NBA Dreams Die in AAU Basketball

Let me take you back to when you were a kid playing basketball in your room on the Nerf mini basketball hoop that every kid had growing up. You're in the NBA Finals counting down from 10, 9, 8...LeBron is covering you in Game 7 and your team is down by 1. You are alone in your room. You pull up from behind your bed and hit the shot. You are an NBA champion, life is good. You are fully convinced you are going to the NBA when you grow up.

Now lets fast forward to travel basketball in middle school. Maybe you are one of the better players on your team. The first guy that learned how to hit a 3-point shot, dribble between the legs, hit a reverse layup. Maybe you even were able to hit the net or dunk on the basketball hoop in your driveway that you moved to 7.5 feet tall. You think you are elite. Your NBA dreams are still alive and at their peak.

You love basketball so you sign up to try out for a local AAU team. You just bought the newest basketball shoes. Your dad let you buy a Gatorade when he stopped for gas on the drive to the gym. And then you walk into the gym and see kids your age dunking. There is a scattering of 14-year-old grown men that you have to play against. By some miracle, you make the team and get to your first tournament. That's when reality hits you like a Mike Tyson uppercut.

Is this story all too familiar to you? Well, that is because AAU basketball kills 99.99999% of kids' dreams to play in the NBA. Yeah, you could be a decent player growing up in your town. You face the same group of kids in surrounding towns and in your neighborhood so you look like the star. Then you join an AAU team and you realize that you stink out loud compared to the thousands and thousands of kids across the country.

People your age have been dunking since their 10th birthday. You see guys pull up from half-court and hitting nothing but net. Your team loses by 97 points and your best friend gets dunked on after the other team threw an off the backboard alley-oop (true story). AAU basketball is the most humbling experience that I kid could ever go through. Scouts come to tournaments to watch the 6'8" 15-year old that already has offers from Duke, UNC, and Kentucky.

At the end of the day, no matter how good you think you are as a kid, subtract that by a million. You are nothing but a small fish in the ocean. A grain of sand in the desert. A blade of grass in an open field. This is when you go from a kid that wants to play basketball as a career to the kid who wants to talk about it for a living. So reach for the stars, but know you will end up just holding your hands in the air looking like a crazy person.