And welcome back to Crimson Cast Galen Clavio, Scott Caulfield
joining you Sunday, August 10th, our record date.
And we're not talking IU football or IU basketball, at
least not directly on this one, although we'll have a couple of
quick mentions of both very shortly.
But first, Scott, happy weekend. It's almost over now,
unfortunately, but. Sunday afternoon, you can't wish
me happy weekend. We're almost done.
Wow, it's still part of the weekend.
I mean. Could I, I mean, if I wish you
on Friday afternoon, good weekend, you'd be like, oh,
thanks, but it's in the weekend. You have a problem with that?
I wouldn't wish you good week on Friday afternoon, but no, we
are, We're, we're getting there. We have like two or three more
weekends without football and then and then it just starts.
It's. Solid football.
You got NFL. It's coming.
It's one more weekend without football because the first
'cause this upcoming the weekend of the 17th, the 16th, 17th.
No football, but Kansas State and IO State are heading to
Dublin to play in Farmageddon in Ireland on the 23rd.
So we're not the 23rd. The, the, the, yeah, the 23rd,
yeah, it's gets right around the corner.
So it is really close. And of course, IU football
starts on the 30th and then the NFL starts a couple weeks after
that. So it's all it's upon us, my
friend. Yeah, the dog days of summer are
almost over. Yeah, so.
We are of course going to be here throughout the entirety of
August talking about IU football.
Got some new shows launching as well.
We did want to remind you folks if you didn't hear the
announcement before, we announced finally that we are
going to be doing a live podcast from the Buskirk Chumley Theater
on Friday, September 5th. Doors at 6:30 and the show
starts at 7:00. We'll be up for about an hour
and a half. Planning on having some guests,
going to talk football, going to have AQ and A with the audience
going to have try to just a fun evening all the way around.
Hopefully at that point, celebrating a big win the
previous weekend against Old Dominion and we'll be previewing
not just the Kennesaw State game.
I would hope so, yes. But also we'll be previewing the
rest of the season talking about where IU football sits and how
things are looking across the country.
Tickets are on sale right now. There'll be a link to that at
the bottom of the video or the podcast, wherever you're
watching or listening to it. It's it tickets about 15 1/2
dollars a pop and that helps to go support the Buskirk Tremley
Theatre and we hope that you will take advantage of that.
We've already had some ticket sales, which is nice and we love
to see you folks out there. If you're going to be in
Bloomington or if you're already in Bloomington and you'd like to
come join us again, Buskirk Tremley Theatre, Friday,
September 5th, doors at 6:30, podcast at 7:00 and we'll have
a, a meet and greet somewhere in town immediately afterwards.
We're looking forward to seeing you folks.
For anybody going in the first couple rows, I mean, we haven't
really planned out what we're doing yet, but I don't think
it's going to be a Gallagher style concert where we're
smashing watermelons and stuff. So should be good.
No poncho's needed. You're good.
Early mid 80s, no reference to comedy, you reference Gallagher.
I mean, wow, we have a special guest.
Maybe. Maybe Gallagher will be there.
Don't know. You're bringing the Yakov.
Smirnoff out after that. I mean, what's going on?
Wow, in Russia they pay me to do concerts.
Yes, yes, and. And and yeah.
Whatever. Anyway, quick reminder also we
are brought to you here on Crimson Cast and the rest of the
back home network by Home Field Apparel and they have a new box
of IU apparel that's out. And you can order it and it
looks amazing. Be sure to do the what?
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box for 2025, it's ready for you folks.
You can go order it right now and have it shipped to you by
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home field yet, use the code home 23.
Get 15% off your first order Home field. apparel.com, proud
sponsor for the Back Home network.
All right, Scott, this is Part 2 of a podcast that we started
about a month ago and there may be a Part 3 as well, but we
wanted to try to. Wrap up the loose edges or
loose. Ends from the summer because,
you know, we have several podcasts.
There's actually 1 floating podcast that we're still
planning on doing, which will hopefully be next weekend.
So keep an eye out for that. But we talked about the
foundations of youth sports in the United States and we talked
about the way that that has manifested itself over the
course of time, what's changing how the system works, why the
system is the way it is. And so if you haven't had a
chance, I'd recommend going back and listening to that podcast
from a few weeks ago. I'll drop a link in the sub
stack or I'll also have a link in the YouTube.
But I got a lot of comments from people, Scott, who had started
listening to that or listen to the whole thing.
And they were like, wow, I'm glad you guys are tackling this.
This is a really fascinating topic.
It's, it is really interesting to think about how much youth
sports touches so many people's lives amongst our audience.
It's either you were participant in youth sports and so you've
got a clear memory of how that was, or you're a parent that's
got children in youth sports, or you're like me and you research
these things and you try to figure out like how it fits into
the larger fabric of society. And so on the last podcast, what
we talked about was essentially how we got to the position that
we're at and a lot of the examples of, you know, why the
current system might not be great, but it also might not be
the worst thing in the world that it's not optimized.
