 66 oil company sponsored teams that sometimes could be as good as or better than major college powers. In 1954 the national AAU champion Peoria Caterpillars represented the United States at the world championship. The International Basketball Federation actually recognized the AAU as the organization that was responsible for USA teams in international competitions until a battle for control of USA basketball in the 1960s resulted in the AAU losing its international recognition in 1972 and the precursor of what is now known as USA Basketball took over.
Meanwhile AAU basketball changed considerably. Now it is a kids’ game. The AAU national championships begin at age eight and under and consist of elite teams put together from the best players in states, regions and large cities. By the time these players hit high school AAU elite team recruiting becomes regional even national.
But the AAU is becoming irrelevant as independent teams of high level players are becoming more and more popular. Often sponsored by shoe companies eager to get their hands on the next Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, these teams play each other in tournaments sponsored by the very same shoe companies.
Like the growth of the subprime mortgage market, the growth of these teams is unregulated by anyone. Set up as “nonprofits” or other complex business entities, even the finances of these teams are as difficult to decipher as the terms of some of those subprime mortgages.
The reality today, as most college recruiters recognize, is that for elite players summer ball matters more than high school performance unless you happen to be fortunate to play for one of the country’s elite high school teams (more on that in a minute). So now you can begin to see why our thirteen-year-old letter writer probably will not be in the NBA. It’s not what he says, but what he doesn’t say. He never mentions AAU or summer ball, which means he probably does not play for one of these teams or, if he does, it is not a good one. It sounds like he is a very good young player on a high school team, but his lack of mentioning summer ball is telling. Unless he gets into it very soon he has no chance.
In an investigative report on these summer teams the Washington Post acknowledged:
In recruiting, the independent travel team coaches are now viewed as being more influential than most high school coaches. Without strong AAU ties, recruiting at an elite level becomes difficult, if not impossible, according to college assistant coaches.
Maryland University coach Gary Williams told the Post:
The last five or six years, I would say that was the dramatic change. With the change in the AAU has come incredible influence over the player, even the players with parents there. The AAU in the last five years has gained a phenomenal foothold with a lot of families in terms of directing their kid where he winds up going to school.
Gary Williams
Memphis coach John Calipari puts it a bit differently:
Recruiting is about relationships. Sometimes, it’s with AAU coaches when you have one of their kids and you do well by them, then they help you get another kid. I have a lot of relationships and don’t apologize for them.
One Sport Athletes–the New Reality
When I was in high school the best athletes routinely played different sports during the school year–football in the fall, basketball in the winter and track in the spring–but now that is changing. Summer ball, which in most parts of the country actually starts in the spring with “tryouts” coming as early as March, is forcing athletes to specialize early in the careers. For basketball there are also fall leagues before a season starts, turning it into a year-round series of games for young athletes.
For the athletes this is high pressure sports at an early age. Coaches used to speak of the “pyramid” with a base in grade school and high school with the number of players narrowing at each succeeding level, but now the pyramid narrows considerably earlier for players. In the thirteen-year-old’s letter one can read between the lines and see a youngster who is already feeling pressure players his age rarely felt two decades ago.
For the families of these players the situation can be just as harrowing. Parents are under pressure to lay out money for “tryouts,” traveling expenses, summer camps for athletes and even personal coaches. My son even was recruited by one of these personal coaches when he was playing college ball because the coach wanted to be able to say he was coaching a college player. Everyone, athletes, parents, coaches is looking for an edge.
Another Yahoo Answers query asked the question that is on the minds of many young athletes these days, “Should I play AAU basketball or varsity baseball?” His query reveals the pressures and dreams he and others face:
I am a junior now and my friend whose a sophmore got me onto his really good aau team. I am coming off a crapy season because my coach never really played me and i was hoping that with this aau season i can be recruited by prep schools or private high schools. I will be playing with kids 1 year younger than me even though the rules say that 16 and under teams can be what ever age as long as your still in high school. So that makes it a greater chance that a school will ask me to transfer and repeat my junior year.
