By KENZIE GARNER
Sheridan High School Student
The Sheridan Student Column is brought to readers by Sheridan High School’s 10th grade English class, taught by Abby Williams.
Growing up, I would always think about how high school basketball was going to be the best thing that would ever happen to me. That was until I started to play travel basketball (AAU).
Travel basketball is a different type of basketball: it isn’t like your normal high school basketball or your rec leagues, and it is very intense and competitive. You could have the country’s best players on a team, and they could still lose by 20; you never know the outcome, you just play until the buzzer sounds.
On the other hand, with high school basketball you typically can guess the outcomes. If you have the best team in the state against a couple of good people, you can tell who is going to win based on experience and skill. This is why I believe that school and travel sports are completely different from one another.
I have played both high school and travel basketball in my career, and personally, I enjoy travel basketball way more than school ball. However, there are many good things that school basketball has to offer. During school basketball, you have cheer blocks, you can play with your friends, there are more people cheering you on, and you can get rewards for your stats or your team making it far in the state tournament. Unlike school basketball, in AAU you don’t have these things. Yes, you have people cheering you on, but it’s not like your hometown rooting for you to win your home games. You also don’t get awards for playing AAU unless you win a tournament.
Another difference between school and AAU basketball is the level of competition. In school basketball you may not play against the level of competition that you play against in an AAU game. In AAU, depending on the bracket or age group that you play in, you can play against some of the best players in the country of that age group. During school ball, you may not always play against the best competition there is. Most people who play school basketball don’t do AAU because they want to focus on another sport, or they don’t want to play basketball at a higher level.
The ways that you prepare yourself for school basketball and AAU basketball also vary. During school ball, you can prepare yourself a lot more efficiently than you can during an AAU game. For example, during school basketball we watch film, break down different players’ strengths and weaknesses, as well as practicing against what they would most likely do while playing against us.
This is not the same for AAU; you can’t really prepare yourself for what the team will do, you just have to go out and play and respond to what they do. That is what I like most about AAU: the fact that you can just go out and play and not have to worry about what certain players are good at. For me, I find it a lot easier to go out and play than watch film on the other team and break it down because when I play, I don’t think about what I am going to do, I just do it in that moment.
Although school basketball and AAU have many similarities, the differences are the easiest things to pick out when you go to an AAU tournament.
One of the biggest differences that you can see is the way you play the game. During an AAU game, the refs let you play. What I mean by that is they don’t necessarily call fouls, they let you hack other people and only call it every once in a while. Sometimes this can cause the game to get very out of control, but most of the time the referees know when to start calling fouls and tell people to settle down. This may also be one of my favorite parts because unlike school basketball, instead of getting five fouls you get six. This can make a big difference because it allows you to play more and not get in foul trouble if you have three or four fouls in the third quarter.
Overall, I think that both school basketball and AAU are useful to anyone who wants to play basketball at any level. However, if you plan on playing basketball at a higher level, it is smarter and more beneficial to play AAU instead of just playing school basketball. Playing AAU gives you the opportunity to play in front of college coaches who can recruit you to play for them.