But we're also concerned about the direction that it's headed.
So I guess coming out of that first episode, was there
anything that really stuck out to you as you had been
reflecting on it before we get into some of your particular
experiences thus far as being someone on the parenting side of
this whole structure? Just just kind of thinking about
how singularly unique the college athletic experience or
the college athletic infrastructure is in the US and
how it it's really, you know, we are the aberration out there,
not the norm that, you know, most other most other countries
have some kind of professionalized sports system
or, you know, I'll reference a couple times like, you know,
Norway, I think they had a piece on, you know, real sports about
this years ago. But you know, they other
countries have other ways of doing things where they try and
keep it fun, but also trained. We're really the only one to
kind of tie academics and where you go to school with athletics
at such a young age. And so that that's the kind of
what I was thinking back on is just how it's kind of like us
using our own, you know, measuring system.
We're just we're kind of out in, in the wilderness, on our own in
the world. Yes.
And it's, it's fascinating to think about because as we talked
about before, using education as a barrier essentially to team
athletic participation is a very uniquely American thing.
And it almost feels like it. It highlights how we approached
it as a society. And it's interesting watching
the US kind of pull apart from that a little bit and discover
that that system made things kind of neat and tidy.
But it also left a lot of things on the table that we probably
shouldn't have left on the table.
And I think there's a reckoning that's coming at some point in
terms of how we need to be thinking about that.
So to catch everybody up on that aspect of things.
In case you missed that first episode, it's a misconception.
I think in a lot of cases for us to consider education and
athletics as needing to be closely tied to one another.
But for most Americans, that is the only way we've come to think
about it. And as we talked about on that
previous show, when you are an athlete at the high school
level, even that phraseology indicates some kind of a
pre-existing educational experience that goes along with
you playing sports. And that's a really odd thing
because as we talked about in Europe and elsewhere where they
have this Academy style system, there's school offered, but the
focus is on developing your athletic ability, developing
your skill set, and putting you down a trajectory where we find
out if you really can be an elite athlete or not.
And what ends up happening in the United States is that
because there's such a close tie between academics and athletics,
you end up pushing a whole bunch of people off the table first in
high school because some people just do not do well academically
in high school. They never make grades.
And then further at the college level.
And this is where I think it's important for us to keep in mind
with the team sports with primarily football and
basketball. And I mean, those are really the
two main ones when you get to the USI mean, there are other
team sports, obviously, but most of them do not have a pathway
that lies directly through college and high school soccer
maybe a little bit in the US. And that in and of itself is
something we need to talk about later.
But only 62% of high school graduates in the US enroll in
college at all. And the number of people that
get a degree in college is significantly lower than that.
It's only about 35% of Americans aged 25 and older hold a
bachelor's degree. So think about that.
That means 4 out of every 10 people never go to college.
And if you think about the athletic ability of people,
often times some of our most athletically gifted people are
people who don't necessarily have the intellectual capacity
or the wherewithal to survive in what we currently classify as
the college environment or may not have the money to be able to
go. You know, there's so many
elements to education that are completely decoupled from
athletic ability. And yet that has been the way
that the US has metered this out.
And you think about the number of basketball players we've
heard rumor, you know, the, the, the famous open courts at Rucker
Park and elsewhere in, in New York and other urban areas where
you'd have players that just didn't go to school because it
wasn't important in their families or because they had
flunked out or, or something, you know, legendary types of
athletes who never got to play team sports because of the
routing that you have here. And it's always been fascinating
to me to contrast that, especially in basketball, but
also in football with what occurs in, say, baseball, where
a similar kind of thing happens. Like it's very difficult to go
get into the minor leagues unless you've at least played in
high school, even if you've got a, a, a Legion team or an AU
team, you're playing. And yet Major League Baseball
regularly traffics in drafting and developing players from
Latin America, often whom don't have, you know, higher education
development or education development above like the 7th
or 8th grade. And and that's even, that's kind
of an equivalency. That's that's odd.
And it's like, well, it's fine there.
We don't mind that, but we do mind it happening within our own
country. That points to a real odd
psychological aspect of the way that we think about these
things. I don't know if we're actually
seeing a lot of progress made, Scott, in terms of that, that
perception changing, but I think it's important people understand
that it's there and it's very different from what you see
elsewhere. I look at the perception
changing in this and that, like the 70s and 80s when you and I
were growing up and previous to that, you know, everything you
said about, you know, some people's inability to get to
college is true. But you know, the athletic
scholarship was looked at as like, all right, well, this is
the key to allow somebody to get the education that they're not
going to be able to get. And like you go to college and
that was always nice things that you don't get your name in the
locker until you graduate. And there's, there's all these
kind of, you know, fun stories of guys who, you know, the the
few who left early, like they would go back years later and
get their degree. And at the time, you know, like
John Thompson, Bob Knight, there's a lot of coaches, you
know, John Cheney at Temple who preach this.