The New High School Basketball Powers
Once high school coaches were the gatekeepers for young players. At public high schools by and large most of these coaches ran clean programs, in part because they were school district employees and also under the jurisdiction of state high school athletic administrators. So when college coaches went looking for players they would be in touch with these high school coaches. Orlando Christian Prep coach Reggie Kohn ruefully acknowledges this has changed:
There are too many people pulling at these kids. As a high school coach, you’d want recruiting to be under your control, along with the parents, but that’s not how things work these days.
Along with the growth of elite summer league teams has come the growth of elite high school teams, all of them private schools who literally recruit players from around the country. The most celebrated or notorious of these programs is located in the town with the picturesque name of Mouth of Wilson, Virginia.
Although Oak Hill Academy has only a little over 100 students, it is routinely ranked number one in the country as well as being famous for producing a who’s who of NBA talent including Carmelo Anthony, Michael Beasley, Mark Blount, Rajon Rondo, Kevin Durant and Jerry Stackhouse.
Coach Steve Smith has built up his program by enticing the best players in the country to come to this small Baptist high school with promises of games against the top teams in the country. Oak Hill’s traveling schedule would put some college teams to shame. This year the team played in North Carolina, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Kentucky, Tennessee, Maryland and Hawaii.
Oak Hill Academy
Other private schools have followed Smith’s lead, recruiting players as avidly as D1 colleges. This has produced tension in some states where public and private schools may meet for state titles. In my own state of Minnesota we had an embarrassing incident when a recruited charter school team took on another squad made up largely of Vietnamese immigrants and had a player score 100 points.
Follow the Money
In every state, region and big city there are a few elite coaches who control summer basketball. Good to average players fork over money to try out for teams run by one of these coaches. Ostensibly the money goes to support the program, enabling teams to wear fancy uniforms and travel to big time tournaments. Those who don’t make the team pay their money and serve as cannon fodder for the program.
In most cases the “tryouts” are a sham. The coaches already know which players they want and in most cases have recruited them to try out. Mainly the tryouts help sort players into one of the many squads the coaches will put on the floor. During my son’s career I witnessed a few of these “tryouts” and came to loathe them because you could see the sorting starting from the very beginning. Players who had no chance were all put on two courts to play each other. After that the coaches paid them no attention.
As for top-ranked players, the traveling team coaches come with all sorts of inducements to play for their team. I remember hearing a pro scout talk about Stephon Marbury, the NBA player who was projected to be the next Jordan back when he was in junior high school. The scout said Marbury had people doing everything from buying his clothes and his meals to making sure he passed his classes since he was 13 years old, adding that this kind of attention had made Marbury uncoachable because everything was handed to him.
Tony Squire, who coached Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen in AAU, admits:
What is happening now, the kids are changing and people are running around now offering kids stuff. Nowadays, if somebody comes in with some money, “You come play with us and you don’t have to worry about anything coming from your pocket.”
Because their teams feature the top players and play each other in elite national tournaments AAU coaches have a hold on their players that is unlike any in sports. If you are chosen for a nationally-ranked AAU team it is virtually a guaranteed ticket to play for a D1 team and an inside track to the NBA. Add to that the kind of perks that go to a player like Marbury.
Former University of Pennsylvania Coach Chuck Daly advises:
Follow the money, follow the money.
That money extends even to the local communities who sponsor AAU tournaments, as an Ohio reporter found out.
The Sacramento Business Journal reports that West Coast championships for AAU will be held in Placer Valley, which sits north of Sacramento, California, in 2008. According to Greg Van Dusen, chief executive of Placer Tourism, three towns in California can expect to see a windfall of over $1 million for area during the 4-day tournament. Not bad for a group of towns with less than 200,000 people combined. From the AAU side of things (with a projected 100 teams in the tournament), that comes to about $45,000 just in tournament fees for teams.
Summer Corruption
Where there is this kind of money and power inevitably there is corruption and the AAU is notorious for this. A Wisconsin sports columnist wrote:
But if you want to know why summer basketball has the shadiest reputation this side of Pete Doherty, you don’t have to go any further than this column to find Exhibit A.
