Some of the events have changed, and so has some of the language, but summer basketball is still shoe business.
Nothing wrong with that. Free enterprise has made us great.
The problems have come when a desire to sell shoes combined with a desire to win games in ways that weren’t always ideal for kids or basketball. Now that’s changing, or at least the gym shoe companies that have bankrolled much of the summer scene say it is.
Three forces are driving this. One is Sonny Vaccaro’s recent departure from grass-roots basketball, which he basically invented with Nike before switching to Adidas and then Reebok.
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Another has been the United States’ notable flops in men’s international competition. Rightly or wrongly — and it’s both — those failures have been partly attributed to grass-roots hoops, which too often has been light on player development and heavy on games and chasing after the “next” Michael or LeBron.
Add heat from the likes of NBA Commissioner David Stern and NCAA President Myles Brand, and you get a grass-roots world in which the buzzwords are skill and team.
The goals supposedly no longer include simply getting the top players in the country together in this or that shoe company camp to perform for recruiters.
We may or may not have been part of the problem, the shoe guys seem to be saying, but we’re going to be part of the solution.
History invites skepticism, but there’s room for hope.
“If it’s about the kids and they want to develop the top layer of kids and make the game deeper, I’m 100 percent behind it,” said Van Coleman, national recruiting analyst for CSTV.com. “It would be great for the game, but if it’s the same-old, same-old with different packaging, then let’s be honest about it.”
The shoe guys say it’s a new summer day and point to changes from last year, when each of the Big Three had a showcase camp for some of the country’s elite high school players. Nike, for instance, has replaced its All-American camp with skill camps, and Reebok has replaced its ABCD camp with its RBK U. That’s U for university, as in teaching.
Adidas, meanwhile, has exited the high-profile camp biz altogether, dumping its Superstar event and instituting Adidas Nations, a team-oriented program.
Of course, some concepts remain. One is getting tons of players in front of college coaches during the 20-day July evaluation period. Another is using basketball to sell shoes.
“Definitely,” Reebok director of basketball Chris Rivers said of the latter. “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t.”
Reebok has stayed closest to the old model, but with some tweaking. It will run 18 Headliner Tryout Camps, in which kids will pay $145 for a shot at one of about 60 open spots in the 120-player RBK U camp, which is July 6-10 in Philadelphia and will, among other things, emphasize players’ lifestyles.
“In the past at the ABCD camp you basically had to be a Derrick Rose to be invited or be someone who knew a Derrick Rose,” Rivers said, referring to the Simeon standout. “With the tryout system, we’re trying to be more inclusive.”
Headliner participants also will have a shot at spots in an underclass camp and one of 10 regional combines. Illinois Wolves coach Michael Mullins will run a Headliner camp May 19-20 in Naperville and a regional combine July 7-8 in Chicago.
Nike will run four “skill academies” before the evaluation period, each a position camp for 20 elite players directed by an NBA star — Kobe Bryant, Vince Carter, Steve Nash or Amare Stoudemire. Those campers will feed into the LeBron James Skills Academy July 7-10 in Akron.
In Adidas Nations, a team of 15 players graduating in 2008 — including DeAndre Liggins of Washington — and a “2009 team” with 14 players will go through three-day training sessions under former NBA coach Paul Silas, all outside the evaluation period.
To replace the Superstar camp in the early-July window, Adidas will have a team camp July 6-8 in Cincinnati.
“Everything we do now at the grass-roots level reflects a team concept,” Adidas spokesman Travis Gonzolez said. “We can all roll out the balls and let the kids play and the coaches watch, but we need to do something to make players better.”
In all of this, the shoe companies say, there will be more openness, more willingness to let kids whose club teams have this or that shoe affiliation attend another company’s events.
Sounds good, but you wonder how well that will work when three major shoe events will overlap in early July and when you see that shoe company-sponsored club team tournaments once again will overlap in Las Vegas.
That reminds you that the companies’ stables of club teams and events haven’t changed much and of how those teams’ fierce battles for young stars have fueled much of the excess and corruption in youth basketball.
The summer, in other words, may be better, but it will still be too much the same.
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