I’m going to have to tap out today and you can consider this an open thread. The past 3 days Youssouf attended what’s supposed to be an elite camp called Coast 2 Coast in McKinney. It is invite only and there were definitely some good players there. A handful of observations.

1. Soccer is incredibly strict about playing within your age group, while basketball is not. Basketball is about playing in your graduating class. Thus, if you fail or are held back, but still graduate in a particular class then you’re playing with younger kids.

2. So when you see a kid “reclassify” into a younger class, I tend to think this is what this is about, because the player is older they can actually graduate earlier and have been playing down a grade level and are actually older than they need to be. When a player reclassifies they are ending up where they should have been all along. It’s a weird deal that people in charge of basketball aren’t more concerned with ages, a kid a year or two older definitely makes a difference. There is a player who has been held back 4 years that we know and he’s one of the better players, but he’s playing against kids that are significantly younger than him.

3. There were definitely 14 and 15-year old kids playing with 12-year old kids, which is Youssouf’s age group.

4. Elite basketball is wild in the sense that it is all one-on-one. Youssouf has only been playing basketball for 4 years and he was basically trying to run offense by setting picks, rolling to the bucket and posting up. Meanwhile everyone else is out there on the perimeter asking the for the ball while the person who has the ball is trying to go one-on-one and drive to the basket. There is almost no defense.

5. Yo played really well. They basically divide the players into teams and Yo had a pretty good team so he was competing with some very good players. I am sure there were older players on his team, but whatever. Yo did play the game the right way, he set screens and tried to rebound the heck out of the ball and didn’t have any issues passing the ball, giving up an opportunity himself to score, but giving it to the better opportunity (most people don’t do this). He’s pushing 5’11” right now at 12 years old and was basically a small forward among this group.

6. He finished his last game around 2:30 and we headed home where I worked for as long as I could before we had to leave for his junior high flag football game. Interesting in that this is basically school sponsored and our town’s team played two other towns. They won both games. Ended up home around 8:00 and I ate something small and passed out.

7. A week from today, Youssouf and I will be in Lubbock for football camp. We’ll drive up and drive back (as painful as this sounds) the same day or get as far as I can.