Exhibit A was the head of a Wisconsin summer program who also ran a recruiting service on the side. Here is where youth basketball begins to resemble Enron or the subprime mortgage crisis. Like the repeal of the banking rules in the Glass-Steagall Act that allowed the corruption that lead to the foreclosure crisis, the lack of regulation of summer leagues has produced its share of ugly stories.
One of the most widely-reported scandals involved the aptly-named former Kansas City summer-league coach Myron Piggie who is now serving 37 months in federal prison for funneling money to players. Brothers Kareem and JaRon Rush and Andre Williams were suspended by the NCAA for taking money from Piggie. To show how deeply the shoe companies are involved, Nike allegedly promised Pigge $400,000. But reporter Dennis Dodd is one to something when he details what may be the real reasons behind the Pigge scandal:
Go to any major basketball hotbed in the country — Dallas, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago — and there are Piggies scattered over the landscape like cockroaches on a kitchen floor.
And they are slicker, quicker and more discreet with their money.
There are those that still wonder what the ultimate purpose is of putting away Piggie, a low-level figure in the summer league feeding chain.
As the stories prove, there are a lot of Piggies out there feeding at the trough of summer league ball. Everyone knows about the one involving NBA star O.J. Mayo, who received money and gifts from agents, reputedly as early as the seventh grade, but the Mayo scandal is merely the tip of the iceberg. The part of the iceberg below the water consists of the deals between college and summer league coaches. It has become standard procedure for colleges to hire AAU coaches or their assistants in return for delivering players.
The Washington Post‘s investigative report focused on the story of DC area player Michael Beasley who played for the summer league power D.C. Assault. Run by Curtis Malone, whose criminal record includes possession of cocaine with intent to distribute, D.C. Assault is a pipeline for D1 players. Maryland Coach Gary Williams says:
People from all over the country don’t go to high school, they go to D.C. Assault to recruit players.
Of all those players Michael Beasley was perhaps the most gifted. Beasley had a close relationship with former Assault coach Dalonte Hill. Kansas State offered Hill a $425,000 assistant coaching job, bringing Beasley with him. K State coach Bob Huggins has admitted he knew if he signed Hill Beasley would come along.
Last year when Kansas University won the NCAA championship, its director of basketball operations was Ronnie Chalmers, the father of guard Chris, who made a miracle shot in the semifinals to send KU into the title game. Baylor University hired Dwon Clifton, coach of the AAU team that includes the nation’s top point guard prospect, John Wall from Raleigh, N.C. Lamont Peterson is administrative assistant to Memphis coach John Calipari and also the personal strength coach of star guard Tyreke Evans.
But the scariest scandal of all involves Thomas “Ziggy” Sicignano, star witness in a federal racketeering trial that involves the Gambino organized-crime family. Turns out in addition to his other activities on the part of Gambino, “Ziggy” was also a card-carrying AAU coach who ran teams and tournaments in the New York.
But like much else involved with organized crime, the scandal deepens. “Ziggy” also was involved with Steve Kaplan, owner of the Atlanta-based Gold Club. CNNSI reported:
Sicignano, who cut a generous plea bargain with prosecutors, testified last week in Atlanta that Kaplan paid strippers to have sex with professional athletes and had funneled money to the Gambino organized-crime family in return for mob protection.
As for the AAU, Mike Killpack, AAU director of sports operations told CNNSI:
I’ve never heard of him or his team, and I’ve been around this for years.
Who Is Minding the Store
The AAU claims it is not responsible for the actions of coaches or teams. In an online chat session at ESPN.com AAU president and CEO Bobby Dodd wrote:
The AAU does not have teams, coaches or athletes. This is a myth that exist in the marketplace. The AAU does not pay the bills or select the teams or coaches. Organizations, such as churches, YMCAs, Boys and Girls Clubs, Corporations, etc., select, fund, and organize teams.
