His annoying gym teacher energy is astonishing.
The true element of what he's pointing out though is that traditional high school basketball involves/involved a lot more practice time relative to game time, more stable teams, more intense scouting, and more of a focus on actually winning the games. Better teams, worse teams, weird matchups, do whatever weird quirk you need and find a way.
AAU basketball is best-on-best over a much larger geographic area and population and focuses much more on individual skill development, both of those being very good things in terms of cultivating the absolute best talents and definitely contributing to the growing talent level in the sport. It does "work".
But the relative decline in that other stuff is noticeable too, especially when you've made your career coaching 18-22 year olds. Cronin has better and better size-skill-explosiveness packages every year, the materials get better and better. But the kids don't know how to execute a scouting report and deal with the tactical subtleties of late game situations like they used to. The two go together, these kids basketball lives have focused more on the former and less on the latter. They work as hard if not harder than they ever did, just on different stuff.
Quit whining coach and teach your young athletes the game, that's your job.
To give you an idea of how bad this own goal was, the state legislature is looking at changing how the regents are appointed.
Having briefly looked into this they actually aren't appointed, they are directly elected by the voters, and individually for U of M, MSU, and Wayne State which seems insane to me.
Like, honestly, if you're a U of M fan you are absolutely voting to retain these board members that Izzo hates, right?
www.minnesotasportsfan.com