You know, we want guys to stay four years, not just because I
want them to play four years, but because I want them to get
their degree. And I want, you know, there's
more to life than basketball. There's going to be more and
over the last 30, you know, to to a point where we're at now
where that is morphed, where everyone's just like, oh, you
should leave early. Like that's dumb to stay in
college. Like you should leave and go to
the pros. And like, as you were talking
about the number of, you know, people who have a degree, most
people in the NBA don't or at least they didn't get it while
they were in college. Most players in the NBA did not
stay all four years and in fact, frowned upon.
And very rarely do you hear that case anymore of you should stay
in college all four years to get that degree.
It's if if anything else, you should stay in college to keep
the NIL money. And it's become just so about
the money, which I'm not saying right or wrong, just it is a
much different viewpoint. And I would I don't know the
numbers. This is more for you.
I think that the number of players in the NBA, you know,
the average career length probably hasn't changed since
the 80s. So it's like the the odds of you
going in college two years and then, you know, making enough
money to live forever out of the NBA is probably still the same
percentage now as it was then. But yet we don't seem to Care
now about people who go to college, just don't get a degree
and then go to the NBA. Well, I will say, I don't know
if it's that we don't care as much as it's like, should we
care? And, and this becomes kind of
interesting. It's an interesting
philosophical question about how Americans view this versus how
Europeans view it and others. But it's also it sounds callous
to say, well, what what exactly is it about the athlete that we
should care about in terms of them getting an education when
we don't care about that for the drop out who doesn't have
athletic skill in high school? That's what I always found
fascinating about this mentality.
Now, some of it and what you were talking about with Bob
Knight, John Cheney, they were raised in a an era where it was
like you have an opportunity to go get, you know, an advanced
degree at a time when that was still very unusual.
And we talked about this on the last show, the.
It wasn't until the GI Bill started to get cashed in that
enrollments at higher education institutions skyrocketed across
the country. That's when I.
Think we talked about like IU didn't clear the 10,000 student
enrollment barrier until the mid 1940s.
Like after World War 2 ended. This used to be something that
only the elite participated in. It used to be something that was
not for the vast majority of people because most jobs in the
US didn't require that level of, you know, of education.
And it's ironic because now it's not just athletes where you're
starting to hear less of a concern about this, but it's
also this entire anti college or college is not worth the money
and you should go to trade school and become a plumber or
an electrician. Nothing.
I mean, again, that's nothing against plumbers, electricians,
but you weren't hearing that rhetoric 303540 years ago.
All you were hearing was you need to go to college because
college was this guarantor of, you know, economic success that
you just couldn't get if you were working a blue collar job.
And it was something aspirational.
It's become a lot less so. And it is interesting that it's
now starting to hit athletics because it's also hitting other
areas. But this is where and the reason
why I wanted to reset us on that is it's fascinating because I
don't. Think.
There's been quite the realization that when you pull
up that thread of we're going to decouple education from
athletics in the United States, you're suddenly confronted with
a lot of problems in terms of development for athletes at high
levels that can compete at a global rate in a bunch of
different sports, not just the team sports.
Because of how central higher education and to some degree
secondary education have been to the development of athletes.
Because there really isn't another way of doing it.
And what I mean by all of that is basically this.
You've got a circumstance right now in basketball, as we talked
about last time, where NBA teams will often look overseas, even
college teams. IU just signed two guys from,
you know, one from Serbia, one from Bosnia who look pretty
skilled, will probably get a chance to play professional
basketball somewhere, whether it's the NBA or a lower level.
They're, you know, they've developed effectively and
clearly they are academically sound enough that they can get
in to an institution of higher learning at the at the pro
level. You've got players getting
drafted in from overseas pretty regularly.
And that should be, I think, an increasing warning sign to not
just colleges and universities in the US, but the entire
basketball system in the US. Because when you compare that to
the United States's clear issues with competing on the
international stage in soccer and the fact that it's not just
a fait accompli, that in the Olympics or elsewhere, you're
just going to be among the best in what you do or win a gold
medal if you're an American. It just shows like the rest of
the world in many cases has caught up.
And now the US finds itself in this weird spot where youth
sports becomes in need of reform because of the training process
is needed to maintain the level of dominance that the US has
gotten used to historically. Well, in a way, the universities
and high schools kind of served as almost like the, the public
good for, for, for, for athletic training.
Like it was like a Police Department or a fire department.
It was like the, the public good.
They, they did it where you would have these one off sports
like tennis was just, you know, you would send your kids down to
ballitaries camp and it was like a for profit enterprise.
And I'm not saying that's bad, but that is where, you know,
corruption and bad things can start to come.
And that was just like, you want to go to tennis, you had to go
to Florida, you had to go there when you were 12, you had to
drop out of school and you had to pay Bullet Terry a ton of
money. And we'll see like no
guarantees. And in a weird way, we're kind
of moving toward that across the board because as you decouple
these things, you know, and this is probably off the, you know,
but this is like the the US, you know, Olympic training was so
tied into the universities. As you decouple these, you get
the youth sports industry, which it is now you know, it, it's
tough because like the the other model had its own issues too
when you connected it with education.