Ultimately the NCAA is supposed to be overseeing such shenanigans, but for all the publicity given to public investigations and penalties meted out to schools, the NCAA has done little about the growing scandal of summer ball. Last year the NCAA and the NBA announced they would launch an effort to clean up the mess, but NCAA President Myles Brand issued a weak statement as to how this would be done:
Early on we realized that we can’t solve this problem through regulation. No rules the NCAA could pass would be able to solve the problem.
A year later little has happened. AAU President Bobby Dodd didn’t sound like the NCAA had much interest in his organization:
We went to a couple of meetings.
So the result of the attempt to clean up summer ball is “a couple of meetings.” That does not offer much hope for our thirteen-year-old would-be pro. As to why only a couple of meetings took place we need only look no further than Chuck Daly’s remark, “Follow the money.”
Summer league programs are to the NCAA like subprime mortgages were to the big banks. They became involved because there was money to be made as former Citi CEO Sandy Weill knows only too well, having taken a small Baltimore loan sharking operation to the position of what was once the biggest financial institution in the world.
The Money
Like a subprime mortgage one interesting little gambit formed by AAU coaches and what are known as “runners”–the sometimes-shady characters who bring together players, coaches, agents, shoe companies and college teams–is what are euphemistically known as “scouting services.” The basic scam works like this: an AAU coach or runner offers to put together “scouting reports” on his players and other players and then sells them to college coaches and others. The basic idea makes some sense for instead of having to visit a team’s games or constantly phone the coach, the scouting reports can enlighten college programs about the merits of particular players.
All these scouting services are legal, but many of them are nothing more than shams in which an AAU coach just sends a piece of paper or a team roster in exchange for money. The money going to the AAU coach is really a “donation” but the receipt of the scouting report gives it the appearance of legality. The catch is that college coaches themselves cannot send the money, instead it is contributed by booster clubs and the rich “jock sniffers” who hang around all big time college athletic programs.
Keith Easterwood, who coaches in the Memphis YMCA program says:
I’ve been involved in summer basketball 26 years and have never had a recruiting service, but it’s always the first thing college coaches ask me about. I had one coach one time tell me he could get me up to $12,000 for my recruiting service, and he couldn’t believe it when I told him I didn’t have one. But what they’ll always do is call and ask how to get a phone number on a kid, and that’s supposed to be your opening to tell them to subscribe to your recruiting newsletter. I’ve just never had one, but a lot of people do.
What fuels all this are the incredible amounts of money in college basketball. That March Madness should come as the nation talks of stimulus is incredibly ironic, for the parallels between big time college sports and the nation’s economy are a metaphor for our times. As you watch Selection Sunday today, you will be participating in what may well be the nation’s largest gambling event, the annual filling out of brackets for various informal pools along with the biggest payday for professional bookies who run operations under the neon-lighted streets of Las Vegas and dimly-lit back-alley dives.
The amount of gambling money that flows during the Final Four is impossible to accurately calculate, but the Las Vegas Sun estimated in 2007
Bettors in Nevada legally wagered more than $228 million on basketball and the sports books “held,” or won, 7.3 percent of the total, or $16.7 million. That’s higher than the casinos’ 5.4 percent hold rate in basketball for the 2007 calendar year. Casinos held $37.4 million of the $687.19 million bet on basketball in 2007, according to the state Gaming Control Board.
The tournament is also the one of the biggest money-making sports events in the world. Advertisers forked over $643.2 million to CBS for last year’s tournament. CBS in turn paid the NCAA $529 million. An ad in the Village Voice offered two tickets to this year’s Final Four plus hotel for $2,995.99–and no one has any idea who the teams will be.
The shoe companies have become a convenient villain in all this, but “shoe company” is merely convenient shorthand for all the goodies sold in conjunction with the Final Four from t-shirts, hats and unmentionables to programs, videos, and cable and satellite television packages that offer you the opportunity to see every game.
The Ugly Reality
In the end the corruption of youth basketball leads to the same place as the mortgage crisis–people of color. In a series last fall I detailed how the roots of the mortgage crisis were racial.
The mortgage crisis began with discriminatory lending and redlining during the post World War II housing boom. What was one of the greatest mass social movements in history, one that made home ownership a reality for millions of Americans, unfortunately came with a heavy price, for it shut out people of color.
