With pressure from NCAA, could this be the end of July AAU basketball in Las Vegas?
Earlier this week, Grant Rice was whipping around the gym at Bishop Gorman High School, preparing the venue’s four basketball courts for the start of the Las Vegas Fab 48, one of the summer’s biggest A AU tournaments.
With more than 900 teams participating in the five-day event, which takes place in dozens of gyms across the valley, the Fab 48 — as well as simultaneous A AU events like the Bigfoot Hoops Classic and the Rebound Hoops Vegas Finals — help make the city a basketball hub every July.
If the NCA A has its way, however, that tradition could be coming to an end.
After Arizona and other college programs were implicated by the FBI in a corruption sting last season, the NCAA is moving to overhaul the recruiting culture that has supplied college basketball with its star players for decades. An exploratory committee last month recommended that the NCAA eliminate live recruiting periods in July and replace them with NCAA-RUN evaluation camps.
Such a move could sap the Las Vegas events of their allure and dissuade thousands of participants from flocking to the city every summer.
Rice, the Bishop Gorman coach and one of the directors of the Fab 48, did not want to comment on potential rule changes, but he took time to stump for the value of such events, even as he was helping to situate the youth teams that had begun to file through the registration desk.
“It takes a lot of effort and a lot of people to pull off these events,” Rice said. “This many teams, this many college coaches, you have to have good people who want to work hard and do the best they can for these kids. And for the kids, they can hopefully play in front of some college coaches. It’s good for the young kids to be playing basketball in big-time events where they can be seen.”
Under the current recruiting system, shoe companies like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour sponsor AAU teams and can supply the coaches and directors with salaries and free gear. The AAU coaches, in return, can exert influence over the players to steer them toward certain colleges that also have exclusive deals with the shoe companies. It’s a murky quid pro quo dance that has existed for years, but the NCAA has incentive to crack down now that the FBI investigation has been made public.
Under the new rule recommendations, which could go into effect as early as next year, the NCA A committee believes it can minimize the power that AAU coaches and shoe companies hold over elite recruits.