Every week, PowerMizzou.com publisher Gabe DeArmond answers questions from Tiger fans in the mailbag. This format allows for a more expansive answer than a message board post. Keep your eye out each week to submit your question for the mailbag or send them to powermizzou@gmail.com. On to this week's inquiries.
TigerCruise asks: Curious to hear your thoughts on the AAU circuits, is the focus on the kids or is it really about the money from the sponsors? Is it as simple(or complicated) as getting rid of the shoe companies or does there need to be another approach? I've never really followed AAU basketball, but from @mitchell4d experience it sounds like the leagues are there more so the shoe companies can get a look at who the next big players are and who they're going to sign to a shoe deal in a few years. Why does something like this exist for basketball and not other sports?
GD: There are a lot of things I don't like about AAU basketball. I generally think it's not a very good product and the kids are there to show off their individual games more than they are to win them as a team. There's a lot of sleaze and corruption around it. That said, it also gives a lot of kids a lot of opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. So that's a good thing. Take a kid like Jericole Hellems. This time two years ago, he was known a very little bit. Two months later, after Peach Jam, he had his choice of schools to attend. That doesn't happen without AAU basketball. So the positives probably outweigh the negatives. But I'm not gonna pretend these shoe executives are doing this stuff just for the good of the kids (said in best Roy Williams voice) and there's nothing whatsoever in it for them either.
It doesn't exactly exist in other sports, but travel baseball and softball and soccer and swimming and I'm sure a lot of other sports are much more important than high school. In football, you've got all these 7-on-7 events and camps that are put on by shoe companies (including one Rivals is doing in partnership with Adidas on Sunday in St. Louis) and none of that seems to offend people nearly as much as AAU basketball does.
Cards11Rings asks: How did yall keep track of recruiting offers and commitments before twitter? Do you think social media has made it easier or harder to cover recruiting?
GD: It was definitely a lot harder to keep track of things before Twitter. We had to rely on sources and make a lot of phone calls. Every time we talked to a kid, we'd ask who he had offers from and then we'd update our database. We were probably also far less accurate.
But there are a lot of negatives to social media in covering recruiting. First of all, I used the word "covering" loosely. For the first seven or eight years I did this, we broke the news of probably 95% of Mizzou commitments. I'm not exaggerating that number. We had the first information on almost every single commitment. I can't remember the last one we broke. Because nobody breaks them anymore. The kids break them themselves. Even when we find out about a commitment before you do now, we wait for the kid to release a graphic or a video on Twitter before we run our story. And that's fine. But it also leads to kids thinking they don't really need us (I disagree with this; without things like Rivals, how many people would know who these kids were? Some will say a lot, but I don't really think it's true. Without this site, I bet you wouldn't be able to name more than ten kids Mizzou had offered in football. That's not an insult to you specifically, just a general statement of what I believe the importance of our sites is in terms of knowledge). It's a lot harder to get a hold of kids. It's a lot harder to do a story that is unique in any way.
So overall, it's probably like any other change: It's not necessarily better or worse. It's just different.