Wide swaths of America were segregated by race. This was not merely due to the prejudices of local home builders or lending institutions but came from the FHA and the federal government. It was a national policy. In systems terms people of color faced two restrictions that served to reinforce each other–they could not move from where they were which left them at the mercy of those who controlled both lending and real estate and they had no access to the government programs that were available to whites and when they did they found the price was often too high.
This influenced the growth of loansharking or what people have relabeled predatory lending or subprime lending. Which terms you use does not really matter because the results were the same: people of color faced exorbitant terms, shady practices such as Sandy Weill’s tactic of coupling insurance with loans and “closed book” closings, and finally just old-fashioned ripoffs.
The tremendous growth of college and professional basketball has also come at a cost. Phil Martelli, coach of Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia puts it bluntly:
I had an opening on my staff last year and three different guys called me about it. They all said the same thing: “If you hire me, I can deliver this guy (high school player) to your program.” Frankly, it made my skin crawl. Not to make an analogy that’s a huge over-exaggeration, but hasn’t slavery ended?
Yet to the athletes involved, most of them African Americans, Martelli’s analogy is not far off the mark. O.J. Mayo and a few others aside, players see little of this money even though they generate it. Michael Beasley did not get $425,000 to attend K-State, his coach did.
Michael Beasley
Many players echo that thirteen-year-old letter writer, enduring this for what may be the biggest gamble of all-a chance to play in the NBA. Of all the players on the D1 level, only a tiny fraction of them will ever put on an NBA uniform and en even smaller fraction will see enough meaningful playing time to last even five years in the pros.
The math tells the story. There are 300 schools playing D1 basketball, with seven to nine players per team seeing meaningful playing time for a total of 2700 potential NBA players. Meanwhile the NBA drafts 60 new players a year of which 1/2 to 2/3 actually make a team. This means only 1% have a realistic shot of that rather large gamble. They would be just as well off buying a lottery ticket once a week (not for nothing is the NBA draft called a lottery).
On top of this is the reality of life for a big-time D1 player. I had a son who played four years of D3, ending up as a team co-captain and know the sacrifice that entailed. At that level he had two hours of formal practice during the season plus so-called open gyms during the off-season. Add to that time in the weight room, hours watching film, lots of personal practice time and summer leagues. On game days there were long bus rides, at least one every week during class time, that had the team sometimes returning to campus when even the most avid party-goer had either passed out or gone to bed.
The NCAA runs a series of commercials whose tag line is “our athletes will turn pro in something other than sports.” At the D3 level that is a given, with players sacrificing free time and a normal social life as they try to master the difficult task of balancing sports and studies. My son was recruited by his college to also play football and compete in the decathlon, but he declined these opportunities because he felt he could not devote that much time to college athletics.
Had he played at the D1 level, he would have had no choice. There the time commitment is multiplied many times over. Big time coaches know their jobs depend on winning and winning depends on recruiting and recruiting depends on getting television time and moving players to the next level. For the players this means basketball is their unofficial major. A friend of mine who had the good fortune to play on an undefeated national champion had two daughters recruited to play at the D1 level. The one who had an afternoon biology class was told by her coach-choose biology or your sport.
Big time college athletics have become big time money games. If you have ever seen the inside a locker room of one the major basketball powers, you can see why high school recruits might be swayed to play for one of these teams. Colleges now build fancy new stadiums, whose naming rights they sell to corporations and whose luxury boxes they rent to high rollers. Even bigger bucks are made by the teams themselves. The most notorious are the much-publicized shoe and uniform contracts. If a Duke or a Kansas is seen wearing Nikes, millions of people across the country want a pair for themselves. Add to this the marketing of team jerseys, t-shirts and other items including dog jackets in team colors.
The better and more highly visible the team, the more they stand to rake in. Several years ago this reached a new low when several high-profile D1 coaches began cutting TV commercials. The NCAA has thus far looked the other way at this, even though the commercials were instant recruiting tools for those coaches and their schools.
