Who is looking out for your child in the game of basketball?
https://coachtrisco.substack.com/p/who-is-looking-out-for-your-child
Published - Jan 24, 2025
Why do people only care about their own children when it comes to basketball, a team sport? This is the question many parents have asked me, yet when I look at my own situation, when have a parent or a coach I have had my son work within the past thought about my own child and his personal development in the game? Rarely, and the fact that I cannot remember a time when a coach, parent or friend has asked my son to come along to a training session, scrimmage or just play in the blacktop, is because of one thing on the parents’ mind… what’s in it for me and my child?
When it comes down to it, no one cares about anyone else. You can see it in representative trials, and you can see it at any place that has training. One parent I overheard when sitting on the sidelines watching the training said, “Oh my son made the NSW selection team and the coach is such a lovely coach, always willing to help my boy with extra training and this has also helped him make a lot of other teams in the club and school”. When the other parent replied, “that’s great to hear about your son, so how can I get my son to do the same as your son? They are about the same skill level and the same age. It would be great if you let me know if the coach is open to training my son too". The parent then hinted “oh, our coach is so busy with other kids in the club and they are exclusive to a certain number of players so look I’m not sure I could give you his number, but let me ask him”. I would like to assume that question would never get raised, and I would also assume that the first parent would not want to share any tips and advice to another parent if they know that it would threaten their position in the team.
So when did it become like this? Has it always been like this? Has competitiveness always been there among parents and kids? If I can think back to when I first played representative basketball, the sport was not the major sport to play. Kids would rather play football, rugby, cricket or perhaps an individual sport like swimming, running or tennis. Basketball was popular, though not that popular so representative teams did not have the number of kids trialling like they do today. I heard that one of the age groups for a representative club in Sydney, for U14 boys, has over 200 kids trialling for only 40 playing spots. In Victoria, you get the same number of kids trialling yet they might have about 80 playing spots, given the number of courts in Victoria is more than double that of NSW. Then in recent years, you have seen growth in Basketball Development programs emerge, such as Breakdown Basketball, MadRavens, FreeFlow, Instinct, RedEyes, and ProBall along with many others created using their Instagram accounts, highlighting the individual player development training that some kids (age between 10-18 yrs old). Some of these individual sessions can cost up to $150 per hour. That is capturing a very niche market of affluent parents who can afford to pay for these coaching sessions and not everyone can do this. Some of the other group sessions available where your child is 1 of perhaps a group of 10 children is fine yet there is no personal connection with the child and there is no follow up to see how the child is progressing. They are attend the hour long session and go home.
So going back to the original question, “Who is looking after your child” in the development of their own game and skills? Well, this falls back on the parent and then the passion from the child wanting to develop and be better because they love the game and love it so much they are willing to do anything and spare any time in learning and developing the skills to be good in the game. With the heightened level of competitiveness and the lack of teams, courts and resources (such as skilled and people-focused coaches) the game in NSW will only go as far as you can resource it. Old and outdated coaching techniques still run through the system and the lack of follow up means the parents need to keep a diary of what their child has done and what they need to do to progress. This is a lot for a parent and for some, these parents do not know about the game so they just rely on seeing their child getting selected to a team. Don’t get me started on the politics of just making a team and we all know that politics is part of basketball because there is not a clear way of measuring how a child’s skill in the game of basketball is being measured e.g. a KPI for a player to make a representative squad requires these certain levels of skill over a 4/5.
If there are prerequisites in place and a solid and consistent coaching pathway for the children to follow, then it becomes clearer. For example, to make a Basketball NSW representative team, you need to belong to a certain association to begin with, then you need to know the coach and the coaching staff who are selecting the players, and then you need to have height, followed by skill for the game. I have heard from coaches that “i like this kid because for U14 boys, we need height and this kid is 200 cms, so we'd better select him even though he has no skill and no footwork, we can work on that, but you can’t teach height”. I get this theory but if everyone in the team was like that then you would have a terrible basketball team. Surely this is the exception, but it happens all too often and that leaves the question, what happens to those players that have the SKILL & WILL, and they also have the ATHLETICISM & PASSION for the game? They miss out on a spot in the team for those who:
know the coach
know the association staff
donate money to the association
taller than everyone else
has a strong IG following
How can we make the selection process fairer, more transparent and in turn help all the basketball players feel like they are learning something for their own development? It’s not an easy question with an equally complicated answer. I guess in my lifetime, I will never see or hear an answer. I hope to be proven wrong…one day.
