An Annual NCAA Debate

by CSP Guest Writer Yael I. Friedman

A recent study, showing the growing disparity in graduation rates between white and black college basketball players, casts the perennial March spotlight on the tensions underlying college basketball.  Likewise, each March brings out a chorus of leading educators and civil rights activists calling for measures to compel colleges to do a better job of looking after their athletes’ academic well-being.  Yet what role should academics play in the development of a basketball player with a probable career in the NBA?  Should the focus remain on stressing academic accountability or rather acknowledging the shift away from the NCAA as a farm system for the NBA and focusing instead on structuring the development of players in a non-academic context?

American basketball is almost completely unique in having developed so strongly on the college level.  Few other American sports (with the obvious exception of football) and no other basketball league, in Europe or elsewhere, fuse education with basketball in quite this way.  According to Christophe Ney, of the website europeanprospects.com, “the highly talented kids (who had played for local clubs on the local level), draw the interest of the professional teams that try to bring them into their own youth structures.”  One striking example is Andrei Kirilenko, the Russian phenom who plays for Utah. Kirilenko became the youngest player to play in the Russian Superleague when he was just 16 and only two years later graduated to the gold standard of world basketball, the NBA, when the Utah Jazz drafted him. While Kirilenko is exceptional in many ways, Russian and European acceptance of his going pro at 16 does not appear to be.

Of course, European and American basketball are completely different animals, with the latter being a much larger and richer one. The amount of money and media exposure involved in American pro ball seduces and entrances even the unlikeliest hopefuls from the second they first set their eyes on a television. This, in turn, leads to unreal expectations of success, ultimate disappointment for the many who don’t make it, and the potential for exploitation for the few who do. Yet is this something that can be remedied by trying to regulate the NCAA and NBA drafting procedures? The relatively new prep-to-play age minimum that bars all prospects under 19 from being drafted does not seem to have any bearing on high school players deciding that college is a more prudent choice. Most notably, Brandon Jennings decided to forego a spot with the University of Arizona Wildcats and instead play for Lottomatica Roma until he was 19 and eligible for the NBA draft.  As a contender for NBA Rookie of the Year, it does not seem that his decision not to play college ball hurt his development as a player. Neither did it hurt LeBron James or Kobe Bryant.

A logical conclusion (apart from blaming the NBA for helping create this distorted view of easy money and fame) is to place greater emphasis on developing youth programs that prepare kids either for a professional basketball career or for the more realistic possibilities of life, where education would be of more use. The NBA and the NCAA have to a certain extent accepted this with their collaborative creation of iHoops, its grassroots youth basketball initiative.

As Kevin Weinberg, (now former) CEO of the initiative noted in an interview with NCAA News last year, “(iHoops) is important because what has happened over time is that increasingly, the secondary school structure has become less important in the development of young basketball players, and that development has moved more into the club system. While that is not necessarily bad in and of itself, it is more of an unstructured system. Our goal is to provide more structure to nonscholastic basketball, and to communicate with participants and their parents and guardians a much more education-based message that goes beyond the development of athletes to the values of education and academic achievement.”

In an article in US News & World Report, Richard Lapchik, who helped conduct the study noted above, lamented that ”[The perception among] African-American young men is that sports may be a way out, an illusion that [is dispelled by] the fact that it’s actually easier for an African-American basketball player in high school to become a doctor or attorney than it is for them to make it to the NBA.”

Yet the emphasis and blame on academic standards in the NCAA seems misplaced as it may be far too late in the life of an aspiring player to suddenly insert academics. With this in mind, two realities come to the fore:  the realization that academics would have little benefit for the exceptionally talented, NBA-ready, players like Kobe Bryant and LeBron James, and the fact that the only solution to preparing young men for life, whether it involves basketball or not,  must begin at the grassroots level, well before the senior year of high school. There appears no other way to both cultivate real talent and dispel the myth that the NBA will be the golden ticket out.