Kobe Bryant is one of the many current and former NBA players that have lamented about the way AAU basketball has hurt the game. AAU basketball is by far the most powerful entity in youth basketball, far more than high school hoops, and many have concerns that the style of play that is prevalent in AAU ball is causing kids to skip steps in becoming great basketball players.
Bryant blasted AAU hoops in 2015, complaining that it fails to teach kids the proper fundamentals of basketball, and said that he felt lucky to have grown up playing in Italy.
“AAU basketball — horrible, terrible AAU basketball,” Bryant said. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t teach our kids how to play the game at all, so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don’t know how to post. They don’t know the fundamentals of the game. It’s stupid.”
Those concerns about the AAU circuit have led Bryant to his latest entrepreneurial venture since his retirement with the creation of the “Mamba League,” a 40-team co-ed league in Los Angeles for players age 8 to 10 that will be played on 9-foot hoops in an effort to let players grow with the game.
“We challenge kids at the age of 8, 9, 10 to shoot on 10-foot hoops, and that doesn’t make any sense to me,” Bryant said in the video. “When I grew up, we actually played on lower hoops. We played on 9-foot hoops, the court was actually smaller and we could learn how to shoot with proper technique. We could go in and try a reverse layup…Right now, I think we’re putting too much on these kids too early, and they’re not learning proper technique of how to shoot the ball, or proper spacing. I think it winds up eating away at their confidence.”
Bryant also hopes to take the pressure of high-stakes summer hoops and make it fun again for kids to learn the game, rather than have them in a stressful environment that’s overly competitive.
“The Mamba League is a fun league for kids to learn the game, to have fun,” Bryant said. “But also, to understand the connection that the game has with life in general, and convert that into being a better son, a better daughter, a better student.”
It’s strange to hear Bryant, the ultimate competitor in the NBA, talking about wanting to make the game fun and encouraging kids to not worry about trying to be great at a young age, but you can see where his perspective as a father has made him more keenly aware of the necessity of giving kids the right tools to grow. At some point, yes, the pressure will arrive, but as Bryant notes in the video, that can come once kids have grown and developed into a basketball player. At the age of 8, 9, or 10, they’re still kids and Bryant wants to treat them as such.
The Mamba League probably isn’t going to revolutionize youth basketball right now being only in L.A. but with the backing of Nike, there’s certainly the possibility of expansion nationally.
(h/t The Vertical)
