AAU Basketball:
An Honest Guide
Should my kid play AAU? When? Is it worth it? Every basketball parent asks — and most answers come from someone selling something. We run AAU teams ourselves, so here's the whole story: what it does well, what it costs your family, and when it actually makes sense.
What AAU Actually Is
"AAU" gets used as shorthand for all travel basketball, but strictly speaking it's a sanctioning organization — the Amateur Athletic Union — that most weekend youth tournaments run under. A club fields teams, enters tournaments, and families follow the schedule. When anyone plays in a weekend tournament — including MP players — they're usually playing in an AAU-sanctioned event. So the real question isn't "AAU or not." It's whether the traditional AAU calendar — fixed teams, tournament weekends — is the right structure for your player right now.
I Grew Up in This World
AAU basketball has been around for thirty years. It started as a way for kids to keep playing in the offseason — and originally, it was only for high-level players. In the nineties there were just a few programs in the Philadelphia area, and the best place to play was the Sonny Hill League: kids from all over the city, South Jersey, and the suburbs, with each part of the city fielding its own team. Rasheed Wallace played for North Philly. Alvin Williams played for the Germantown Medics — a team I was lucky to be a part of, alongside Steve Goodrich, two-time Ivy League MVP at Princeton; Lynard Stewart, a Temple legend; and Marc Jackson, future NBA player and now the voice of the Sixers.
That's the version of this world I came up in — when offseason ball meant the best players in the city finding each other in one gym. It's also why I can tell you honestly what today's version does well, and where it's drifted from what it was built for.
What AAU Has Become
Youth basketball is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, and in the last decade private equity firms have been buying up tournament circuits, club networks, and event operators. That changed the incentives. The original AAU existed to get the best players real competition. Much of today's version exists to maximize the number of paying families — more age groups, more divisions, more tournaments, more weekends. When the business model is entry fees, every kid is told they're one showcase away.
What's being sold is exposure: the idea that college coaches — or increasingly, private and Catholic school programs — are watching, and that recruitment is one more tournament fee away. Here's the reality: real recruiting happens at a small number of top-level events involving a small number of players, almost all of them 15 and older. For everyone else, the fees fund the circuit — not the kid's chances. No 10-year-old has ever been recruited off a Sunday bracket, but a lot of families have paid for years of weekends believing the next one might be it.
None of this means tournaments are bad. It means a parent should know whose interests the calendar serves — and make sure the money and the weekends are buying what actually helps a player: reps, coaching, and love of the game.
What AAU Does Well
Traditional AAU is geared for kids who want to travel — to test themselves against competition from other cities and see how their game holds up outside their own gym. For older, advanced players, that has real value: elite tournaments concentrate talent, college coaches attend the top events, and there's a confidence that comes from earning it on an unfamiliar floor.
Here's the honest catch: the competition in other cities isn't always better. Sometimes you drive two hours to play a team you'd beat by 30 at home. Some tournaments are run beautifully; others aren't. Some venues are great; some are a middle school gym with one working scoreboard. Travel guarantees mileage — not quality.
The Challenges Nobody Puts in the Brochure
When AAU Starts Making Sense
Some say AAU has ruined youth basketball. In some ways that's true — but it's not the whole story. High-level teams genuinely need a place to play teams from other areas, and Philadelphia produces a lot of very good ones — at the 13–14 age levels especially, this city is deep. Testing yourself against that is real development.
Our view: around age 12 or 13 is when it starts making sense to look for programs and tournaments that test your player's skills. Under 12, tournament travel adds very little that well-run local competition doesn't provide — at that age, development is reps, touches, and confidence, not exposure.
But even when the age is right, you don't need a tournament every weekend. It's inefficient — a waste of time, money and energy — and there's a physical cost nobody talks about: back-to-back games with one or two hours in between is poor recovery for a developing athlete. Kids play their second game tired, with tired habits, and tired habits are the ones that stick. A young athlete gets more from one well-scheduled, well-rested game than three stacked on a Sunday.
The mistake isn't playing AAU. It's paying AAU's full price — in weekends, money, shared reps, and recovery — at an age and frequency where your player would grow more from playing twice as much, ten minutes from home.
Don't measure a season by how many tournaments you entered. Measure it by how much your player improved.
The MP Approach
We built MP Fall Basketball to keep everything AAU does well and fix what it doesn't:
Train during the week. Play on the weekend.
Est. 2004 · Philadelphia, PA