But on the flip side, the youth sports model like, hey, you're
going to do travel teams, You're just going to play basketball 12
months a year. We're just going to continually,
you know, use this as a, as a money maker, but also a trainer,
but kind of more of a money maker.
And there's good teams, there's bad teams, and you got to travel
a bunch and you might have to spend a ton of money.
And it almost limits the ability of people like you're you're
back to the point where it's like the guys at Rutgers Park.
To your original analogy, it's like Rucker.
Rucker Park, Scott. Makes me out of four.
I do love, I do love the alternate scenario where it's
actually Rutgers Park and it's a bunch of guys in New Jersey
playing basketball with each other.
But please go ahead. Why is why are the games not as
good as what I've been hearing about where was Oh, but but it's
you know, you they are now kind of eliminated from that travel
team set up and it's becoming again back just kind of, you
know, high level, the elites of just people who have a ton of
money, the ability to travel. And it's like, again, this is
kind of AUS thing. We we can't find middle, we
can't find middle ground. We're always going just.
Polarity to polarity. Well, and this is where to some
degree, there's a lot of different things colliding at
once. And this is where I wanted to
get into the parent discussion. But you hit an economic point
that I think has to predicate all of this.
You mentioned that real sports video that was showcasing what
was it? That was it the, the complex up
by where you live. And there was another real
sports excavation of this, I think about six or seven years
ago about a similar kind of youth sports park in Columbus,
OH. And what you'll note and, and
what gets talked about in that Columbus, OH piece, or maybe it
was Dublin, OH, it was one of the suburbs of Ohio, is they
talked to the guy who's running it and he basically is like,
well, we're doing this as a service for people that can
afford to pay. It is essentially, you know, the
message and, and that actually concerns him because he knows
that there are all of these children who don't have the
financial means to pay. And what's interesting is if you
think about education as a barrier for athletic
participation, economic barriers work in much the same way that
academic barriers do. Because there's a pretty clear
correlation in most cases between a child's socioeconomic
circumstance that they grow up in through their parents, or
maybe they don't have parents in the house and they're being
raised by a family member and their ability to have decent
enough academic achievement to be able to stay in school and
participate. And when you don't have that,
and especially when you see that, you know, 40% of the
population wasn't isn't going to college and never has.
Well, that shows 40% of the population off the map.
Well, this is a similar kind of thing where if you have the
means, your child can participate.
What's fascinating is historically, at least over the
last 20 years, the way this developed was if you have a son
who you think might be good enough to play a sport that
could get them a scholarship at a college, or if you have a
daughter who you think would be good enough in volleyball or
softball. You look at it as an investment
that's worth the potential pay off.
Even if it doesn't work out, 'cause if you can get a
scholarship even to a smaller school, what you've gotten
college paid for. And that's a huge economic
burden that you don't have to deal with.
But for the people who can't afford those things,
increasingly and almost universally now, there's no
alternative. One of the things in the real
sports piece from from six or seven years ago, if you go to
the municipal playgrounds or parks where kids used to play
regularly, even when we were in school, like back in the 80s and
certainly before that, most of them are in disrepair.
Most of them have had budgets slashed.
Most of them don't have people attending to them.
They're unsafe. They're often times in drug
infested neighborhoods or in just unsafe neighborhoods.
And So what it creates is essentially a further winnowing
of who can participate in sports.
And while that works in a closed system where you don't have
outside competition from other societies, what it does is in
the sports like soccer, like basketball, where there are more
comprehensive systems in place that don't have all those
economic barriers, you suddenly start to fall behind really
quickly. Well, there there was a real
sports did a lot of this because there was another story they did
6-7 years ago, which oddly is like not like there's only clips
available. It's not fully available.
Come on, HBO, put it out there on one of your 27 apps from HBO
Go to not go to HBO Now to not. Super Match.
Super match not match just HBO we'll do it again just total
horrible branding. They, they did a story about the
Norway skiing like youth instruction and how just
completely different it is because all these youth sports
here, you know, in the US it's all about tournaments and games
and playing, playing a ton and keeping score and having winners
and having losers and having trophies.
And in Norway, where they have a unbelievable success at skiing,
it's like up until 16, it's just, we'll have fun.
Like everybody's allowed to be in there.
Like there's professional coaches and they're coaching,
but it's like we're not keeping track of times or anything.
And like, we'll, we'll do races and like the, the kids will kind
of know where they finish, but we're not giving out meds.
Like it's just for fun. And then it like 12 or 13 or 14
is when they're like, all right now we'll see who can actually
do it. And you know, I, I look at that
too. And it's like that that goes
into like, I'm not even sure the program we have now with the
youth sports culture provides the results because you get a
ton of burnout. And then you also get, you know,
this is also so many things tie into this.
It's like after you had the injuries with, you know,
Halliburton and Tatum and a little bit of Lillard, but like
all of these crazy Achilles injuries, you start looking at
like, is this overuse and kids just playing too much, which
also, again, like real sports is the Rosetta Stone.
