Kobe Bryant has always been critical of the way AAU programs run in the United States. In fact at one point said that international players. Remember this:
“AAU basketball is horrible, terrible AAU basketball,” Bryant said to reporters. “It’s stupid. It doesn’t teach our kids how to play the game at all, so you wind up having players that are big and they bring it up and they do all this fancy crap and they don’t know how to post. They don’t know the fundamentals of the game. It’s stupid.”
So with that being said, with the backings of NIKE, Bryant will open up a league in Los Angeles to teach kids the fundamentals of the game.
The league will consist of 40 teams and the age range would be from 8 to 10.
“We challenge kids at the age of 8, 9, 10 to shoot on 10-foot hoops, and that doesn’t make any sense to me,” Bryant said in the video. “When I grew up, we actually played on lower hoops. We played on 9-foot hoops, the court was actually smaller and we could learn how to shoot with proper technique. We could go in and try a reverse layup…Right now, I think we’re putting too much on these kids too early, and they’re not learning proper technique of how to shoot the ball, or proper spacing. I think it winds up eating away at their confidence.”
The purpose of this league, according to Bryant, is for fun and the hope that the kids would fall in love with the game.
“The Mamba League is a fun league for kids to learn the game, to have fun,” Bryant said. “But also, to understand the connection that the game has with life in general, and convert that into being a better son, a better daughter, a better student.”
