Posted on July 23, 2026

By Dr. Keith Adams, Ed.D., CMAA

President & Founder, CKA SAVE Project, Inc.

I read a piece recently on Andscape defending AAU and grassroots basketball against the narrative that it's ruining the sport. Directors from some of the country's most respected programs — Compton Magic, PSA Cardinals, Team Takeover, MOKAN Elite, Game Elite — made their case, and honestly, I didn't disagree with most of it.

They talked about mentorship. About coaches who double as guidance counselors and, some days, therapists. About financial literacy programs, mental health support, community organizing, diaper drives. About giving kids exposure and access they'd never get otherwise. One director put it about as plainly as it can be put: the job of an AAU coach isn't so different from the job of a YMCA director when we were coming up.

I believe that. I've spent 30-plus years in gyms, classrooms, and athletic departments, and I know these directors aren't lying about the hours they put in or the lives they've changed. Grassroots basketball, at its best, is a community institution wearing a basketball uniform.

But I read that entire article — thousands of words, a dozen sources, real depth on mental health, financial literacy, culture-building, brotherhood — and there was one word I kept waiting for that never fully showed up.

Academics.

Everything But the Classroom

To be fair, the word appeared once or twice, mostly in passing — a "full-time education professional" here, a mention of "qualifying for college" there. And I don't say that to diminish it. Any attention to eligibility is worth something.

But here's what struck me: an entire feature built around defending grassroots basketball's off-court value could be written almost start to finish without describing anything that resembles sustained, structured academic development. No mention of degree mapping. No mention of study skills, executive functioning, or how a 15-year-old actually learns to manage a syllabus, a training schedule, and a home life all at once. No mention of what happens when a kid with real talent has real gaps in his transcript.

That's not a knock on the directors quoted in that piece. It's not their job to run an academic program — most of them would tell you that themselves. It's a reflection of a structural gap in how we talk about, and build, support systems for young athletes in this country. We've built an entire ecosystem — sneaker circuits, camps, rankings, scouting platforms — optimized almost entirely around athletic development and exposure. Somewhere along the way, academic development became the thing everyone assumes someone else is handling.

Usually, no one is.

The Gap I Built CKA to Close

This is exactly the gap the CKA SAVE Project was built to close back in 2009, and it's the foundation of everything we've built since — the SDS Framework, the 100/100 Standard, the Academic Baseball Card, the Academic Monitoring Grid. Structure. Discipline. Support. Not as slogans, but as an operating system that treats the classroom with the same seriousness as the scoreboard.

At CKA, we don't ask a student-athlete to choose between being a great competitor and being a strong student. We expect 100% commitment to both, simultaneously, without negotiation. That's the 100/100 Standard, and it's non-negotiable for a reason: talent gets a young athlete access. Preparation is what determines whether that access turns into something lasting.

The grassroots article made a case — a fair one — that criticism of AAU basketball is often unwarranted and that the space deserves more credit for the good it does. I agree. But I'd add a second point that didn't make it into that conversation: crediting grassroots basketball for its mentorship and life-skills work shouldn't let anyone off the hook for the fact that academic infrastructure is still, for most players, an afterthought.

Time Poverty Doesn't Care Whose Job It Is

Every young athlete I've worked with over 30 years has faced the same math problem. There are only so many hours in a day, and travel, training, film, camps, and games eat most of them. I call what's left Time Poverty — the gap between what today's student-athletes are expected to manage and the time and support they actually have to manage it.

Grassroots programs are stepping up in real ways to address the emotional and financial side of that equation. That's genuinely good news. But Time Poverty doesn't discriminate between the categories we've decided to divide it into. A kid who's mentally healthy and financially literate but academically underprepared is still going to hit a wall — just a different one, usually further down the road, when the eligibility clock is running and the safety net of youth basketball is gone.

That's the wall the CKA Post-Graduate Academy and our full menu of organizational services — the Virtual Internship Program, Career Launch Academy, Transfer Portal navigation, NIL strategy — are built to help players see the wall that is coming and help them prepare for, long before they hit it.

Give Credit Where It's Earned — And Ask for More Where It's Owed

I don't think grassroots basketball needs to be torn down to make room for what we do at CKA. I think it needs a partner. The coaches and directors are doing the mentorship, the financial literacy work, the community building — they're doing real work, and they've earned real credit for it.

But the next time someone writes the definitive defense of grassroots basketball, I'd like to see academic development get more than a passing mention. Not because the current work isn't valuable, but because a student-athlete who leaves the game without a Time Poverty plan for the classroom is still walking into the same wall we've been trying to help kids avoid for 30 years.

That's the conversation we're not having enough. At CKA, it's the only conversation that matters as much as the game itself.

Building Better Students. Developing Better Athletes. Creating Better Futures.

One Goal: Balance. One Result: Success.

Dr. Keith G. Adams, Ed.D., CMAA President & Founder, CKA SAVE Project President-Elect, The Drake Group Host & Executive Producer, Odd Coaches Podcast www.ckasaveproject.org | @ckasaveproject | @oddcoaches