Volume 67, Issue 8

The Institute for Higher Basketball

by Avi Mermelstein

Last summer, in front of near-indifferent crowds of less than 6,000 in Indianapolis and a television audience smaller than LeBron James’s, US Basketball learned several lessons the hard way.  First, that it no longer enjoys enough of an advantage over the rest of the world to send less than its best players to an international tournament.  Second, that a team composed of 12 small forwards will lose to a team sporting legitimate players at all five positions.  Third, that George Karl really can’t coach.  Fourth, and most important of all for the purposes of this article, that high schools and colleges are no places to develop professional basketball players.

This knowledge, while novel to American basketball, has long been grasped by Europeans in the most international of sports, soccer.  Good European soccer players don’t go to college.  Most don’t even go to high school.  Instead, they train with professional teams from as young as 12.  Not that they sign professional contracts that young.  Rather, the professional teams field youth teams coached by professionals, with regimented practices.  Eventually, if the players are good enough, they graduate to professional status at age 17, and begin training with the pro team or, more likely, with the team’s reserves.

What about their schooling?  Well, the teams provide tutors to work with the kids through high school.  But that’s really beside the point.

This system has several advantages.  Kids develop fundamental skills more reliably under the guidance of professional coaches.  They play with equally talented teammates against tough competition.  They don’t have to worry about attracting the attention of pro teams as they are already under the watchful eyes of those teams.  And, as opposed to the high school players of the NBA who frequently spends years on the bench, they come to the professional team immediately ready to play or they don’t come at all.

Nations all over the world have turned this system to basketball and have begun to produce young players capable of starring in the NBA, players years ahead of their American counterparts in fundamental skills such as passing and shooting.  The results speak for themselves—a cursory look at a list of the league’s rising stars yields, among others, Dirk Nowitzki, Yao Ming, and Peja Stojakovic.  A cursory glance at their educational backgrounds yields not colleges, but professional basketball organizations.

That is where LeBron James should have been—at an academy for higher basketball, not a Catholic high school.  That way, we wouldn’t be even be discussing questions regarding his eligibility.  Same thing goes for Chris Webber, Marcus Camby, and all the other amateur basketball players that accepted gifts during their college careers to the detriment of their schools.  They would have been young pros in professional environments getting paid to play long before draft day.

As it is they weren’t, which is why we’re discussing the question of paying student-athletes.  But there’s really nothing to discuss.  Colleges and high schools are, ostensibly, about getting an education.  Their basketball teams provide students with opportunities to participate in extracurricular (or co-curricular) activities within the “educational” experience.  A basketball player can claim that his basketball is teaching him leadership or perhaps, in the James case, obscure amateur status bylaws.  But a student doesn’t get paid for going to school or participating in a school activity.

That last point is really what it all boils down to.  There are many other problems with paying student-athletes.  The feasibility of equal pay scales for schools that generate unequal revenue, all the thorny issues that accompany professional status such as labor unions and government regulations, decisions as to how much is enough—all these questions confuse the seemingly simple idea of play for pay.  But laying aside all these practical concerns still leaves us with the somewhat lofty objection that once you pay college or high school athletes, they are no longer going to school, even ostensibly.

Sound like a farce?  It is.  That’s one of the reasons why America should implement a system that clearly differentiates between students preparing for college and players preparing for the NBA.  Until then, there’s no legal difference between LeBron James and the worst player on a last-place Yeshiva League team.  Both are going to school.  Both are playing basketball in school.  Neither should get paid to do so.♦

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