WS Chronicle

By KP Brabham

This informative series provides valuable insight by our local coaches. Previous articles in this series ran in past issues of The Chronicle. This is Part 2 of Coach Gainey’s interview.

Coach’s advice to parents

Coach Gainey’s first part of advice for parents is for kids to possibly play travel ball/AAU or at YMCA summer league up to their 9th grade year because of the huge jump between middle school and high school ball. Coach Gainey explained, “The competition will become stiffer. Kids come from various middle schools and sometimes it is hard leaving the ‘big man’ on campus in middle school once they get to high school. Kids enter high school competing against other 9th graders,10th graders too, and if talented enough for varsity as a 9th grader, competition will be against 11th and 12th graders.

“AAU can be expensive, but it is just as important getting with a team that is competitive and will have the opportunity to play. Every kid wants to play. Often mistakes are made by just selecting a team and teams are not as competitive, so when kids get to high school, the competition is very stiff and playing competitive summer ball is a necessity.”

Traditional high school players and AAU players

Coach Gainey emphasized too that summer workouts are important especially for student-athletes who can’t travel. “AAU is expensive, which is one reason why we do things in the summer. In AAU, coaches get to choose their talent, hand-select a team, whereas in high school, yes you do the same, but it is from your district kids and zone. With AAU, kids come from outside the county, all over the city, and sometimes from out of state, to try out for your team. You get to pick and travel with the kids who are the best from an area. In your traditional high school, you have to take the talent, the kids who came to your school, and try to build a program and figure roles out a lot quicker than AAU. The AAU talent you know will be there every night with a 6’10” guy. 

“In high school, the tallest may be 6’4”/6’5”. For the high school team, you’re figuring out what type of offense you will do, which changes from year to year. One year the team can be big, so you try to walk-it-up (slower tempo) and the next year the team can be small and you try to run/play as fast as possible. You can figure things out quicker in AAU by identifying this guard who’s fast, post player who can play with his back to the basket.” 

Coach Gainey believes his experience as an AAU coach back then is a much different experience than what AAU coaches are experiencing today. He believes the start comes from the colleges and transfers down, and the culprit of the matter is the transfer portal. Coach Gainey stated, “When I coached AAU, you kept 95% of your players all year and may add a player for nationals. Everyone was trying to be the top team in their state to get to Orlando, Florida, to win a national championship. 

“Now everything with AAU is a showcase. Once it was if you were not the top two or three teams in pool-play from Friday and Saturday’s games, then you were not playing on Sunday. Today, you can lose three games, it’s a showcase, and you still play in front of college coaches. The mindset has changed now to ‘I’m playing in front of college coaches.’ There’s not a lot of team-first; it’s I. ‘I’m playing in front of this college coach; I’m trying to get this scholarship; I’m going to shoot 20 times a game to show him I can score.’ 

“The team concept is no longer in AAU, you’ll just find another team to go play on. And if that team doesn’t work out, you’ll go find another team. I think that’s transferred to the high school level. You go to a high school, coach not playing you as much as you think you should play, you’ll just transfer to another high school,” stated Coach Gainey.