Penn State

Good morning everyone, hope all is well. I purposely haven't posted a blog since April. I wanted to see how the AAU season finished up. Although we will participate in the Junior Nationals July 22-25, our season is basically over. Although our record is .500, I believe we accomplished what we set out to do. As I mentioned in an April post, this was the Boys and Girls Club of New Haven (CT) Blazers U16 Girls Basketball teams' first year competing in AAU, however, of the 10 girls on our roster, 7 had extensive AAU experience. When we formed this team, we did so with 4 objectives: experience, exposure, development and competitiveness. After 3 months of practice and playing, my assessemsnt is that we did well in 3 out of 4 areas: Experience- including junior nationals we will have participated in 9 tournaments, playing a total of 33 games to this point. That is a lot of basketball. Exposure- 7 of the 9 tournaments were exposure tournaments and our girls got the opportunity to be seen by DI, II and III coaches. For $600.00, that is a great investment for players and parents looking to play at the next level. Development- at our very first practice I told the girls that I want them to go back to their respective high school teams better basketball players. I shared with them the goal of improving their strengths and their weakness. I can honestly say that each girl showed improvement in different areas and they will finsh the AAU season better players than when they started. While I feel good about accomplishing 3 goals, I am highly diappointed that we didn't accomplish the 4th goal of competing on every possession. This was very frustrating because as a coach you can see where physical improvement is needed and help correct the problem. However, it doesn't matter how much physical improvement is made if you don't have the deisre and heart to compete on every play, whether it's practice or in a game. The unwilligness of my team as a whole to compete is something that I cannot figure out and has led me to draw several conclusions. Firstly, maybe it's me. As a coach, my job is to motivate players to want to be successful. And when my players are not competing, it is a direct reflection of me and I have to figure out a way to motivate them to compete all the time. (Any suggestions?) Secondly, maybe it's the players. Being 40 years old and having grown up in Staen Island, NY, I spent countless hours in the park playing basketball, baseball, football, racing, swimming, fighting and competing. In talking to my peers it all comes back to the kids of toady have a lot of other things to distract them. When I was coming up, we didn't have play station, unlimited texting (hell we didn't even have cell phones), my space or facebook. We had the park and whatever was happeniniig in the park. Although I understand that it's a new day and time, I've seen far too many girls using sports as a social outlet rather than a competitive competition. Thirdly, my informal experiment has allowed me to develop a theory. First and foremost, I am a Head Girl's High School Basketball Coach. I have coached both boy's and girl's AAU and now more than ever I feel that AAU is a "necessay evil." It's one thing to be on the side of the argument that prefers high school or the side that prefers aau. To me doing both is the ultimate conflict. Why? Because as a high school coach, I fear that my players are going to fall into bad habits, be it practice or game, they won't work on the skills that need to be improved to help my high school team, they may get conflicting messages about how to do things on and off the court. Then there is the fear that your player will end up transferring to another school because of AAU connections. My high school has been very successful over the past 6 years and my players have grown accustomed to winning. When you coach players from other programs who are the complete opposite, you can see some of the mentaility that comes when players are accustomed to not winning. One of the most frustrating things is to see players give up on themselves just because things aren't going there way during the course of the game. My AAu team has some very good players that played on bad teams. I must admit that I underestimated hte effect of losing has on a player, even a good one. There were times this AAU season that you could litreally see a kid actually "give up." Almost to say, "here we go again." I spent a great deal of time trying to get the girls to play to the end. And we preached practicing and playing with a winning attitude. While our play on the court has not reflecting this mantra, the great thing is that they have some time between Now and November when high school season starts to figure out what having a winning mentality is all about.