It goes back to a real sports. Another one they talked about
with, you know, Tommy John surgery and young kids and just
the idea of, you know, pitchers in these travel teams throwing
curveballs when they're 910111212 years old again,
because they're trying to win where it's like, you know,
these, these guys are doing Tommy John surgery and 17-8, you
know, 12 and 13 year old kids. It's like, are are you getting
overuse injuries because you're playing too much at A at a
competition? Level.
So part of the issue, and I want to start this segment or part of
it by saying the big problem with the European system when
you get into things like soccer is that it does leave a ton of
people behind who don't make it. People who think they're going
to become professional soccer players and they get to age 18
and they're not good enough and suddenly they basically don't
have a future. When you think about, however,
the overall setup in sports, there's a bunch of things in the
European system and elsewhere that work more functionally
better than the current American system.
And it's ironically something the American system used to at
least do somewhat well and has increasingly not done well.
So there's a few things here to throw in a as you said, it's a
lot more inclusive. It's not sorry you don't qualify
economically, so we're not going to let you into our.
Club or sorry your your. Family doesn't have enough
money, so you don't get to play on these fields.
You've got to go. Find something that your tax
dollars don't even pay for anymore.
So that's that's part of the issue is that you, you, as we
talked about, not just with the academic barriers that the US
has had, but you know, even with that, everybody would at least
normally get a chance to go to high school.
It wasn't until high school that you would start to see people
drop off. But that's a different set of
barriers that reduces the number of people that could
potentially. Be discovered as elite athletes
or very good athletes that could play at the collegiate level or
the professional level. So that's part of the issue.
Second issue that you run into is that with most of these
travel teams, with most of the high school coaching, there's no
licensing. There's, there's, there's very
little quality control in terms of what you get with the coaches
that you have The a lot of times your qualifications in those
cases are, well, I played in college or I played at the pro
level, but I'm not actually doing the training.
It's somebody I knew in high school or college that's doing
the training. It's my name, the brand name on
there that's selling it, but it's a business.
I'm not actually necessarily out there doing XY and Z.
You know, contrast that with take soccer training in Europe
where and in basketball where there is there are badges and
there are training levels and you have to in order to.
Qualify for jobs, have to take tests.
And have to continually upgrade your knowledge level in order to
rise up through the ranks of coaching.
That doesn't mean that you can't get great coaches out of a
license list system. It just means that you could get
a coach who isn't very good. And you'll often get coaches who
might be good at coaching particular skills but might be
terrible at teaching the holistic elements of the game.
And it's why you don't see a lot of skill development in a lot of
these for, and again, I'm painting with A broad brush
here, but when you think about, but the complaints and the
concerns that people have about youth sports in the USA, lot of
it is there is no real quality control.
Often times parents don't know what they're getting because
they're getting sold a vision or a, or a bill of goods on certain
things that may not match up with the reality.
But how are you going to know you're not an expert in this?
Either so I have some experience in this.
I was AII coached basketball in Texas.
I was a teacher for five years, middle school coach, head coach
the basketball team in Texas. It's funny, I I got there, you
and I took the coaching basketball course with Bob
Knight. I had my notebook.
But I I get there, I was hired as a social studies teacher and
my principal was like, you're from Indiana.
Like, yeah, he's like, I like Bob Knight, you're a basketball
coach. Like, OK, I guess that's how I'm
doing it. But you know, this was right
2000 to 2006, kind of early AAU culture.
Again, one point of reference. But you know, I'm coaching 7th
and 8th grade in middle school. I'm the head coach.
We met every year with the high school head coach, the high
school that we fed into and and his directives were very clear.
Like, Hey, we run a motion offense.
I play man to man defense. You here's there's little things
like you know, when the guys, you know what we call Wolf, when
the guys come up behind the ball, just terminology.
I want to to plug in. So we get your kids as freshmen,
it moves in. He's like, I really don't care
if you win or lose. Like I want your kids to
compete. I want them to play hard, but I
would much rather your team come in and they know the principles
of motion offense. Then you guys win a division
title middle school, because who really cares about that Move
that to today where some kids just playing AAU all the time.
And from an AAU point of perspective of these travel
teams, you kind of have to play to win.
Because if you're telling parents like, hey, we're going
to go to Buffalo and then Rochester and then we're going
to date and we're going to fly all these places, you know, just
economically, it's like, I, I don't want to go and watch my
team go own 25 all year. Like that sucks.
And like I, I don't really, if we're just going to learn
principles, why, why are we going to Dayton, OH to do that
when I live in Indiana? So I, I think that's part of it.
I also think, you know, one of my other when I was in sales for
years too, Like one of my things I always try and think of is
like, how, how are you making money off of this?
Like just in the, in the equation when I'm doing a
business deal, like what's the benefit to the other side?
Because there has to be one there?
Like how are they making money? It's also good, just like good
advice to not get scammed. Someone's like, Hey, I'll give
you free money. It's like, how, what's your deal
on this? But what do you think about it?
