If Hard Work is too daunting, Find a Travel Ball Squad

When I asked childhood friend Andre Miller (Portland Trailblazers) if he ever played travel basketball he said no. Correction, he said he played on a team once at some time in high school and never again. But guys like Miller aren’t as common anymore, that is, young basketball players who rely on honing fundamentals – the nuts and bolts of his 10 year career as a premier guard in the NBA.

I am a coach and I know plenty of public school head coaches who speak no flattering words about players on their teams who defer to travel ball wisdom with regularity. Admittedly, I know very little about the travel ball protocol and its promises of scholarship-attaining exposure. But those I talk to say it is literally ruining high school basketball. I can say that it’s rare to find a kid in the gym working on the “boring” tactics I teach when I train young players. What I see are kids who are late to practice and unprepared physically and mentally when called upon to compete. I can only cite what I’ve seen but players show up at the gym with Ipods in their pockets and ear buds plugged in (That’s if they get to the gym at all).

Coach buddies say that on a team of 13, there’s maybe one kid willing to work on sharpening ball-handling and shooting hours before a game. Everyone else is content with whatever they can get from mandatory practices. “If they don’t get it in the regular team practice, they figure it’s not worth getting,” according to my buddy who coaches at a local high school in Upland, California. Today, it seems like the parents know best as do the travel ball coaches. The head coaches at our high schools have seemingly become akin clownish caricatures of basketball antiquity as kids are pulled away from school teams arbitrarily throughout the season. The scary piece in all of this is that players are learning how to play the game of manipulation rather than how to commit to skill mastery. Apparently Travel Ball is big money so I doubt it will fade into the background unless a movement burgeons. Kids who love the game, respect their opponents and understand the fruit of the old adage that says, “Perfect Practice Makes Perfect” is all that’s needed to drive the short cut mentality far from prep sports.