The inequity of a system in which players generate millions for D1 colleges and universities while receiving little in return has generated a great deal of criticism over the years, but the NCAA and D1 schools continue to defend it by saying they are giving these so-called “student-athletes” a chance for a college degree.
What Happens to the Players
But what really happens to the players who don’t make it? How many graduate and go on to have decent careers? To put it bluntly, is college basketball a plantation system in which African American men and women labor to put money in the hands of a largely white power structure while they receive little in return? Are those few who make it to the pros the equivalent of the house Negroes of the ante-bellum South?
Each year Richard Lapchick of Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at the University of Central Florida releases a study of the graduation rates of teams in the NCAA D1 Tournament, “Keeping Score When It Counts.” Last year’s study found 41 teams or 64 percent of the total graduated at least 50 percent of their players. However these rates were grossly different for white and African American athletes.
61 percent (33 schools) of the men’s tournament teams graduated 70 percent or more of
their white basketball student-athletes, while only 30 percent (19 schools) graduated 70
percent or more of their African-American basketball student-athletes creating a 31
percent gap.
Lapchick pointed out:
It needs to be noted that African-American basketball players graduate at a higher rate than
African-American males who are not student-athletes. The graduation rate for African-American
male students as a whole is only 37 percent, versus the overall rate of 61 percent for white male
students, which is a scandalous 24 percentage point gap.
The Bottom Line
This evidence testifies that the NCAA tournament may be America’s most hypocritical public event. That this hypocrisy is openly embraced by the nation’s institutions of higher learning only makes it even more despicable. The NCAA and AAU’s complicity in this is as reprehensible as the collusion of federal regulators who approved of redlining, repealed Glass-Steagall and then looked the other way as the subprime crisis deepened.
So far there has been no equivalent of the subprime crisis in youth basketball, but given the depth and breadth of the problem it is only a matter of time. When characters like Myron Piggie, Curtis Malone and “Ziggy” Sicignano have their fingerprints on the evidence, a major scandal is not far away.
The youth basketball scandal is the hoops equivalent to the steroid embarrassment that is now rippling through college and professional sports. In baseball an entire generation of players has been tainted. The abuses of youth basketball have the potential to cause the same kind of major damage and with it will fall AAU coaches, college programs, pro teams and a generation of players who profited from this system as surely as athletes profited from steroids.
As you settle down to watch the Final Four there are the equivalent of A Rod and Mark McGwire out there on the court, only just as with the steroid scandal you don’t know who they are yet. But you will.
Afterward
I must personally confess this is one of the most difficult articles I have had to write. I love the game of basketball, have played and coached it and watched my son play summer ball and end up a three-time academic all-conference selection and co-captain of his D3 team. I know he would not be the person he is had he not played basketball.
But I also saw the ugly side of the system: corrupt, physically abusive, and incompetent coaches and parents who would do anything to win. It started in the very beginning. When he was in the fourth grade my son was scoring at will on another team, so the opposing coach sent in a player to deliberately injure him. Luckily fourth graders can only do too much damage, but like the scandals of youth ball noted above neither the coach nor the player suffered any consequences beyond a one shot foul.
It got worse as the years went on. My son made it as far as he did, not because of the coaching he had, but in spite of it, including in college where he had a coach more interested in his own press releases than his players. In the penultimate moment of my son’s career, after the championship game of the conference tournament–his last game as a four-year letter-winner–I found him alone in the locker room with the league championship trophy wondering what to do with it. The coach had long since left.
I tell that story because ultimately this entire system depends on us just as did the subprime crisis. We allow our kids to be manipulated, we allow the abuses to continue, we root for college teams that depend on the corruption. Everybody was willing to look the other way when the subprime market was doing well.
As we learned from the subprime crisis, looking the other way only lasts so long, then you have to pay the consequences. We need to do this for kids like that thirteen-year-old whose innocence in the face of reality is somehow refreshing. It fuels my optimism to know there are still players like that. May he go on to a career in law and maybe straighten all this out. In the end I do this so other players won’t have to go through some of the things my son did.
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