Like again, back to kind of that public good, you know, high
schools, colleges, they were this there to provide education
and also provide athletics and they would get a benefit if a
player went to the next level. It's like, oh, we're the high
school that had, you know, Tyrese Halliburton, Jason Tatum,
and you get some of that on the the travel circuit.
But really how the travel circuit makes money is not that
they advance players to the next level.
It's that you stay in their system and then you continue to
pay them their dues every year and you continue to fund these
travel tournaments, which fund the sites like Grand Park.
And, and that is that just provides a different level of
instead of work. Again, not saying that travel
coaches can't be good or the system can't work, but it, it
also provides this underbelly where it's like, what's the real
goal here? It's like, am I trying to make
everybody better? Or if I win a bunch of games and
the parents are happy and they sign up again next year and I
can raise the prices, maybe I just kind of focus on the, the
wrong things. Like I the last thing I'll say,
sorry, I'm talking a lot. It's like I just finished
coaching my son who's going into 7th grade last two years in
intramurals here in Westfield. And you know, in the 6th grade
intramural, you're allowed to do zone defense like two quarters
of the game. I just never did it.
I hated running zone. I we, we had a little tournament
at the end. It's like I ran zone for half a
game because like it's a tournament, but the rest of the
season I'm like, let's play man to man.
Cause zone is almost like this weird hack at the younger levels
of basketball where it's really tough for kids to play offense
against a zone. But it teaches.
And again, like Jim Beheim, I'm sorry if you're listening, but
you know, zone at a young level just teaches really bad
defensive principles. OK, just stay there and just
don't move a lot. Whereas man to man teaches you
to move. And so I look at it kind of like
throwing a curveball young, but it's like you, you see this a
lot in travel teams. They run a lot of sets that
maybe aren't teaching the best fundamentals, but they're kind
of hacks to get you to get wins. And that's where you get into
this issue where you have a lot of players who may have the
means maybe in the system and they're learning kind of all of
the wrong things. So they get to a level where
they need to know like how to shuffle on defense, how to get
back and how to, you know, understand your spot in a, you
know, help defense situation. They don't know how to do it.
Right. Well, and I just want to
clarify, there are licenses available.
Whether they're required or not is almost entirely dependent
upon what state you're in, what organization is being coached.
So, you know, like USA Basketball has a licensing
system where you have to become, I think AUSA Gold member or you
don't have that license in order to coach, but that's only if
you're affiliated with USA Basketball.
Same thing with soccer. Like they've tried to create a
system where there's licensing, but it's no guarantee that
you're actually going to be needing that depending on what
organization you're coaching for.
My point in all of this is not that there aren't great coaches
in the US or that there's not certain circumstances where you
might have that, but most parents are very ignorant about
these spaces to begin with. The kids certainly don't know
any better one way or the other in most cases.
And what we find is that there's even when there is licensing
involved and even when you do have some kind of a credential
check, it's often as you just put it, without real direction.
Because you could be in one community learning one set of
things and move to a different community in the same state, in
the same metro area and have an entirely different set of
emphases. It's very inconsistent.
It's very patchwork. And what it ends up creating is
a circumstance where for a lot of people, they're they're
wasting money and they don't know it at the parental level.
And they're your kid might just be naturally good at sports and
not need that coaching. And often times there's things
you need to unlock in kids that you might not be able to get to
because you're not getting the right coaching.
I mean, it's a real issue that often times doesn't get cleared
up until much later in the process.
Right. Yeah, so, you know, I I do think
that just across the board and we had AI thought some really
good comments from Mike Petrie, long time friend and listener
and occasional guest on the pod. But, you know, he made the note
the following which I which I thought that the, you know,
we're, we're worth mentioning. So one thing I think works
against the skill development model in the US is the sheer
scale of the number of players. And we talked a little bit about
the population differences on the last show, but I think it's
worth reiterating like the, the largest country in Europe by
population is Germany, which has about 80 to 85 million people.
the US has like 350 million people.
It's a it's a huge country. And I mean, you compare it to
something like, you know, I think like England has 60
million, I think France has 50 million.
I mean, and then and those are the biggest ones and then it
starts to really go downhill from there.
So worth noting. So bike continues because there
are so many players to sort through.
It works to NBA teams advantage to wait as long as possible
before they spend big money on assets, you know.
And so that I think is, you know, one of the issues is that,
as we talked about before, there probably should be a licensure,
A licensure system that is mandated by the major
professional leagues. And those professional leagues
should be working in tandem with the national governing bodies of
those sports. But everybody knows that the
leagues in the US have far more power than the governing bodies.
And they don't necessarily want to have to deal with that 'cause
they don't want to have to take over the training process 'cause
that is a lot of money. It's all about investment at
that point, which I'm going to come back to in a second.
Another thing that Mike notes, the problems of the US model are
that scale dictates everyone in the chain and and what the chain
values is quantity over quality. And a a coaches value to
coaching to college coaches is based on how many college ready
players are in the program at the same time.
