Sincere Lover\’ of Basketball

Pop Jennings
(718)327-4159 (home)
(718)787-5723 (cell)

Interesting idea. The best way to make the NCAA better is to offer them some competition and an idea like this would do it.
The most important piece is getting the NBA to sign your talented players and pass up on the NCAA talent.

What an amazing opportunity! The idea that a driven entrepreneur is able to own a semi-pro basketball team and learn the business by focusing on the grass roots of all sports ownership “player development” is awesome. We should be wise enough to do this in every enterprise….focus on “development” while chasing the big WIN.

Any chance there is a template in place today (Franchisor) that can help launch this process?

MFFL,
-Vic

Mark, your idea is a good idea. Wish I had some extra bucks.

I know you’re a college hoops fan, but personally, I think the whole NCAA thing stinks. I totally wish for a minor league system to evolve into destroying the NCAA and their system of spoiled rotten athlete-students. Some of those kids, who’ve I’ve had in my class as a student and as a college instructor, have no idea what reality is, and live in an “above everyone else” dream world.

crash.

Love your idea – as a high school basketball coach who does AAU just to get around the silly high school rules and give the kids an opportunity to play, I think we need to change the system. I see a lot of kids who see the pull of AAU and listen to their AAU coaches and think something magical is going to happen. It’s a joke… Parents pay a lot of money to send their kids to faraway places while their AAU coach whispers in their ear telling them that so-and-so college is interested in their child. All of this so-called development should be better managed with the emphasis on the players, not the money.

I always thought of your concept as a basketball academy – a school where students lived in dorms, played basketball and studied year-round. I coached in Japan, and there were sports-centric high schools that did just that. If we want kids to be trained the right way, we need to make this happen.

The main problems I see are 1) parents 2) school systems and 3) a lack of political backing. Parents will expect their players to become basketball stars at these academies, and not appreciate the fact that even if their kid is not playing much they are benefiting greatly from the process. School systems will hate losing attendance money and the benefits of having star athletes on campus. And politicians will never support a process that trains students what they want or need to learn. We should have more technical academies (science, computers, engineering, etc.) but our political and educational system would never support it.

One last thing Mark – keep up the great work. You are a lightning rod for criticism, but you keep challenging the system and opening people’s eyes to the realities of our world. And most NBA fans would agree, we can only wish our favorite teams had an owner as dedicated as you.

I think the American sports culture and the media (of which I am a member – though a small-fry) tolerates big-time college athletics as the path to the major leagues in a given sport – save, perhaps, for soccer.

I’d guess that any attempt to sign a player while IN high school would draw scorn from media, the NCAA, the NFHS, education people and countless others. If I owned such a team, no matter how much I tried to stress career development, it would end up no better than a footnote to the story. Because, from a media perspective, that’s not the most eye-grabbing angle. It’s Oh My God, This Guy Is Turning High Schoolers Into Professional Athletes.

I would be concerned that any tide of negative publicity, and it can happen quickly, would be too much to overcome from a business perspective.