The value to parents is how many college coaches are looking at
the program that the they might put their kids into.
What's interesting is that football appears more like golf
and tennis, where outside coaches and camps are more
concerned with individual skill development than competition
results. And that we you do see that a
bit in the draft process. We talked about how unique
football is. Football also has the.
Benefit. Of not having any of those
external pressures. As we talked about before, the
US isn't competing with anybody to produce football players and
the NFL knows it as a closed system.
And as we've seen a lot of great football players, great NFL
players either play at smaller Division One FBS colleges or
sometimes even lower than that. I remember, you know, who was an
Andre Reed, great Buffalo Bills receiver, went to Cuts Town
State. I was like, where the hell is
Cuts Town State? It's a small school in
Pennsylvania, but that shouldn't have worked.
How did he end up there? Look at, I mean, you want to
take another example last year. I mean, just how many guys?
Came from a deep, you know, a low level area.
But yeah, I mean, no, it's there's Jerry Rice.
Didn't he play it like a Mississippi Valley state for
Jerry? Rice, Elijah Sarat started I
think at the division two school, right, and meant to
James Madison and now he's here. So it is one of the interesting
things about football. And again, the scale is
important because of how many people you need to play football
versus some of the other sports. And that scale thing is a real
problem again, because it is nationwide and you know, it does
create some problems in terms of trying to come up with a
coherent system that works nationally.
The problem? I think Scott for you know that
I, you know, I'd love to hear from you about is so many we,
we, you know, a, a lot of Americans love to have systems
that just work that they don't have to think about.
And that's a lot of criticism of Americans.
I think it's actually the case with most people everywhere.
You really do have to do a lot of research to figure out what
you should be getting your kid into at the youth sports level
in order to make the right decisions.
But you often times neither have enough information on your own
because you don't have the background in it to make the
right decisions. Nor is the information that
you're being presented in any way, shape or form the right
information that you need to actually make the decisions
because it requires you to go essentially scout multiple teams
and coaches for what, two or three years before your kid gets
to that point, often times while your kids already playing some
other version of youth sports that you already have to keep
tabs on. It's, it's really one of those
kind of survival of the fittest sorts of environments and it
disadvantages everybody except the service providers at that
point it feels like to me 100% true.
I mean. And you know, the, the two
things that I've experienced, you know, 1 is, you know, like
our, our, our, both of our, both of our boys, we signed them up
for baseball when they were like 6 or 7 years old.
And I was kind of naive. It's like, all right, well,
they've never played baseball. Like this is a great time to it
was intramural wasn't like just a trap, like an intramural
Baseball League at six years old.
And like we get there and half the kids have already had, you
know, professional coaching and like they're they all know how
to play baseball And and like my sons didn't do well.
They're they're not particularly awesome at baseball, but it was
like, I thought this was to learn baseball.
Like do we need to pre learn before six years old?
Like what's going on? I find that increasingly in the
intramurals around here and just northern Indy, Indianapolis is
very, you know, you sports centric up here.
What also. I'm finding is.
You know, my, my oldest plays basketball.
He's not, you know, he's going to try out this year.
We'll see how he does on the basketball.
He's he's not good enough to make the travel teams.
But I have some friends who have some daughters who are in soccer
and they're they're starting to make travel teams.
And what you also run into is like, I personally, let's just
say my oldest was good enough to make a travel basketball team,
was getting really good at basketball.
You, you kind of can't have your own views on things.
Like I don't believe that that anybody should be playing the
same sport 12 months a year. But if they were good enough,
like my friends who have the daughters in soccer, it's like
they don't really get to make that choice.
It's like, well, if you want to be on the travel team, we're 12
months a year and you sign up as like, you got to do all these
tournaments. If you miss two or three
tournaments, you're off the team sometimes without a refund.
So like the idea of like, well, I want my kids to play multiple
sports through high school. It's like you kind of don't get
that option if your kids are good enough to be in that elite
level. Because as you said, the service
providers kind of have these terms and conditions like, no,
this is what we do because then you're paying 12 months a year.
And so you kind of get pushed out in that realm also.
But it's, it's tough as a parent because it's like, I want, I, I
would love to see my kids grow and excel in some sports.
But it does feel like, man, I'm running like, you know, my
youngest is 9 and it's like, man, I feel like I've run out of
time. He's 9.
Like, it's stupid. But it's like I, I don't have
enough time to give him a trial in each one of these.
But it's like at 9, it feels like the kids who are already,
you know, pushing ahead, they've already had four years in there.
So it's like, I can't just start, oh, try lacrosse.
It's like, well, you're already behind in everything at at six
or seven or eight, which is which is nuts.
It is well, and it makes. Me feel bad because you know for
the number of really good youth coaches that are out there who
believe in the right things and really push the right things and
have the best interests of the the kids that they're working
with their heart. Often times at the municipal
level, it, it ends up that you a lot of the the places you're
supposed to send your kids, if you think that they've got a
shot at making it to the next level of whatever that is, are
not necessarily run in a way that is conducive to being
having a normal life. You know, making normal or, you
know, economical decisions or not having to choose, as you
just said, between this or something else entirely because
you're not willing to commit to the level that somebody else is
willing to commit at. Well, and also, I mean I'm, I'm.
Sure. Many people in our audience have
dealt with this, like my friends who are getting into the travel
soccer world, they're kind of like, we'll, we'll, we'll be
gone for the next four months. And like, we'll, we'll throw out
like, Hey, we want to go to a concert in November.
Like we don't have our schedule yet.
Like they, they don't commit to anything.
But it's, but it's because of that commitment.
And I, I mean, I get it. And you know, I'm, I'm not
sitting here saying that if my son wasn't good enough in
basketball to do that, I might not be doing that for a year or
two just to see what it's like. So it's, I'm not at all saying
that's not the thing to do. It's just you, you take a step
back and it's like, man, that is, that is nuts.
I mean, we're not even in high school yet.
And this is a ton of commitment. Well, I guess what concerns?
Me, that's a micro level thing that's really important, but
that's happening all over the country.
But the macro level is just as important from a cultural
perspective. And this is where we probably
leave this topic broadly for the third episode, but to kind of
tease it as many problems that individual parents and kids have
at this level, at the level you're talking about that period
between maybe 6:00 and 12:00. But even beyond that, it all
feels like it's directionless. And that really should concern a
lot of people in the United States about if you care about
USA anything, USA Basketball, USA soccer, USA track and field.
So much of what the setup is right now is either still
heavily, heavily like reliant on these pay for play types of
systems that have developed where you're not getting the
best athletes in at the top of the funnel.
So you're not getting them as as they pass through the funnel and
at the tail end as finished products.
But you're also, in many cases, the the part where you're
actually in the funnel isn't really teaching you the skills
that you need to be an elite athlete in that sport.
When you get to the tail end of things, you know, I'm always
amazed at how. Good.
The former. Yugoslavian republics are at
training basketball players. You think about it like, you
know, Luka Doncic and Nikola Yokich and all of these amazing
players that they've had historically coming out of
Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, those three especially.
Like that doesn't make a lot of sense if you think about it.
That's that's a war-torn area. It's not the richest area in
Europe by any means. And yet the training
specifically in basketball and also in tennis, when you also
consider, you know, Novak Yukovich, who comes out of the
exact same setting. Like they have been able to come
up with a very directionally focused, skill heavy training
process that does at the end of the day, produce really high
level players in their sports, despite them not fitting any
archetype of what we would think of as being great athletes.
Like it's, it's hilarious listening to other NBA players
talking about Nicola Yokich. He, he breaks their brains,
right? Because they it like, they look
at this guy and he looks like, you know, Eric Montross.
You know where it's like that guy shouldn't be Eric Montross.
Yeah, out of shape. Eric Montross.
That guy shouldn't be the best NBA player in the in the league,
but yet he, he's won an MVP, he probably should have won another
MVP. He's won an NBA title.
You know, he is so skilled, and he is.
So smart and sees the game so well.
And the US system, if they can get those types of players, it's
almost by accident because as we've talked about, the US has
largely survived off of brute force athletic talent making it
through all of these gates to get to the final spot.
Now with basketball, basketball's a relatively
inexpensive sport to do this in. Where the US needs to be
concerned is swimming and diving, track and field, you
know, all of these sports that require large facilities,
state-of-the-art facilities. And what we're going to talk
about in the next episode is how the potential collapse of
college sports as we know it really endangers.
That Olympic training model, Olympic training model, because
think about the USA Swimming and diving team, like the vast
majority of them are coming from where?
From Indiana, from Texas, you know, from a couple of other
schools that have great facilities and are willing to
fund these things. Well, we're on the precipice
right now of a bunch of schools saying we got to spend twenty,
$22 million a year on revenue sharing to pay for our football
players and basketball players, which we have to have in order
to maintain a college athletics department in this environment.
We're not going to continue to pay for a swimming and diving
program or a gymnastics. And we've already seen it in
some of the the like the more esoteric Olympic sports where
those have been. Men's gymnastics is a great
example. It's gotten dropped in so many
places because of Title 9. So you end.
Up with an almost entirely Academy based system.
The one last thing I'll also say, you also deal with a
situation where even in football, a lot of schools and
coaches are saying, if I'm at Northern Illinois, which I think
is actually the coach that did this, said this, or if I'm at a
smaller school, why should we spend our time and our money and
our effort training players who then move on and go play at a
higher level and we get 0 compensation in return.
And this is where the transfer system comes into to play, which
is the topic that we'll hit the next time that we do this.
So anyway, we'll wrap it up there.
Scott, any final thoughts? No, sounds good.
Looking forward to Part 3. We'll be back with.
Part 3 of this eventually we'll have a lot more IU football talk
coming up this week as well. This is Crimson cast for Scott.
I'm Galen. We'll catch you folks.
On the flip side, stay never daunted.
So everybody.